Marketers often find good business advice in the unlikeliest of places. Why? Because everything is marketed whether you’re talking gizmos or ideas. Today’s pearl of wisdom comes from an interview at Mediabistro’s GalleyCat of blog-to-book-to-movie phenomenon Julie Powell.

With a strong opening weekend behind them, the movie Julie & Julia about the author’s quest to recreate all of the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking while blogging about it is already the stuff of urban myth. In the interview, Julie cautions others to not get caught up in the social media aspect of the process. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the continually evolving world of online marketing and sales, it is those experts and websites that share reams of content with their audience around common areas of interest that are the most successful. Hands down; no contest.

It would be difficult to find a more succinct definition of how this works than in Brian Clark’s new report, Authority Rules. Brian notes that “Many people think the main barrier to online marketing success is a lack of traffic. But it’s really a lack of trust.”

Brian was one of the early champions of the “Teaching Sells” philosophy and is now one of those authority figures in successful online marketing. If you’re just meeting Brian for the first time, you will do both yourself and your company a favor by spending time on his website trolling through the hundreds of pages of knowledge that he willingly shares with his audience.

P.S. Educating your customer is selling.

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Amazon has been much in the news lately with a variety of situations ranging from unilaterally shutting down associate accounts in North Carolina and Rhode Island where state legislatures were considering taxing online sales to buying the stellar shoe company Zappos and forging a new channel of e-readers with its Kindle and Kindle 2 products. Wherever you stand on Amazon’s development as a monolithic distribution channel, we have to give kudos where they’re due.

In this case, the abject mea culpa by CEO Jeff Bezos on the Amazon website the other day is a model apology to customers for a colossal mistake (again a unilateral decision -this time much more far reaching than the one mentioned above). Read the rest of this entry »

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The age of the rugged individual is over. One of the new century’s essential skills is collaboration. Understanding what it is and how to do it effectively is one of the critical skills in our new marketing toolkit.

Here are four different perspectives on the importance of collaboration:

10 Ways to Collaborate in a Down Economy  - 21st Century work skills like collaboration have never been more important according to Mike St. Pierre.

Four Web 2.0 Collaborative-Writing Tools -  Although written from a teacher-student perspective, these tools are just as valuable for collaborative projects in today’s business environment according to Tech Learning.

A different perspective on building community with your blog -  Joanna Young discusses reasons why you would not want to create community and collaboration on your blog.

Are you Listening? Influence and Participation Above the Noise? - Liz Strauss believes that listening is the cornerstone skill for collaboration.

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Posted in: K-12 Education, Marketing | Comments(1)

Before I leave the topic of this week’s Executive Publishing Conference & Expo behind me, there are a few more observations that may be helpful to educational publishers about the general state of the publishing industry. I make these observations through the filter of attendees to another recent conference, South by Southwest (SXSW) which began as a small music festival and is now a signature meeting for music and interactive media.

I’ll preface the rest of this post by stating that there are a surprising number of traditional publishers who are still “learning” that the world has shifted and that they are in great danger of becoming dinosaurs. At the conference I attended, there were plenty of people who have sailed into new interactive waters of online publishing and social media. These were best represented by some of the vendor offerings and some of the panelists. But many of the attendees from small to large publishers seemed to be hearing about the shifts in the rules of engagement for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »

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