Web Ink Now

My book World Wide Rave is now FREE on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad, and as PDF

As a kickoff to an awesome 2013, I’ve made my book World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories, free on all major ebook platforms as well as a PDF version.

This isn’t a one-time limited time thing. The book is now free and will continue to be free.

Download your copy on your favorite ebook reader or via PDF (with no registration required).

I'd be grateful if you would pass this on...

World Wide Rave free PDF download
(32 MB file, no registration required)

World Wide Rave free on Amazon Kindle
World Wide Rave free on B&N Nook
World Wide Rave free on Kobo
World Wide Rave free on your iPad

I define a World Wide Rave as when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products. It’s when global communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It’s when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. And it’s when tons of fans visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there.

Since one way to generate a world wide rave is to offer something of value for free, I thought making the book totally free made sense.

I want to thank Shannon, Peter, Matt, Elana, and Brian at my publisher John Wiley & Sons for working with me on this project. Most publishers would flat out say "no way" to an authors request to make a book free. My friends at Wiley totally get the value of generating attention in this way. They understand that because more people will know my work they will consider purchasing my other (paid) books. That understanding of the new realities of publishing is why I've done my last 5 books with Wiley. There is a significant amount of work required to coordinate with Amazon (for Kindle), B&N (for Nook), Apple (for iTunes) and Kobo is takes a lot of work. Thanks guys.

Download your copy on your favorite ebook reader or via PDF now. And please pass this offer on via your social networks.

More information on World Wide Rave here.

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UPDATE January 10, 2013

My publisher is working to make World Wide Rave free outside of the United States. This is a manual process that takes a great deal of time. I'll post links as I hear about them:

World Wide Wave free on Amazon UK Kindle

The Icarus Deception: How high will you fly?

A decade ago I left a nice, safe corporate career to find my art and discover my true self. It was scary. I didn't know where the journey would lead nor if I could make a living by my own wits. Seth Godin's The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? is an ambitious work that challenges you to do the same. It's for anyone who is living life as a cog in the machine and who dreams of breaking free, making art, and creating something meaningful. You don't have to leave your current job to make art, but like me, you might be forced to.

Seth launched the book via Kickstarter and because I am a backer, I got an early copy. The book releases to the public on December 31.

Part of the reason I chose to start my own business was Seth's 1999 book Permission Marketing had recently been released and for me, the book clearly articulated the online marketing revolution that we were on the cusp of. I just had to take advantage of those ideas but that marketing radicalism just didn't fly with the corporate status quo. There are no boxes in the org chart for a "ruckus maker".

For me, creating art meant starting something new. But you can create art within an existing structure too. It's the doctor who chooses to communicate with patients on Skype video when they have questions even though the medical establishment looks down on such personal care. It's the customer service rep who brings his colleagues together every Friday afternoon to figure out ways to do their jobs better. It's anyone who picks herself to do something important rather than waiting for an authority figure to give authorization to proceed.

I read each and every Seth book the moment they come out. And if you take a look at my Amazon reviews, you'll see that I talk about many of them. Yes, I'm a fanboy. But that's because Seth has an uncanny ability to generate ideas that prompt me to think about what I'm doing in new ways.

The Icarus Deception will likely make you uncomfortable. The ideas push you to evaluate the nature of your work and your life. Hopefully, like me, Seth's thoughts are a catalyst for you to stop simply doing what the bosses say and live as an artist: to try the untested, to challenge accepted wisdom, to build something new, to travel without a roadmap, to make a difference. I only wish this book had been available ten years ago when I was ready to fly.

Inbound PR and a free Newsjacking book excerpt

Getting positive attention for your business via mainstream media is great! That's why organizations spend so much money on PR agencies and staffers.

But the old "outbound" approach - sending a press release or PR pitch to hundreds of journalists via email doesn't work so well in a world of instant communications.

Media outlets work at rapid pace, constantly striving to publish the most relevant and newsworthy content. The new way to reach members of the media uses "inbound" PR - creating content that journalists are looking for as they write breaking news stories.

Newsjacking

Regular readers of my blog know I call this approach Newsjacking which is the subject of my most recent book.

I've teamed up with HubSpot (I'm on the HubSpot advisory board) to offer a free excerpt of Newsjacking.

I'm also holding a Twitter chat about Newsjacking Thursday December 20 at 2:00 pm ET. You can join me by using the hashtag for the chat - #inboundchat.

If you haven't read my Newsjacking book, here is an opportunity to download a free excerpt. Learn how to transform your PR from outbound to inbound.

Why Make Art? And how to fund it

This morning, Seth Godin announced his newest book The Icarus Deception and a fascinating Kickstarter Project to fund it.

Seth's new book is about the mythology of success (and failure) and how our economy rewards people who are willing to stand up and stand out.

Seth writes: "For too long, we've been seduced into believing we should do less. It's time to redefine what we're capable of. We are all artists now, and the connection economy we're living in relentlessly rewards those who do work that matters."

I'm a Seth Godin fanboy and enjoy reading each of his books the second they are released.

I'd certainly read The Icarus Deception anyway. But this book is also interesting because of how Seth is funding it.

Kickstarter and Seth's art

Seth has a Kickstarter project to fund the new book. Like Amanda Palmer, who raised over $1 million to fund her new album through Kickstarter (I wrote about Amanda's project here), Seth is tapping his loyal fans to help him fund his new book – using the proof of support to convince his publisher and bookstores to back it in a big way.

As I write this, it is just a few hours into the project and one funding level has already sold out. It looks like Seth is on a similar trajectory as Amanda was in the early days of her project.

Seth is betting (rightly it seems) that his fans are willing to fund the book even before it has come out. People like me are going to buy it anyway, so why not get a commitment up front and use the fan support to make the book even more successful.

Supporting your favorite artists

Yes, I am a backer at one of the higher pledge levels. Sure, I want all the stuff that comes with being a backer.

However, more than that, I want to support the artists, like Amanda and Seth, who I believe in. I want them to live well so they can continue to produce art and enrich my life.

People want YOU to succeed too!

If you provide great art, even in the form of products and services, your fans want to support you. That's why people line up to buy new Apple products without even trying them. Do they line up for your art?

If you make great stuff, people will take a chance on you. They'll order the software upgrade, visit the chef's new restaurant, reserve a room in the resort on a different island.

Harry Potter ebooks and generating attention for your business

Last June, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling launched Pottermore, a fan site that was initially launched as a private beta. I wrote about it here Pottermore, Apple and "the secret will soon be revealed" form of real-time marketing. I managed to get a beta login, so I'm a registered user on the Pottermore site.

Last night got an email saying that the new Pottermore ebook store is open and that the Harry Potter books are (finally) available in electronic format.

This is significant because it is the first time that Harry Potter books are available as ebooks and the only place to buy them is on the author's own site. (If you go to Amazon to buy a Kindle version of a Harry Potter book, you're re-directed to Pottermore).

Attention

The book business is changing. So is the music business. And these changes have ramifications in your business too: How you generating attention?

Now authors can easily get a book out without going to a publisher and without using paper. And they can control their distribution.

Or they can choose to lose control and make their work completely free with no registration required.

That's not to say that traditional publishing is going away. I actually think print books and the big publishers have a future in the new ecosystem.

You no longer need to convince an editor in New York or an A&R guy in LA that your work is worthy.

Now you can create your own audience, build your fan base, publish your art, and control its distribution. Or you can make your work completely free so you can spread it far and wide like Summer Land did.

Seth Godin has been talking about these themes on his blog and on his Domino Project site.

Check out this Domino Project post from Seth on what happens when you flip scarcity with abundance (hint: everything changes).

Neil deGrasse Tyson as master communicator

I'm a big Neil deGrasse Tyson fanboy.

Partly that's because I'm an Apollo moon mission geek and collect artifacts from the Apollo program. (Pretty geeky, right?)

But mostly, I'm a fan because Dr. Tyson is such an awesome communicator. When I read his books and articles or watch him on television, I always take away something that I can apply to my own work as a marketer and communicator.

His bio says Neil deGrasse Tyson s an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. But he is so much more.

Neil deGrasse Tyson as master communicator

Dr. Tyson is so good at speaking and writing about the cosmos and why it is important for us to have an understanding of the wider world in which we live.

If you haven't heard him speak, check out Jon Stewart interviewing Dr. Tyson on The Daily Show on February 27, 2012.

In the clip, he explains how fear contributed to the development of America's space program in the late 1950s, thereby spurring economic growth. "We no longer advanced a space frontier," he says. "The Space Shuttle boldly went where hundreds have gone before." Watch the clip to see a master communicator at work.

By the way: An astrophysicist with 350,000+ followers on Twitter? What's up with that? Yep, that's @neiltyson

Space Chronicles

His newest book, just out, is Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier – a collection of essays and speech transcripts around the theme of space exploration and how America & NASA has not done much to inspire people in the past 40 years outside of some cool robotic missions and the Hubble telescope.

I read Space Chronicles in three sittings because it is that good.

In the book, he talks about how America boldly embarked on the most audacious scientific endeavor in history by sending humans to the moon. However after 9 lunar missions (6 that landed) we... stopped exploring! For 40 years we've only been to low earth orbit with manned missions.

Sure there have been some spectacular robotic missions such as Cassini to Saturn and the various Mars rovers. And the Hubble space telescope has delivered spectacular images. But humans haven't explored.

Dr. Tyson argues we're not inspiring our young people to study science and engineering and that’s a problem for the economy.

"Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock."
- From Space Chronicles.

If you want to see how thought leadership is done by a master communicator, read and watch the work of Neil deGrasse Tyson. You don't need to agree with him nor be a space geek to learn from his style.

Quick aside – In high school my buddies and I would go to the Hayden Planetarium (after some appropriate preparations of course) to see evening productions of "Laser Floyd" – a cosmic mixture of loud Pink Floyd with colorful lasers projected on the planetarium dome. I've even got a ticket stub from 1978 to prove it. Neil is close to my age. He grew up in New York City. I wonder if he went too? Nah, probably not. He was studying while I was partying. But maybe?!

Image: from @neiltyson Twitter.

Go Mobile

In Tokyo's Roppongi entertainment district you find several hundred bars within walking distance of the subway station. Yet only a few are visible from the main street; the vast majority are tucked away on the upper floors of back-street buildings. To differentiate, many cater to highly refined customer preferences. So if you want to listen to classic reggae while sipping a Red Stripe, there is a bar for you in Roppongi. But how do you find these establishments when you’re thirsty and confused in an unfamiliar city?

Your mobile of course!

Because buyers use their mobiles to search for products and services in the time of need (like I do when I'm in some faraway city), you've got an opportunity to reach them when they are ready to buy.

The elapsed time from firing up a mobile app like Foursquare or Google Mobile to a customer walking in the door is now measured in minutes (or even seconds).

Adding GPS (global positioning system) capability to mobiles has transformed a once mundane voice-only mobile phone into a targeted weapon focused on proximate surroundings. With onboard GPS capability, the mobile user gains awareness of nearby people, companies, and locations, even in unfamiliar territory like the bar district of Tokyo. Engaging people via mobile devices is a fast-growing and fascinating area that every modern marketer needs to be knowledgeable about.

That's why an understanding of mobile marketing is so important.

Fortunately, Go Mobile has the answers. The new book, part of my own New Rules of Social Media Book Series, is published today.

When I created the series with John Wiley & Sons, I said that it was essential to have a book about mobile marketing. Fortunately, Jeanne Hopkins, V.P. of Marketing at HubSpot and Jamie Turner, founder of the 60 Second Marketer agreed to write this book. Either one of them would have written a great book on mobile marketing, but having them collaborate is double the fun. I learned a great deal by reading this book and I’m confident that you will too.

Mobile marketing is for all organizations

The challenge is to understand this new landscape so you can get your business into the mix at that precise moment of decision.

It's not just consumer brands that need to pay attention to mobile marketing. There's also the often overlooked but essential requirement that you make your website mobile friendly which is essential to all. Many sites still don't have a mobile-friendly architecture, so those organizations miss out on opportunities to sell to the many people now accessing their sites from wireless devices.

Mobile offers the power to reach buyers at the exact time and place they're looking for what you offer. It is a revolutionary tool for building business and it's easy to learn.

Go Mobile provides a step-by-step roadmap for people interested in using mobile marketing to grow their sales and revenues. The book covers how to set-up a mobile website, how to run a QR code campaign, how to develop a mobile app and how to run a mobile banner ad campaign, and more.

USA QR-code Scavenger Hunt

To launch Go Mobile, Jamie & Jeanne have hidden 4 iPads with copies of Go Mobile in secret locations around the U.S. Clues will be available each day starting January 12, 2012. Scan the bar code to begin playing or go to the Go Mobile site to learn more.

Fun fact: There are 6.8 billion people on planet Earth. 4.0 billion of them own a mobile phone, but only 3.5 billion of them own a toothbrush.

Are you reaching this vast marketplace?

Disclosure: I am on the board of advisors of HubSpot.

real time + marketing = revolution

This week, the new paperback edition of Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now is out.

The book was originally published in November 2010 in hardcover, and this edition is revised and updated with new stats and new examples.

As I was writing the first edition, I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. Every time I searched the web for talk about issues relating to real-time marketing and PR, results were scarce. Pundits and practitioners seemed locked into thinking about long-term campaigns and not how to seize advantage from what’s happening right now.

More than a year later, search engines tell a very different story: "real time + marketing" is a topic that has exploded. Even the Direct Marketing Association is in the game. The DMA annual conference, one of the largest gatherings of marketing professionals in the world, is now billed as "The Global Event for Real-Time Marketers."

What happened?

Although my humble book did climb to number two on the Wall Street Journal best-seller list ("and stayed there for a week or two," as Jerry Garcia once said), I can't claim paternity here. The wave was coming, like it or not. I just happened to spot it early.

A Real-Time Revolution

When I first sat down to write, protestors in Tehran had just figured out how to use social media as a weapon of civil disobedience. Less than a year later, the same real-time techniques were toppling despotic regimes such as those in Egypt and Tunisia.

Even among CEOs 80 floors above the street, the realization has begun to seep up from below: "What happened to Mubarak is not unrelated to my business." The revolution now underway is not just political and it’s not just an "Arab thing." Upheavals are coming. Those who understand and adapt stand to be among the winners. Those who ignore what's happening may not fare so well.

The real-time revolution is very much a "people thing." And the people I interviewed for the book are its heart and soul: passionate characters at the forefront, from Amsterdam to Boston to Tokyo, each with an eye-opening story to tell. They made researching and writing such a compelling experience for me that I hope... even those who'd choose a root canal over a marketing book will not be disappointed if they decide to read Real-Time Marketing & PR.

By definition, this is a subject that changes quickly. So if you read the first edition you will find many new examples and anecdotes added.

I worked with my publisher John Wiley & Sons to make the look and feel of the new paperback edition of Real-Time Marketing & PR similar to the new third edition paperback edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR. Similar cover, same fonts, consistent use of terms and language. In a sense, Real-Time is a continuation of New Rules.

If you've read New Rules and not yet read Real-Time, this might be the time.

Japanese language edition of Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead

Today, the Japanese language version of Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History was published.

If you liked the English language version and read Japanese please check it out. If you have Japanese colleagues who are marketers or music fans, please pass along. If you are a fan of great design and the Grateful Dead you might be interested even if you don't read Japanese.

My co-author on Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead (and HubSpot CEO) Brian Halligan and I both lived in Tokyo in the 1990s, so having the book in Japanese is sort of a homecoming. It has been an exciting project and the finished product is absolutely stellar.

Here is the Facebook page for the book and here is the Amazon Japan page. (As of this writing, the book is ranked number 29 on Amazon Japan among all books they sell). In addition, you can check out an interview with me in Wired Magazine Japan.

Normally I don't write about each translation of my various books (so far nearly 30 languages), but this one is special for a number of reasons.

The book was produced with a true all-star team. Shigesato Itoi corralled the team to create the book and he wrote the foreword. Itoi-san is a popular cultural figure in Japan who is a pioneer in Web content creation. He's got a remarkable 430,000+ Twitter followers @itoi_shigesato and his site is one of the most active in Japan. I'll be interviewing him for an upcoming blog post.

Itoi-san brought in his friend Shin Sobue to design the book. His book creations are so popular that some of his fans buy his work no matter what the topic of the book! He used fantastic fonts (think late 1960s Haight-Asbury meets Japanese) and managed to capture the improvisational nature of a Grateful Dead concert in a book. Amazing.

The Japanese language version was translated by none other than my lovely wife Yukari Watanabe Scott. Yukari, who has quite the following herself on Twitter @YukariWatanabe and her blog, has tolerated my Grateful Dead fandom since we met in Tokyo nearly 25 years ago.

The book was published by Nikkei BP, which also published the Japanese edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR and will soon bring out Real-Time Marketing & PR in Japanese.

Like the original English-language edition, this book features awesome photos by my friend Jay Blakesberg, who has photographed the Dead since the late 1970s.

Thank you team!

8 ways to get people to discuss your new product in social media

On November 14, 2011 I introduced my new book Newsjacking to the market.

One of the challenges of my work is that I write and speak about strategic marketing. I have to admit something right here: I obsess over the use of my own marketing strategies to market my work. Heck, if I can’t launch my own book, how good are the ideas, right? I was under pressure.

In order to generate the most excitement around Newsjacking, I chose to do some particular things that I hoped would help to launch the book with excitement. These are the ones that worked well for me and that I would do again in the future.

I'd suggest that these techniques should be used at launch to get people to discuss any new product in social media. It is not just for books.

1. Don't talk too early.

I chose not to talk about the book ahead of time. In fact I never used the word "newsjacking" anywhere on the web prior to November 14, which was launch day. I find that people have short attention spans. If I say "a book is coming" but people cannot actually read it, few will act. So I chose to keep quiet.

2. Choose a memorable name.

The title I used - "Newsjacking" – had been used before by people like Urgent Genius but it was not very popular a term, especially outside the UK. Most people were hearing the word for the first time and it was memorable to them.

3. Inject some controversy.

The concept of newsjacking feels like a black hat technique to many people and some wondered if it was ethical. (Newsjacking is perfectly legitimate, as I do explain in the book). But that sense of perceived negativity is a powerful tool to get people talking. John Jantsch wrote Is Newsjacking a Legitimate Tactic? And Erica Glasier wrote Ethical question: Is newsjacking black hat? These blog posts were tweeted hundreds of time, spreading the ideas in the book.

4. Seed the market.

I gave an early heads up (about 24 hours notice) to a few friends so they could prepare blog posts that ran on my launch day.

5. Have a news hook and newsjack.

I chose to launch Newsjacking, which is in e-book only format, on the same day that the new Kindle Fire launched. My goal was to newsjack the Kindle Fire announcement and that tactic actually worked because writers for publications such as the Vancouver Sun, Forbes, and MediaBistro talked about my book in context of the new Kindle Fire.

6. Respond to people in real-time.

I did my best to comment on each of the dozens of blog posts about Newsjacking in real-time, I also tried to react to as many of the thousands of tweets as I could without cluttering my stream too much. It was exciting to participate in the launch this way.

7. Don't forget international markets.

I woke up very early to interact with people in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. And I checked in again in the evenings to connect with Australia and New Zealand. I was psyched that people wrote about the book in many markets and found blog posts in multiple languages including Japanese, German, and Dutch.

8. Measure, report, and improve.

I measured via TweetDeck, TweetReach, and Google to see how the Newsjacking meme was spreading. I reported the progress to my publisher so they could help push things along and when possible, I tweaked what I was doing to improve. Note the takeup of the meme "newsjacking" in just the 48 hours after my launch as measured by TweetReach (below).