Web Ink Now

Sex, shaving, and your oral health

Please forgive the gratuitous headline but I couldn’t resist. Two new free ebooks have been sent to me recently and both of them involve sex. Well, sort of.

Dianna Huff points us to Dr. Helaine Smith, a Boston, Massachusetts cosmetic dentist. Dr. Smith asks the question: "When was the last time you thought about your teeth? That's like asking when you last thought about your femur or your elbow."

In her new e-book, Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex! Dr. Smith explains the connection between oral health and sexual well-being: "a topic not too many people talk about."

She says: “What many people don't understand -- or even consider -- is that the health of our teeth and mouths has a huge connection with our overall physical health -- and our sex lives!

Luke Faccini points us to an ebook that his agency The Sponge created called The 6 Essential Elements to an Exceptional Shave!

The ebook asks: "Were you taught how to shave by a pro? More likely you've unknowingly taken on the bad habits of your father, or even worse, you've taught yourself to shave from what you've seen on television commercials. If you ever get razor burn, ingrown hairs, redness or irritation then you have to read on!"

The ebook includes six reasons why you should pay attention to your daily routine with number 6 being: "The amount of sex you get is in direct proportion to how well you shave!"

The sex angle, while just a teeny bit gimmicky, does spark some interest because the authors are linking sex to unexpected things like shaving and dentistry.

I really like these ebooks. If a dentist and an Australian company producing "male grooming products that were created to increase the appeal of the uncompromising man" can find topics to write an ebook about, it shows that virtually any company, product, or organization can use an ebook to tell a story.

You can too!

Disclosure: Both of these ebooks kindly mention me in the acknowledgments and I thank the authors for that. I had nothing to do with the development of either ebook. However, both authors were in some way inspired by the information about creating ebooks that I included in this blog and in my latest free ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free.

New Rules of Viral Marketing update and free virtual book tour teleseminar

It's been twenty days since I released my new ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free.

I'm amazed at the stats. In just 20 days:
> 42,810 downloads (based on my Web analytics)
> Close to 100 blog posts about the ebook (depends on which blog search engine is used)
> Well over 1,000 hits on the exact phrase "new rules of viral marketing" (on the day I put out the ebook there were zero hits on the phrase.)

How did I achieve these results?

I didn't do a thing. I didn't beg the media to write about it. I didn't pay for expensive advertising to promote it. I didn't interrupt people by sending it out via email.

All I did was post it on my blog. That's it. You did the rest. Thank you for downloading the ebook and for talking about it.

(Well, I guess I can safely say that my viral marketing ebook has gone viral.)

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UPDATE - Due to a scheduling problem with the technology provider, the live event needs to be postponed to Tuesday March 4, 2008 at 6:00PM eastern time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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I'll be on a live teleseminar Tuesday February 26th, 2008 at 5:00 PM EST to discuss viral marketing in depth. For about 70 minutes, I'll answer questions that you submit to me and discuss the issues people face with going viral. It's free to participate. I hope you can make it.

Mike Sigers, of Simplenomics kindly offered to host the live Q&A with me. Mike will do the Q part and I'll do the A part. Mike is a sales and marketing consultant who simply tries to help people find easier, simpler ways to sell more and market their products and services for less cost with bigger results.

To submit a question for Mike to ask me, please go to the New Rules of Viral Marketing Virtual Book Tour site. You'll have an opportunity to post the question and then get the dial in information.

Your questions are really important to me. As I learn more about viral marketing and more about what you want to know about viral marketing, I will be creating more information about how to spread your ideas for free. The questions help me to speak, write, and produce the most valuable information.

If you don't want to ask a question, but would like to listen in, that's cool too. Please go here.

If you can't participate live, ask your question anyway. The New Rules of Viral Marketing Virtual Book Tour site will have the replay as an MP3 the morning after the live event.

Thank you for spreading my ideas.

The New Rules of Viral Marketing - free ebook!

The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free

> Imagine you're the head of marketing at a theme park, and you're charged with announcing a major new attraction. What would you do?

> What would you do if you were a vice president of marketing for a technology company and you were ready to find a new opportunity to advance your career?

> If you were a marketing executive for a big, famous company, how could you quickly put a human face on your organization?

> Or think of a marketing program that you might initiate if you suddenly had to launch a startup technology and services company targeting marketing professionals, Web designers, and business owners interested in improving their Internet marketing. How would you do it?

The answers will surprise you. The smart marketers profiled in The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free tell you exactly how they used viral marketing and provide advice in their own words.

Download The New Rules of Viral Marketing now! It's free and there's no annoying registration requirement.

You and I are incredibly lucky.

For decades, the only way to spread our ideas was to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write (or broadcast) about our products and services. But now our organizations have a tremendous opportunity to publish great content online—content that people want to consume and that they are eager to share with their friends, family, and colleagues.

How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free!

Word-of-mouse is the single most empowering tool available to marketers today. I wrote this e-book so you can take advantage of the power of viral marketing too. In it, I share ideas that will help you create your own viral marketing strategies and campaigns. These are the "new rules" I've used to create marketing programs that have sold more than a billion dollars' worth of products and services worldwide.

It's not easy to harness the power of word-of-mouse, but any company with thoughtful ideas to share—and clever ways to create interest in them—can, after some careful preparation, become famous and find success on the Web.

Please download my new ebook. And if you find it interesting, please share it with whomever you believe would benefit from reading it. Thank you.

Seinfeld on Marketing - check out this terrific free ebook

Bill Gammell recently released a terrific free ebook Seinfeld on Marketing: 7 Marketing lessons from the cast of "the show about nothing"

Not only is Seinfeld on Marketing a fun read, the lessons are fundamental and applicable to all.

Bill writes: "All this time we thought Seinfeld was a show about 'nothing'. Little did we know that peppered in its nine seasons were hidden, real-world marketing lessons taught from the masters themselves. But unlike the Soup Nazi's secret soup recipes, these marketing lessons are to be shared freely with everyone. In fact (to loosely quote Elaine Benes when she discovered the secret recipes of the short-tempered Soup Nazi), feel free to give these lessons to every marketer in town..."

I agree with Bill, who says: "You don’t even have to be a lover of Seinfeld to understand and apply the marketing concepts. So if you are a newbie, I'll hold your hand and walk you through them. If you wear your 'puffy shirt' on casual Friday's, I'm sure you'll be just fine."

Ebooks, the hip and stylish younger sister to the nerdy white paper are a great way to tell your story.

Check out Seinfeld on Marketing: 7 Marketing lessons from the cast of "the show about nothing"

Steve Chazin, former Apple Marketing executive, releases MarketingApple blog and ebook: Secrets of the World's Best Marketing Machine

My friend Steve Chazin just launched a really cool new blog called MarketingApple. He also a released an ebook today called Marketing Apple: 5 Secrets of the World’s Best Marketing Machine. Steve's blog and ebook are definitely worth a look for two important reasons.

Steve understand how Apple markets products and he does it from the position of an insider. His five secrets, which are both interesting and relevant for marketing professionals, are packaged to make it easy to learn how Apple operates.

The other reason to check out Steve’s blog and ebook is to see how he put together the content. This is a nice crisp design that shows off the text content with stunning clarity. If Apple were to do a blog and ebook to share the secrets of marketing, this is what it would look like.

Steve spent nearly a decade at Apple where he managed a New England sales territory, drove a strategic partnership with the Harvard Business School, and worked with Steve Jobs to rebuild Apple's marketing efforts which helped return the company to profitability in the late 1990s.

MarketingApple.com is a new site open to anyone who wants to learn and implement some of the techniques that has made Apple, Inc. the world’s best marketing machine. Steve’s first-hand knowledge of how Apple turned the company around by better marketing is a must read.

These days, Steve is a source for reporters looking for insights into Apple’s marketing and he also speaks about the topic at conferences. Steve is also Vice President of Marketing at TubesNow.com, a Web company that makes sharing, publishing, and subscribing to content easy, manageable and fun.

I spoke with Steve early this week and he shared with me why he’s doing this. "Apple is a perfect example of what good design and good marketing can do when you tie them both together. My background and my love for the company puts me in a unique position to help others embrace a similar approach. And I love helping other fellow marketers look good!"

Check out Steve's MarketingApple blog and download his ebook.

Disclosures: Steve Chazin is my friend and I helped him with the strategy to get his MarketingApple ideas into the marketplace. I have done work for Steve's current company TubesNow.com.

Align Corporate Communications to Achieve Business Goals - a new free ebook by David Meerman Scott

I've written a new complimentary ebook for the Dow Jones Corporate and Media Solutions group called Align Corporate Communications to Achieve Business Goals: A simple six-step process to use communications and measurement tools to drive business.

Most PR programs measure the wrong things. Agency people and in-house staff happily build "clip books" or calculate "advertising equivalency metrics" in an attempt to prove the worth of PR. However, management teams simply don't care about these forms of measurement.

What management does care about is achieving their goals for things like revenue, profit, and customer retention. Sadly, few communications strategies actually align with the organizational business goals that really matter!

This ebook lays out my approach to this alignment. The ebook is totally free with no registration requirement and is sponsored by Factiva from Dow Jones.

If you focus on the goals of your organization and build appropriate communications strategies to support the goals, then you can measure the effect of your efforts and show management, investors, and the board the results. Using media measurement and analytics help communicators to directly identify the cause and effect relationships that communications strategies have on revenue.

I hope you enjoy this ebook. The ideas are simple but powerful. People who adopt a disciplined measurement approach like this earn the respect of the management team, become a trusted advisor for the entire organization and build a successful career.

Attention Marketers: Hire a Journalist!

On the speaking circuit when I talk about The New Rules of Marketing & PR (including thought leadership based marketing) and when I show examples from innovative organizations, nearly everyone in the audience enthusiastically embraces the ideas. Many people see the potential that thoughtful content has for their business and understand how different this approach is from the some old stuff they are doing (trying to convince the media to write about their widgets and buying expensive "on message" advertising).

But there is always a contingent of people whose eyes glaze over and who adopt a bit of a defensive posture. I always hope one of the skeptics will ask a question because they always voice the same general concern: "This all sounds good, David. But how can we actually create all this content you're talking about: e-books, white papers, blogs and the like? We have a small marketing department and very little budget."

The answer is quite simple: hire a journalist!

With the consolidation of the newspaper and magazine businesses, journalists have found it difficult to get and keep good jobs. Many experienced people are looking for work. And there are many more people coming out of journalism school than available entry-level jobs.

A journalist skillfully creates interesting stories about how an organization solves customer problems and then delivers those stories in the form of ebooks, white papers, content rich web pages, podcasts, and video. And consumers love it. How refreshing to read, listen to, and watch these products of journalistic expertise instead of the usual product come-ons that typical corporations produce.

Of course, this is a dire situation for many reporters and editors themselves, but a tremendous opportunity for corporate marketing and PR departments that need to find great talent to create effective content. Sure, this is a drastically different job description and some marketing VPs may have trouble getting their arms around this kind of hire. But I'm convinced based on the characteristics, skill sets, and work ethics of the journalists I know as well as the evidence from companies (such as IBM) that have already experimented with hiring journalists into the marketing department, that this approach is the right one.

Journalists themselves will need to think deeply about the opportunities that a corporate assignment might bring to their career. Many journalists have a strong emotional aversion to selling their skills to corporations. While some would rather wait tables than work for "the dark side," others may find the opportunity refreshing and maybe even an consider the possibility that a corporate stint as an enhancement to their career that would make them more marketable to magazines and newspapers in their future career.

So I ask my marketing and PR friends: Why not just go for it and hire a journalist?

New free ebook – The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders: How technology company CEOs create success (and why most fail)

Alert readers of this blog know that I am a huge ebook fan. Ebooks are a great way to deliver information directly to your buyers in a format that they want to read. Ebooks also have potential to go viral when people share it with others.

For the past few months, I've been working on an ebook with my colleagues at Pragmatic Marketing. Together with Craig Stull, Pragmatic Marketing CEO and Phil Myers, Pragmatic Marketing President, I co-authored "The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders: How technology company CEOs create success (and why most fail)."

Download a totally free copy, no registration is required.

We spoke with 30 CEOs of technology companies large and small, established and upstart for this project and learned some surprising things. We learned the secrets of market-driven leaders and also the fatal flaws that keep companies from making their goals.

"Our first product was a winner...but the rest stunk. What happened? Did our market dry up or did we just get stupid?"
-- An unnamed and currently out-of-work CEO

The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders is about why some products and companies fail, where others succeed. Based on surveys spanning 3,000 companies, 40,000 individuals and one-on-one interviews with 30 technology CEOs, we found seven consistent success factors related to company culture, management style, and product & marketing strategies that propelled the winners. And we also learned also the seven fatal flaws that derail market laggards.

The industry standard for technology product management and marketing, Pragmatic Marketing teaches a practical, market-driven approach to creating and delivering technology products. Founded in 1993, the company has trained more than 40,000 product management and marketing professionals, with more than 90% of alumni indicating the training as essential or very useful to their careers.

Please feel free to share this permanent link with your CEO, colleagues, investors, PR agency, and anyone else who might benefit from it.

The ebook is freely available to anybody with no registration requirement.

Mobile phones are the new lighters

Last night I took my teenage daughter to the Orpheum Theatre in Boston to see two of her favorite bands: Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace. We had a great time. This was one of the first concerts I've been to recently where the audience was in their teens and twenties. Alas, the bands that I choose to see attract forty-somethings like me.

Last night, half the crowd was holding up mobile phones during the show. Some were snapping photos. Some were shooting videos. And still others wanted to be part of the action by waving around a light source.

When I was my daughter's age in the late 1970s, I went to dozens of concerts. Some highlights: The Clash, The Ramones, The Grateful Dead (25 times), Talking Heads, The Romantics, Muddy Waters, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, Frank Zappa… I'll stop naming bands now because this is probably way too much information at this point.

Back in the day we all held up lighters to be a part of the action. Sometimes you'd see thousands of lighters.

Last night there were a thousand mobile phones (and a handful of lighters too).

At rock concerts, mobile phones are the new lighters.

I was thinking how many of the online marketing tactics we use today are really new ways of doing things that have been done for many years.

> Ebooks are the new white papers (but white papers are still important for many audiences)

> Google AdWords are the new Yellow Page ads (but in some local markets the Yellow Pages are still important)

> Wikis are the new print directories (Print directories? Do they still make them?)

> Blogs are the new guy on the barstool who is funny and smart and people listen to (anyone have time for the bar anymore?)

Are your marketing and PR tactics better suited to a previous generation?

The New Rules of PR ebook: Revised and updated for 2007

The New Rules of PR – a new and updated edition of the ebook for 2007 with a forward and newsmaker tips by David McInnis, founder & CEO of PRWeb, a Vocus Company.

When I first released my ebook The new rules of PR: How to create a press release strategy for reaching buyers directly by posting it on my site and my blog and sending a press release out about it in mid-January 2006, I thought I might get a few thousand downloads. Imagine my surprise when the ebook was downloaded more than 15,000 times in just the first week!

Since then, I have been happily watching the wave of interest from this effort and am amazed by the metrics:
> When I first put it out, there was precisely one hit on Google for the exact phrase "new rules of pr." The last time I checked there were over 9,000 Google hits because hundreds of bloggers and online media outlets have written about the ebook and thousands of readers have commented on my blog and others.
> As I write this, it is nearly a year since the release of the first edition and more than 150,000 people have downloaded it (so far).
> An expanded hardcover edition The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly is due out in June 2007 from Wiley (you can pre-order the book on Amazon now).

David McInnis, founder & CEO of PRWeb, a Vocus Company, was among the very first people to download the ebook, write about it on his blog, and help push the viral marketing buzz. David suggested doing a second edition of the ebook and I am pleased that he has not only written a forward for it, but also contributed a series of newsmaker tips. David and the team at PRWeb have pioneered social media tools for press releases such as tagging and trackbacks, so he is the ideal person to put his stamp on this new and improved edition.

Download your complimentary copy of the second edition of The New Rules of PR now.

A press release about the new edition of the ebook went out today. (Hey this is an ebook about using press releases to reach buyers directly, so you should at least check out the press release about it, don’t you think!)

If you read the first edition, welcome back! If you are reading The New Rules of PR for the first time, prepare to learn about a new way to get your organization noticed on the Web.