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The Fortune Cookie Chronicles blog and open-source Chinese restaurants

Because I am on airplanes nearly every week traveling to my speaking gigs, I read a lot of books -- novels, thrillers, and nonfiction. I look for things that I can enjoy. It's all about entertainment and amusement to make the downtime on the plane ride fun.

I just finished The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. I read it in two sittings: through page 201 on a San Francisco to Boston flight on Friday and the rest yesterday. (I did get up to use the toilet a few times, so I don't know if that is really two sittings or not). What's so great about the book is that it is an entertaining and well written romp into a world we are all familiar with, but until now really didn't knew that well.

Jennifer 8. Lee (her middle name "8" connotes prosperity in Chinese) tracked down so much cool information about Chinese food, like who writes the fortunes that go in the cookies, who is General Tso and did he really like Chicken, and much more. I lived in Hong Kong for a few years and lived in Asia for nearly a decade. I now live in the Boston area and eat Chinese a few times a month. I thought I knew about Chinese food. Ha! I didn't know squat (until now).

Readers of this blog know that I very rarely do book reviews. I'm writing about Jennifer's book because I discovered that she has one of the best book blogs I have ever seen. Everything, from her writing, to the design, to the choice of topics to blog about is spot on. And she mixes stuff about the book with things that are interesting to people who have already read it.

To the many wannabe author-bloggers out there, do check this blog out.

One more thing about this terrific book. Jennifer tells her readers that there are twice as many Chinese restaurants in the U.S. as McDonalds and then used an analogy to open-source software that is just wonderful. McDonalds is centralized standardization of fast food by a large corporation. Everywhere you go it is the same. That's the Windows of the fast-food world. However, Chinese restaurants are nearly as predictable fast food but each independently run restaurant draws on an open-source network of suppliers (packs of soy sauce, wooden chopsticks, takeout boxes, and the like). Through word-of-mouth good ideas are copied and improved upon, by thousands of restaurant owners. Chinese restaurants are the Linux operating system of the restaurant world. In her book, Jennifer included an email exchange she had with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia about the analogy which I found fascinating.

Will your company be successful in the year 2208?

I spent an enjoyable day this week with my editor and his colleagues on the marketing, editorial, and PR teams at my publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. to discuss new initiatives for my current book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR and ideas for future book projects. For example, there will be an Amazon Kindle version of New Rules shortly. And yes, I've got two more books in the works—one to come out in 2008 and one in 2009. It is just a little early to announce anything now, but you'll be the first to know.

Amazingly, Wiley has been publishing books for 200 years. Can you imagine—Wiley was founded in New York City when Thomas Jefferson was president! And Wiley has been a significant player in the publishing industry for two centuries.

How can a company be around for that long? Simple, the only way is to be tuned in and develop products and services that people want to buy and markets them in the ways that people find information or solve problems.

Here are a three examples of the new rules at work at Wiley:

1. When I wrote New Rules, the professionals at Wiley embraced my new publishing model of blogging the book as I wrote it. They encouraged me to give away a large percentage of the book for free on my blog. Other publishers would freak out if an author wanted to put bits of the book out for comment and solicit ideas online. Wiley encouraged it.

2. Wiley has a group of passionate employee bloggers. One of them is my friend Joe Wikert (who introduced me to Wiley). He writes the terrific Joe Wikert's 2020 Publishing blog: A Book Publisher's Future Visions of Print, Online, Video and All Media Formats Not Yet Invented.

3. Wiley Europe has a cool online media room where they educate and inform reviewers, the media, and consumers.

To mark the company's bicentennial, Wiley has just published a terrific coffee table book to mark the occasion Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry.

Think about your business. Will your company be around in the year 2208?

Thank you fellow business book authors

11,000 business books are published each year. The published ideas in these books educate, inform, and influence how people go to work every day. As an author, I like to think that our efforts help to make people more successful. It is an honor that tens of thousands of people have invested time and money to read what I am passionate about.

800-CEO-READ (8CR) is the premier business bookseller and is used by corporations to buy copies of the best business books available. They created the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards to recognize the best business books of 2007.

How cool is it that my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR was selected as "authors choice" from nearly 300 books submitted. I’m stunned that my fellow business book authors chose my book as a best title of the year. If you voted for me, thank you!

Please check out all the terrific books that were selected. These authors work really hard to write great books.

Millions and millions of books, twenty authors, and one funky room

"I choose Mug root beer from the big white fridge with the pull handle because that's what I would have grabbed in my own rec room. The mismatched furniture and leftover paint that colors the walls are just what we had at home. As a place to stimulate ideas and build new friendships it’s great to finally get out of those damn hotel conference rooms and instead meet in a place that reeks of Pink Floyd and making out with Nicole in the corner. As I first sip my Mug, I swear cheap incense burned thirty years earlier still lingers. A flashback, perhaps."

I've attended more than 50 conferences in 2007 where I was invited as a speaker and this week, I finally attended one for me. As an attendee! The terrific business book author Pow Wow, expertly sponsored by 1-800-CEO-READ (8CR), brought together 21 business book authors, and industry luminaries including publishers, publicists, designers, speaker’s agents, and more.

There were dozens of bestsellers represented and millions of books sold. It was so terrific to meet and share ideas about writing, marketing, and selling books. And with this group of extremely successful entrepreneurs we all picked each others' brains on the business of speaking and writing as a career. I learned a great deal (hey 8CR – sign me up for next year!)

The paragraph above was the result of a writing assignment – we had about ten minutes to write a few sentences that describe the funky Catalyst Ranch room we were hanging out in.

Here are the authors who attended:

Erika Andersen Growing Great Employees

Greg Alexander Sales Benchmarking

Jose Castillo

Kevin Eikenberry Remarkable Leadership

Phil Gerbyshak 10 Ways to Make it Great

Joanne Gordon Be Happy at Work

Jackie Huba Church of the Customer

Joe Heuer Business Daffynitions

Mike Kanazawa Big Ideas to Big Results

Alexander Kjerulf Happy Hour is 9 to 5

Steve Little The Milkshake Moment

Ben McConnell Citizen Marketers

Robert Mintz The World According To You

Jack Mitchell Hug Your Customers

Susan Quandt Sudden Impact on the Job

Michael Stallard Fired Up or Burned Out

Dan Roam The Back of the Napkin

John Rosen Stopwatch Marketing

Rajesh Setty Life Beyond Code

AnnaMaria Turano Stopwatch Marketing

Bill Welter The Prepared Mind of a Leader

Steve Yastrow We

Here are the people who work in the business book publishing world who shared ideas with us:

Ray Bard - Bard Press

Mark Bloomfield - Harvard Business School Press

Shelley Dolley - Leap7

Barbara Cave Henricks - Cave Henricks Communications

Mark Fortier - Fortier Public Relations

Nick Morgan - Public Words

Gerry Sindell - ThoughtLeaders Intl

Les Tuerk - BrightSight Group

Dennis Welch - Cave Henricks Communications

Susan Williams - Jossey-Bass

Thank you to Jack, Todd, Sally, Kate, Dylan, and Aaron from 8CR for putting on this great event.

Authors and musicians - link your blog to your Amazon product pages!

I am constantly amazed by the ability of Amazon.com to push into new ground. I've always said that Amazon is successful because they run the company as a content site that happens to sell stuff. Everything on the site is focused on creating important content that surrounds each product – things like editorial reviews, customer reviews, similar books, search inside and whatnot. There's even the cool statistically improbably phrase feature.

Amazon now allows bloggers to link their blog posts to their product page on Amazon in a program called AmazonConnect. What a cool way to add content to your page. Potential buyers see what you are passionate about by reading a few of your posts. You can even post with a podcast or a YouTube video embedded in your post which appears on Amazon.

So far very few authors and musicians are taking advantage of it.

Here is what it looks like on The New Rules of Marketing & PR product page. Scroll down below the product information and you will see my three most recent blog posts followed by customer reviews.

Kind of cool don’t you think?

Linking your blog to Amazon is very easy to set up. The best part is that after the one time set up procedure is complete, you don't have to do anything else. Your blog posts automatically appear on your product pages.

Here are the steps required:

1. First, you need an Amazon profile. If you've ever written a book review, then you've already got one. Here is what mine looks like.

2. Then you create an Amazon blog on your profile page. If you want to, you can manually update your Amazon blog, but I think most people will just want to link their existing blog.

3. Once the blog is set up, you link your existing blog's RSS feed to your new Amazon blog.

4. The final step is to link your Amazon blog to your product pages (your books, CDs, and other products). To do this, Amazon needs to verify you are who you say you are so they have a form to fill out so your agent or publisher can verify.

Here is a list of authors who have participated in this AmazonConnect program.

All blogger/authors and blogger/musicians should consider setting this up.

The power of negative headlines (part two)

Mark R. Hinkle (Author, Blogger, Technologist) enjoyed my riff do not read this blog post. So he tried the tactic on his blog on subject he knew would elicit a strong reaction.

Top 10 Reasons Not to Use Ubuntu

Editorial note – even if, like me, you don’t know what Ubuntu is, you must read item number 8 on Mark’s list.

Mark says the reaction was amazing. The next morning he woke to find the post on the front page of Digg with over 100 diggs (there are 149 now). He says his blog is getting 10 times the normal traffic and the hits keep coming.

Mark says an added benefit was that he enjoyed writing the post.

“There's a lesson to be learned about appealing to the emotions of your readers there somewhere,” he says.

The Best & Worst Business Books

This morning my Google news & blog alerts lit up with the following headlines: "The Best & Worst Business Books" and "10 Overrated Business Books." I'll admit that I momentarily freaked out about it because I knew that the alerts were triggered by my name or my book title so I immediately linked to Charles Tan's Bibliophile Stalker blog.

Phew, The New Rules of Marketing & PR was on the "best" side of the list, which was compiled by Geoffrey James at BNET. I'm so excited because the lists aren't just recent business books, but all time business books such as Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (also on the "best" side). Great company indeed.

Here's what Geoffrey wrote in the introduction to the featured article: "Your time is limited — but the number of business books aren't — and many of the bestsellers aren't even worth their weight in your carry-on. We've sorted through the fads, pop theories, and half-baked research to find the ones that will actually give you information you can — and should — put to use."

Ten Overrated Business Books

BNETs take: "We think that some of these classics became popular not because they were particularly insightful, but because they reinforced conventional business wisdom."

Read the details for each book to learn why it was chosen.

Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution by Michael Hammer and James Champy

In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman

Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun by Wess Roberts

Jack Welch & the G.E. Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO by Robert Slater

Jesus CEO by Laurie Beth Jones

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey

The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson

Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work by Jack Canfield, etc.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids -- That You Can Learn Too by Robert Kiyosaki

Ten Underrated Business Books

BNETs take: "These 10 books might not tell you want you want to hear, but they will give you information you need to significantly revise your personal and business strategies."

Read the details for each book to learn why it was chosen.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Devitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting,
Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott

Managers Not MBAs: A hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development by Henry Mintzberg

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Wow. Quite amazing company to be in!

Separately, The New Rules of Marketing & PR scored a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Only a few business books gain this honor. You can see the review on the book's Amazon page.

The Gobbledygook Manifesto – revised and updated with new data

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke!

Just like with a teenager's use of annoying catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again in Web sites and news releases—so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people's, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don't communicate very well, you know?

Alert readers of this blog and my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR will recall that in late 2006 I created The Gobbledygook Manifesto to analyze the enormous number of meaningless phrases that appear in corporate marketing and PR materials. You know what I mean (and like me, you may occasionally be guilty of writing like this: "Company X is a leader in providing flexible, scalable, mission critical solutions for improving business process using cutting edge, next generation technology").

If you haven't read the original analysis, I recommend you check out this recently published version: ChangeThis The Gobbledygook Manifesto by David Meerman Scott.

I wanted to see if there were any differences to the data in another time period. So with Dow Jones Factiva, we did another analysis for recent nine-month period. The original analysis was from January 1, 2006 through September 30, 2006 and the new analysis from November 1, 2006, to July 31, 2007.

The analysis by Factiva uses text mining tools to analyze news releases distributed by the major news release distribution services such as Business Wire, Marketwire, PrimeNewswire, and PR Newswire sent by companies in North America (a separate analysis was also conducted for Europe). For the revised analysis, Factiva analyzed each release in its database that had been sent to one of the North American news release wires it distributes for the period from November 1, 2006, to July 31, 2007.

Gobbledygook Analysis for North America. Click chart for larger image.

It turns out there were more releases sent during the period. A lot more. In the first analysis (Jan 2006 through Sept 2006), 388,000 press releases were sent in North America while in the new period (Nov 2006 thru July 2007) 440,500 releases were sent. Good news for the press release distribution companies! I'd like to think that I've played a role in goosing the number of releases because more than 250,000 people have downloaded my ebook The New Rules of PR: How to create a press release strategy for reaching buyers directly.

The percentage of releases containing at least one of the gobbledygook phrases went down slightly, from 19% to 17.5%. Clearly these phrases are still overused.

The words mentioned most often were similar to last year’s analysis. In North America – next generation (10,427 mentions), robust (8868 mentions), flexible (8515 mentions), and world class (7887 mentions) were the leaders.

The words mentioned in Europe were virtually identical in their frequency compared to North America.

Smart Marketers are statistically improbable according to Amazon.com

Amazon recently turned on Search Inside for The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

I finished the manuscript for the book way back in December 2006 (about a decade in Internet time). As an author, some of the things that get surfaced by Search Inside jolt me. Did I write that? It’s like running into an old girlfriend after many years.

Search Inside takes every word of the book and runs it through a bunch of algorithms. Many authors and publishers don’t like search inside because they feel people can "steal" their work. Nonsense. Having my book appear in search results when someone enters a phrase that is used in the book is a terrific benefit. Search Inside also allows buyers to virtually flip through the book as they would in a bookstore. Being able to browse before a purchase is important for any Web site. Amazon lets publishers opt out of Search Inside, but I think those who do are making a mistake.

I'm particularly intrigued by the Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases which are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside program. To identify Statistically Improbable Phrases, Amazon indexes every word of every book in the Search Inside program. Phrases that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books are considered Statistically Improbable Phrases. The idea here is if a consumer is looking for a book on a subject, the Amazon search engine surfaces the right books by analyzing the text inside the book, not just the title and subtitle.

Some of the Statistically Improbable Phrases for The New Rules of Marketing & PR include: buyer personas, online media room, news release content, persona research, news release strategy, persona profile, influential bloggers, news release program, search engine marketing, click fraud, landing page, social networking sites, blog posts, online news sites, smart marketers. What a great way to surface long tail content.

So if someone, such as Adele Revella for example, had entered buyer personas into the Amazon search engine, my book would pop up in the book search results page because that phrase is statistically improbable and it appears in my book a lot. How cool is that?

I think the list of Statistically Improbable Phrases that are surfaced for my book is a great one. My book is about those things!

But hey, why are "smart marketers" statistically improbable? What does that say about marketing people?

Thank you Robert Scoble!

I want to thank Robert Scoble for writing the terrific forward to The New Rules of Marketing & PR!

What makes his generosity especially remarkable is that I have never met Robert. The only real connection we share is that his book Naked Conversations was also published by Wiley. The foreword Robert wrote is just brilliant. It sets up what I write about in my book perfectly. Robert obviously took time to do this – for someone he only knows from a few emails and blog posts. Thank you Robert!

Foreword to The New Rules of Marketing & PR

You're not supposed to be able to do what David Meerman Scott is about to tell you in this book. You're not supposed to be able to carry around a $250 video camera, record what employees are working on and what they think of the products they built, and publish those videos on the Internet. But that's what I did at Microsoft, building an audience of more than four million unique visitors a month.

You're not supposed to be able to do what Stormhoek did. A winery in South Africa, it doubled sales in a year using the principles discussed here.

You're not supposed to be able to run a Presidential Campaign with just a blogger, a videographer, and a Flickr photographer. But that’s what John Edwards did in December 2006 as he announced he was running for President.

Something has changed in the past 10 years. Well, for one, we have Google now, but that's only a part of the puzzle.

What really has happened is the word-of-mouth network has gotten more efficient. Much, much, more efficient.

Word-of-mouth has always been important to business. When I helped run a Silicon Valley camera store in the 1980s about 80% of my sales came from it. "Where should I buy a camera this weekend," you might have heard in a lunchroom back then. Today that conversation is happening online. But, instead of only being two people talking about your business, now thousands and sometimes millions (Engadget had 10 million page views in a single day during the Consumer Electronics and MacWorld shows in January 2006) are either participating or listening in.

What does this mean? Well, now there's a new media to deal with. Your PR teams better understand what drives this new media (it's as influential as the New York Times or CNN now) and if you understand how to use it you can drive buzz, new product feedback, sales, and more.

But first you’ll have to learn to break the rules.

Is your marketing department saying you need to spend $80,000 to do a single video (not unusual, even in today's world, I just participated in such a video for a sponsor of mine)? If so, tell that department "thanks, but no thanks." Or, even better, search Google for "will it blend?" You’ll find a Utah blender company that got six million downloads in less than 10 days. Oh, and 10,000 comments in the same period of time. All by spending a few hundred bucks, recording a one-minute long video, and uploading that to YouTube.

Or, study what I did at Microsoft with a blog and a video camera. Economist magazine said I put a human face on Microsoft. Imagine that. A 60,000-employee organization and I changed its image with very little expense and hardly a committee in sight.

This advice isn't for everyone, though. Most people don't like running fast in business. They feel more comfortable if there's lots of checks and balances. Er, committees to cover their asses. Or, they don't want to destroy the morale of PR and marketing departments due to the disintermediating effects of the Internet.

After all, we can type "OneNote Blog" into Google or Live.com, or Yahoo and you'll find Chris Pratley. He runs the OneNote team at Microsoft. Or, search for "Sun CEO." You’ll find Jonathan Schwartz and his blog.

You can leave either a comment and tell them their product sucks and see what they do in response. Or, even better, tell them how to earn your sale. Do they snap into place?

It's a new world you’re about to enter. One where relationships with influentials AND search engine optimization strategy are just as important as each other. One where your news will be passed around the world very quickly. Don't believe me?

Look at how the world found out I was leaving Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup (PodTech.net).

I told 15 people at a videoblogging conference. Not "A listers" either. Just everyday videobloggers. I asked them not to tell anyone until Tuesday – this was on a Saturday afternoon and I still hasn’t really told my boss.

Well, of course someone leaked that information. But, it didn't pop up in the New York Times. It wasn't discussed on CNN. No, it was a blogger I had never even heard of that posted the info first.

Within hours it was on hundreds of other blogs. Within two days it was on the Wall Street Journal, in the New York Times, on the front page of the BBC, in Business Week, Economist, in more than 140 newspapers around the world (friends called me from Australia, Germany, Israel, and England, among other countries) and other places. Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft’s PR agency, was keeping track and said that about 50 million media impressions occurred on my name in the first week.

All due to 15 conversations.

Whoa, what's up here? Well, if you have a story worth repeating bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers (among other influentials) will repeat your story all over the world. Potentially bringing hundreds of thousands or millions of people your way. One link on a site like Digg alone could bring tens of thousands of visitors.

How did that happen?

Well, for one, lots of people knew me, knew my phone number, knew what kind of car I drove, knew my wife and son, knew my best friends, knew where I worked and had heard me in about 700 videos that I posted at http://channel9.msdn.com on behalf of Microsoft.

They also knew where I went to college (and high school, and middle school), and countless other details about me. How do you know they know all this? Well, they wrote a page on Wikipedia about me at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scoble -- not a single thing on that page was authored by me.

What did all that knowledge of me turn into? Credibility and authority. Translation: people knew me, knew where I was coming from, knew I was passionate and authoritative about technology, and came to trust me where they wouldn’t trust most corporate authorities.

By reading this book you'll understand how to gain the credibility you need to build your business. Enjoy!

Robert Scoble
Vice President Media Development, PodTech.net
co-author Naked Conversations
Scobleizer.com