Folder: Getting It: Taking the Web Beyond Marketing
These are documents about or relevant to the art gaining and holding people's attention--with an authentic voice for reasons that are worth your time and the time of others. This is marketing beyond "marketing"--or marketing beyond bullshitting--and much else. Useful for anyone who wants to add value to the web and get value back. How to be, if not a thought leader, a good sustainer of worthwhile conversations with your audiences and markets. Yes this includes that "Web 2.0" and "social media" stuff, but without the superficial hucksterism. If these topics interest you, I blog about them here occasionally and welcome your comments.
Files:
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The Hughtrain
"The market for something to believe in is infinite. It’s not about merit. It’s about faith. Belief. Conviction. Courage. The primary job of an advertiser is not to communicate benefit, but to communicate conviction. The Customer is a human being. The Consumer is a metaphor. Understand why what youʼre offering to do for other people is interesting, important, meaningful, etc. Then start telling people about it. Write like you mean the words." Hugh MacLeod (gapingvoid.com) spells it out with colorful language. (From ChangeThis.com where you can find a lot of good business insight. The guys at Milwaukee's own 800ceoread.com keep an eye on ChangeThis; follow them there or on Twitter.)
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The Cluetrain Manifesto
People of Earth: This is a classic. Pulled from cluetrain.com and turned into a PDF because someone will read it here, and they should.
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Really Bad Powerpoint (And How to Avoid It)
Seth Godin calls bullshit on one of the major Microsoft menaces. "Almost every PowerPoint presentation sucks rotten eggs," he says, because it is built with a bias toward non-communicative usage. And sadly that is mostly how it is used--to fail to communicate. Don't help Microsoft help you be lazy and ineffective. Do you really want to bore people and fail to communicate with them? Read Seth's tips for creating and delivering righteous PowerPoint presentations. (Also of note is the Edward Tufte classic, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.)
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The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008
Philip Sheldrake's introduction to social web/social media analytics as of 2008. SWA is defined by Sheldrake as "the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation's sentiment and influence."
In other words, these are some methods for discovering, monitoring, and quantifying what a particular group is saying online, what they're saying about a given topic, or simply what audience (if any) can be identified by its conversations about a given topic.
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Low Hassle Web Community Building
Some good, fundamental advice on building online communities and networks--from Joe Pulizzi at Website Magazine (which seems to have misplaced the full text of the original article).
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Getting the Most From Your Online Donation Pages
DonorDigital.com's study of what works best to maximize online donations.
