I bought the book last week via Kindle and am in the throes of reading it; because of a special deal Hyatt had on at the time, I received an audio version of the book as well, which I'm listening to in bursts and am getting heaps out of it.
According to Hyatt, great ideas are no longer enough.
As the former CEO and current Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers, one of the largest publishers in the world, Hyatt says he has met hundreds of hugely talented people with outstanding ideas.
Unfortunately he says, most of them couldn’t get published. Why? Because they didn’t have a 'platform'.
But it’s not just authors. In the past ten years it’s been increasingly difficult for anyone to get the attention they need to succeed in such a noisy world. This includes:
public speakers
bloggers
recording artists
politicians
business owners
entrepreneurs
sales people
corporate executives
marketing people
"Basically anybody who has something to say or to sell," Hyatt says in this video.
According to Hyatt, in the old days, you could stand on a small hill or a wooden stage to be heard - that was your platform.
However, thanks to social media "everyone now has access to a virtual microphone and everyone is connected to everyone else". As a result, today's platforms are built of:
contacts
customers
prospects
followers
fans
In other words, he says, a platform is your tribe. People who share your passion and want to hear from like-minded people.
From what I've read so far, PLATFORM manages to thread together important topics and issues across the realms of product development and launch, social media and online marketing, and personal branding. Quite a diverse spread of topics, but Hyatt makes it work.
P.S. I also enjoy reading Hyatt's blog and listening to his podcasts. You may like to check them out too.
It's that time of the year again folks when the PR Warrior selects a handful of books that, if read over the Christmas break, will knock your marketing/PR/social media knowledge out of the park!
Okay, maybe that's an oversell. But you will emerge from 2011 all the wiser for the experience.
The books I've selected look at marketing and PR in the context of today's super-connected and highly fluid marketplace, where anyone with an internet connection and a point of view can become an important influencer in their own right.
No Bullshit Social Media - pragmatic, to the point, business-oriented, practical information.
The New Relationship Marketing - jam-packed with helpful hints, soft skills for today's marketing and business professional - share the love! (Download a FREE sample chapter here).
The End of Business as Usual - must-read for PR folk, bigger picture ideas and concepts (check out my interview with Brian here).
Engagement From Scratch - multiple views, stories and ideas from a broad sweep of smart thought-leaders in the social media and new marketing space.
At the recent Public Relations Institute of Australia’s PR Directions national conference in Sydney I had the opportunity to catch up with best-selling author and renowned new media thinker Brian Solis following his opening keynote address.
Sir John Hegarty is one of the world's most lauded advertising creatives. His new book Hegarty On Advertising was eagerly awaited by his legions of fans inside the world of advertising and outside of it.
It's a really practical and easy to read book - anyone interested in creating and distributing content as a means of attracting people's attention and generating buzz about their brand should check it out.
I've (finally) bought a Flip camera. I love it! Here is my first 'experiment' - a video post filmed at Chez Warrior.
Main gist of the post is a review of POWER FRIENDING, the new book by Amber Mac (who incidentally is in Australia currently; she appears at the Schmart Marketing Conference tomorrow in Melbourne and Wednesday in Sydney).
Anyway, POWER FRIENDING is a pretty good book if you're after a broad overview of the world of social media. Follow Amber on Twitter here; I also recommend Net@Night, Amber's pod/vodcast.
As your grandparents, children and Oxfam Unwrapped emails will tell you, Christmas is a time for giving.
We give, sometimes because we have to, but often because we want to. We like the feeling that we’ve helped others, and it’s a creed the Brains on Fire team obviously lives by. Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell and Geno Church have written a book that gives and gives and gives.
It gives ideas of how to engage sustainable word-of-mouth social movements for business or action group. It gives the blueprint for how this can be achieved, and the real world case studies of where it’s been successful.
Hell, it even gaveme hope that the ideas I was thrashing around in my honors thesis on social movements all those years ago (back when a tweet was something only birds did) were not as hare-brained as I thought.
Giving is a great enabler – yet another theme from Brains that comes through loud and clear - so it would be remiss of me if I didn’t give something more back to you, dear reader, about the book.
Without further ado, here are the Brains team's 10 lessons for social movement success, with an appropriate Christmas theme.
Movements aren’t about a product conversation, they’re a passion conversation. “Passion is contagious” write Phillips, Cordell and Church. “How do you fit into people’s lives and make it better?” A visit from the jolly obese man in red is a yearly wish for most children. It drives them to prove that they’ve been nice, not naughty, and to wish for all the gifts the world can provide. They are passionate, and share that energy with their friends and family. As if Santa doesn’t make our lives bette
Movements start with the first conversation. How many of us have left out some brandy and a cookie for the bearded wonder at Christmas, alongside a handwritten note of request along the lines of “I’d love a Playstation, but please don’t let your reindeer eat mums petunias.” And how many times did we wake as children and find the cookies all gone with nary a few crumbs left, and a nicely wrapped shape under the tree?! Oh how we laughed and breathlessly recounted it to our family and friends all day! “Like that first conversation…stories are important to customers as it allows them to place themselves in the story”, say Phillips et al. Christmas provides a compelling story for everyone.
Movements have inspirational leadership. Well this is a no brainer (see what I did there?). Be it a religious leader or cultural figurehead, all of us has someone to turn to at Christmas time for a rationale and belief. “Most people trust the opinions of people just like themselves” is the main reason. Well, Jesus came from a family of carpenters and Santa is a man who runs a B2C company in the arctic. Yep, sounds like my kind of everyday people.
Movements have a barrier for entry. You can’t get presents if you’ve been bad all year, everyone knows that. If you’ve got an Italian background like me you’ve even got the threat of a delivery of coal from befana hanging over your head; pretty scary if you grew up near Hazelwood Power Station. “It must be give and take” conclude the Brains trust.
Movements empower people with knowledge. Everyone knows the basic story of Christmas but no one knows the whole story. Extra bits and pieces are shared, family to family, and through that a shared experience of Christmas takes hold. “Knowledge can create a bond and provide common ground. And sharing it is vital to igniting a movement.”
Movements have shared ownership. Engage the customer is the key here. Do you think we’d still worship Santa if he kept bringing oversized knickers and odd coloured socks each year? Hell no! He brings us iPads, Wired subscriptions and iTunes gift cards. “Don't start with the customer "in mind", but actually with the customer. Anything that comes straight from their mouths is pretty damn hard to refute.” So that’s why Christmas wishlists are so successful!
Movements have powerful identities. Even setting aside the fact that Australians are, as one of the Irish uncles of a co-worker once put it, hilariously in love with decorating our homes with fake snow in the middle of summer. But we identify with that snow. It’s as Christmas as plum pudding, fairy lights and tinsel. Says Brains “We are the collections of beliefs and values we are passionate about, and passionate people wear their beliefs on their sleeves.”
Movements live both online and offline. “A real relationship is about personal investment and sacrifice” say the Brains writers. Giving at Christmas nearly always has a degree of personal investment – what does this gift say about me? – and sometimes a degree of sacrifice. If anything, the festive season allows us to foster better relationships than what we would otherwise be unable to do at other times in the year. That we can do it both in the real and virtual world is a (often understated) given.
Movements make advocates feel like rockstars. How damn cool does it look like being a Christmas elf? Or an angel? Or a reindeer? Surrounded by toys all day, the ability to fly, or even only having to work one night a year…these are a few of my favourite things! While we can never be any of those things, we can be made to feel part of the story, the ‘centre of the universe’ experience that most customers crave. “It's not about how they fit into your marketing plan but rather how you fit into their lives.”
Movements get results. Obviously Christmas gets it done, because we all keep coming back for more year on year. I’ll leave it to the Brains authors to sum it up. “Movements move people to action. Movements transform companies. Movements change lives.”
So if you’re in the market for a social business book to give to a friend or colleague this year, I can’t recommend Brains On Fire enough.
It occasionally suffers from the same issues as most business books – repetitive and too formulaic in parts – but the simple lesson-style layout, the engaging writing style and compelling real-world stories elevate it way above book end fodder.
Merry Give-mas!
<<< David Scott follows lots of interesting folks and tries to reciprocate on @dascottonline. He’s trying to blog regularly about what it means to be a mid-20s white dude getting married next year at http://twoweeksonedate.wordpress.com
If you are a marketer or PR person or senior executive with power over how your brand is seen in the marketplace, you’d be crazy not to spend a few hours over the Christmas break reading one or more of the books discussed below.
Bottom line is: the world is changing before our very eyes.
Unless you’re immersed in the work of the world’s most progressive marketing thinkers and bloggers…unless you’re reading books like the ones below, then potentially you’re already behind. Sorry :)
Following is a selection of recently released business books that may help you re-think your current take on marketing (and possibly even help you kick-start the new year with a re-energised focus on what’s possible from a marketing perspective).
I was recently sent a copy to review, here are my thoughts:
What's Mine is Yours is a bit of a slog...but please, don't take that as a negative!
The book is so jam-packed with insights, mind-blowing statistics and cases in point that I found myself stopping to take notes every few pages, not to mention rushing to the web all the time to check out in greater detail the examples given.
I am being flippant, of course - the book isn't a 'slog' at all. In my mind, the more notes you take while reading...the more a book can get you thinking about all sorts of possibilities...the better, yeah?
And that's what this book does - it gets you thinking.
Firstly, about the rampant consumerism that has increasingly engulfed the planet in recent decades. It saddened me to see how we are just buying shit that we never use, to be slapped in the face with the fact there's a 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' out in the ocean, potentially double the size of Texas.
We also learn how the emergence of 'throwaway living' started in 1915 with a campaign that promoted Dixie Cups - and that today, a "staggering 220 billion paper and plastic cups are used worldwide per year".
But...
On the flip-side, I'm also heartened by the fact that we - the human race - is starting to do something about it on a global scale.
The 'Collaborative Consumption' movement - as coined by Botsman and Rogers - is growing and evolving.
Social technologies have given this movement scale and momentum - no doubt - but attitudinally we're also shifting: we are sharing more, using less and becoming more and more community-minded. Environmental concerns and cost-consciousness are increasingly influencing our actions.
According to the authors, Collaborative Consumption consists of three 'systems':
REDISTRIBUTION MARKETS: used or pre-owned goods are redistributed from where they are needed to somewhere or someone where they are e.g. eBay.
COLLABORATIVE LIFESTYLES: sharing and exchange of resources and assets sich as time, food, space, skills and money e.g. peer-to-peer social lending (LendingClub).
PRODUCT SERVICE SYSTEM: based on a 'usage mindset' whereby you pay to share a product so you can use it without needing to own the product outright e.g. car sharing.
But the 'glue' that holds everything together is a growing sense of trust in each other (whether we know them or not), which in turn is a cornerstone of any growing community.
"New online and offline marketplaces are forming where people can once again 'meet' in a global village and form nonlocal trust. We have returned to a time when if you do something wrong or embarrassing, the whole community will know", the authors write.
What Botsman and Rogers have done is document a major societal shift that is occurring before our very eyes.
They've joined the dots of a number of trends and neatly packaged it up for us, complete with dozens of examples that bring their theories to life e.g. here are just some of them:
As a PR practitioner or marketer, if you are able to somehow tap into the 'collaborative' zeitgist, then more power to you. There are some fabulous opportunities but only if you respect the community aspect of Collaborative Consumption.
On the flip-side, if you ignore the rumblings of this trend - or, if you try and intrude on 'the community' in half-cocked fashion - the results might not be that great.
For the broader business community --
The Collaborative Consumption movement is growing: Botsman and Rogers predict it will become a "fully fledged economy" within the next five years.
That spells O.P.P.O.R.T.U.N.I.T.Y. for far-sighted companies that understand this developing space. After all, some of the businesses mentioned above grew incredibly quickly (mainly through word-of-mouth) and have become multi-million dollar enterprises.
Note to Melbourne readers: On this Thursday, November 18Rachel Botsman will be sharing stories and research from around the world to illustrate the cultural and economic force known as Collaborative Consumption — organized sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities (presented by HUB Melbourne) - book here.
The event will also feature a panel consisting of:
Steve Sammartino - founder of Rentoid, Australia’s largest online hire and rental marketplace
Daniel Noble - founder of DriveMyCar Rentals, Australia’s first peer-to-peer car rental platform, connecting private car owners and drivers.
Juliette Anich - director of The Clothing Exchange, Australia’s leading social swapping network.
Okay, this would have to be one of the coolest business book titles ever: MARKETING LESSONS FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD.
The concept is also interesting - authors David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan draw parallels between the way the iconic rock band the Grateful Dead operated in the 60s (and 70s, 80s and 90s) and how successful businesses market their brands in today's hyper-connected environment.
Following is an excerpt of a post I wrote for the SWEAT EQUITY blog:
Firstly, I really enjoyed the book. It was a quick read and the book itself is small, compact and well designed.
The concept is pretty cool, especially for a business book. The title outlines the premise perfectly and is exactly what you get - marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead, a major-league band that became highly successful over a long period of time despite breaking many of the so-called 'rules' of the music industry.
My concern prior to reading was the authors might have tried retrofitting the content into the concept they had developed. Luckily, that wasn't the case and the lessons flow effortlessly.
Crucially, the book works perfectly for today's hyper-connected marketplace in which technology has levelled the playing field and consumers are rejecting the hard sales pitch.
Marketing today is less about broadcast advertising and more about sparking two-way conversation about your brand; it's less about incessantly trying to win over new customers but rather looking after the ones you've got and building a community of loyal fans from a solid base.
And this is exactly what the Grateful Dead was all about.
Summing up, if you're after a business book that brings to life an 'alternative view' of brand marketing (albeit using lessons from a bunch of hippies versus an accredited MBA curriculum), then you could do worse than check out 'Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead'.
Trevor Young has built PR Warrior into one of the world’s foremost showcases of what can be achieved at the intersection of public relations and social media.” - Brad Howarth, Smart Company, September 2011 More »
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