Book Review: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk!
Al Ries, Jack Trout
I’d heard this book was a staple for PR & Marketing professionals, but then when one of my favourite authors Tim Ferris recommended it as one of his top 5 must-have books, I finally decided to grab myself a copy.
What’s to like about it:
- Easily digestible chapters
- Tonnes of real world examples
- Doesn’t rely on extensive previous knowledge of Marketing, Branding, or Public Relations
What’s not to like about it:
- While the examples are great they are very US-centric and many desperately out of date as to sometimes even counter-illustrate how the rules work
- Some people get put off by the first two rules.. I don’t, I’m just saying *some* people do
Tim Ferriss says that he uses these rules as a sanity check before launching and marketing any new business and I can see why – Sensible, reliable and easy-to-understand advice makes this a great reference book I often refer to before I start planning.
For a sneak peak of the content there is a free summary here.
New Zealanders go home!
I recently checked out a new website for New Zealanders returning from abroad which a friend of mine has worked on.
At the risk of being throttled for saying this here, I thought the content was great but the lack of any interactivity (aside from a Live Chat option which was closed) seemed sadly absent and a bit of a missed opportunity.
The best part of the information is the carefully sourced and collated peer-to-peer observations from NZers who’ve been through it:
“I had massive reverse culture shock when I returned. Probably bigger than when I first arrived in the UK. Things I noticed: very slow nasal accents.. to name a few” – Loic Taylor-Bizet, Quarantine Officer
“I was shocked at the media – newspapers and television. So many ads!” – Vince Powell, Lawyer
These kind of personal observations are invaluable and inherently shareable. I would’ve thought it a no-brainer to at least whack a forum on to this section of the site to further enable people to intereact with and answer eachother’s questions. Or what about the potential for a Social Networking element to help people connect with those who have or will be returning – again this could’ve been as simple as integrating Facebook Connect?
In fairness the Career Services parent site this content is connected with doesn’t incorporate any UGC. It may have been decided as not appropriate or too costly to manage once in place. Or maybe there’s a Phase II? Anyway I better pipe down or I won’t be welcome back any time soon.
Image: kevindooley
Recommended Reading:
VisitBritain and user generated content by Richard Britton. Slideshare presention on the process VisitBritain went through when it decided to integrate UGC into the website
Social Media gives more returning visitors than Search by Joshua March. Suprising stats on visitor loyalty when referred from Social Media, and in particular Social Networks.
The Nightmare before Christmas: Eurostar, the channel tunnel, and We Are Social
The Nightmare before Christmas
It’s a Saturday morning and 7 days until Christmas. You get a call that your client (who you are not retained to manage crisis communications for) has been involved in a major transport fail. Reports are rife online that passengers went without food and water for hours, babies couldn’t get clean diapers, and information was almost non-existent. Twitter is aflame with criticism including attacks on a Twitter profile @Eurostar_UK which is in fact not in use by your client’s organisation.
To find out how We Are Social dealt with this nightmare scenario Robin Grant has posted a detailed write-up. I encourage you to read it and file as an example of “Best practice when the sh*t hits the fan”.
I’m back
Wow, I haven’t written here for ages because I had such a nightmare changing over the design of my site. There’s so many widgets and fidgety things to get up and running that I went into denial that I could ever fix it myself and instead focused on seeing other client projects get online (check out the new Tempero site where I also blog).
Anyway, I’m back now with a simplified category structure and a few new things that I want to write about – Book Reviews for one. I am a business & industry book junkie and constantly telling people to read stuff. I thought I’d start collating my thoughts here to save you time & money finding out which ones are best.
My old site was on wordpress with a redirect from www.grapevine-consulting.com. Hopefully everyone has found me again here and updated their RSS readers with the new feed.
Defeated
After half a day, and about £60, my long-awaited plans to improve the look and feel of my blog have resulted in, well, I’ve actually made it worse.
It’s not that I underestimated the complexities of installing wordpress and messing about with it but after having conquered the free version over here http://grapevineconsulting.wordpress.com/ well over a year ago I wanted to move things on a bit.
I could’ve paid someone but find it’s useful to try this this stuff at least once so I understand it a little better if it crops up in client work. Well, I can admit when I’m beat. Please bear with this ugly looking site until I can find someone to rescue me.
Should PRs pitch on Twitter?
No.
Well, that’s what I always tell PRs when I run training sessions. Why? Because I find it impossible to explain to twitter newbies exactly how and when it *might* be OK to do so. But am I too hardline?
Maybe.
I mean when I run training sessions most people are new to Twitter full stop, forget the marketing applications (ick) of the service. But could PRs have an authentic and relevant conversation about a client on Twitter? Hmmm…
Willing to accept I am not the Social Media equivalent of a Delphi Priestess I instead asked some of my on- and offline writing contacts to “B*tch about the Twitter Pitch”. Over to them……
PR: Is it really so hard to be nice?
I say that in PR you always get the short straw. Being the liaison between journalists (who can be a tad tough to deal with sometimes) and a client who may not always understand how important it is that you get the correct pricing, stockist and hi-res image in 30mins for a deadline is tough.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard “PR is incompetent”. The reality is that you do your best, working on behalf of a number of people’s interests, and always having to put on a happy face.
You can’t exactly say
“sorry, my client thinks you’re Tier Three press and hates your reviews”
likewise to the client
“The journalist didn’t even want to include your cr*ppy product in their feature.”
Despite the amount of un-niceness there is working in public relations, the role implys you can actually relate to the public. Which is why this story about a PR rep telling a blogger that images of them wearning the designer’s clothes were bad publicity had me astounded.
Is it so hard to be nice? It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, write for Vogue or just someone posting pics to your Facebook profile. Surely this is not an example of bad practice in blogger relations it’s an example of just bad relating.
Unfortunately when it comes to bloggers there is still an ingrained attitude of agression from PRs. Could we all be a little nicer to eachother?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYLsyNBnE5M]
Technology and the new industrial revolution
The FT’s reported on new research by HSBC on how business is expected to develop over the next 20 years. New technologies and working practices are, of course, at the heart of it. I was interviewed for the report and am profiled as
a “referral economist”, a new breed of business matchmaker who profits from connecting people
That alone sounds a little shady but in context it’s about using your network to connect with business opportunities and connect other businesses to eachother.
A lot of people think “networking” is ego-driven, greasy sales types at events handing out business cards and trying to get closest to the most important person in the room. That’s just a misconception like the idea that Twitter is just ego-centric, over-sharing of the minutae of life.
Networks (and social technologies like Twitter) are about connecting people. The social media revolution has already massively impacted industry by connecting brands and customers. The next phase is when businesses connect to eachother. Wikinomics fascinates me by exploring that idea, and the concept of Amplified 09 goes further looking at what happens when we connect across industries.
I know it’s cheesy but we really do live in exciting times.
Not just a label
"Strait Jacket" can be worn as t-shirt or dress. Patriziabel Sito
Cottage industry is on the rise with the success of online store fronts like Etsy and NOT JUST A LABEL (NJAL) is just such a site taking it’s existing social network of rising fashion stars and enabling them to sell one-off designer peices via the launch of a new online store.
Based on market research by the company showing that “today’s consumer is looking for unique and one-off designer garments” the new store will feature items selected by the NJAL team plus key industry figures. The idea is a new concept to showcase design talent by selling fashion which may not normally be considered commercially viable.
Will it work? New, exclusive, limited, alternative – sounds like a recipe for fashion success to me.
Ask and ye shall receive: ByUnderground
In December last year I attended a bloggers briefing held by Transport for London on how they’re planning to communicate transport info to the public, particularly via web and mobile.
Although I never typed up my thoughts from that meeting the clever folks at Inreal Technologies, a Cambridge based start-up, spotted a comment I’d left on Annie Mole’s blog stating that what most interested me would be mobile applications for transport info.
Inreal offers a free app called byunderground which differs from similar sites (like TFL’s wap service). Here’s some of the key features:
About:
I'm Darika Ahrens and I help brands develop marketing strategies for Social Media. My background is in Public Relations for companies like Orange, Microsoft, Philips, HTC, Yell.com, and Estee Lauder. I've worked with and trained some of the UK's top agencies.