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- While the examples are great they are very US-centric and many desperately out of date as to sometimes even counter-illustrate how the rules work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.
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.