Free Seth Godin download from Audible.com

For a limited time, Audible.com is offering a free download of Tribes, a new audio book from uber guru Seth Godin. A companion casebook is also available as a PDF, also at no cost.

Hat tip: PR Squared

The Clash and the art of listening to your audience

I am a huge fan of The Clash. They just had it--a swagger, a conviction, and a unique style that earned them the right to be called "the only band that matters." A book I'm reading right now includes a quote from Creem writer Bob Gruen that helps explain why they were so great:

The band would stay up every night and talk to anyone who wanted to talk. They weren't just out to meet cute girls. They were available to all their fans. It was the roadies' job to get their fans into the dressing room and the hotel, which was the opposite to other bands. They wanted to know what their fans were thinking. That helped inspire them.*

So what does this mean for you? No matter who your audience is, you have to do more than just listen--you have to create an environment that encourages honest feedback. And it can't just be because you want to sell something. It should be because you genuinely want to improve. The minute you stop listening is the minute you risk inauthenticity. And if you're not going to be authentic, what's the point?

*From Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash by Pat Gilbert

What not to say in your voicemail greeting

Another thing about voicemail: if your greeting says "your call is important to me," change it. Now. The message you may wish to send is that you'll give careful attention to every message you receive. What the caller thinks, however, is that if everyone's call is important to you, no one's call is important to you.

Insipried by the the great book by Laura Penny, Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit.

Recommended reading: Let My People Go Surfing

Last week, I mentioned Yvon Chouinard's Let My People Go Surfing in my a post entitled "What I learned on my summer vacation." I checked the book out after reading about it on AdPulp, a blog that says a lot of things I like about advertising, marketing, and life in general. It's no surprise, then, that I enjoyed Let My People Go Surfing quite a bit. It's not for everyone, but if you're looking to make your work life more meaningful, become a better marketer, or learn more about some the most pressing environmental and political challenges we face, it's definitely worth your attention. It covers a lot of ground, and it's not your average business book. But that's what makes Let My People Go Surfing so worthwhile.

Instead of writing a review, I'm going to excerpt a few of my favorite passages. If you like what you read here, I'd encourage you to check out the rest of the book*.

----------------------------

I've been a businessman for almost 50 years. It's as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit to being an alcoholic or a lawyer.

I've never respected the profession. It's business that has to take the majority of the blame for being the enemy of nature, for destroying native cultures, for taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and for poisoning the earth with the effluent from its factories.

Yet business can produce food, cure disease, control population, employ people, and generally enrich our lives. And it can do these good things and make a profit without losing its soul. That's what this book is about.

----------------------------

Everything we personally own that's made, sold, shipped, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we're either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.

All the more reason, when we consider the purchase of anything, to ask ourselves, both as producers and consumers: Is this purchase necessary? Do I really need a new outfit to do yoga? Can I do well enough with something I already have? And will it do more than one thing?

----------------------------

People who aren't in the clothing business can count themselves lucky not to have the problem of fit. The way a company sizes clothes--what you call a small or a medium, whether you design for physically fit people or those who aren't--will always satisfy some customers and distress and turn away others. At Patagonia we pattern our sizes to our core consumers, who are active and in better shape than the average snowmobiler or bait fisherman. This may mean we lose potential customers in order to keep our core customers happy. So be it.

----------------------------

When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I'll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can't be sold on it merits. I'd be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me. I'd much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition.

----------------------------

I don't really believe that humans are evil; it's just that we are not very intelligent animals. No animal is so stupid and greedy as to foul its own nest--except humans.

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It's no wonder we're no longer called citizens but consumers. A consumer is a good name for us, and our politicians and corporate leaders are reflections of whom we have become. With the average American reading at only an eighth-grade level and nearly 50 percent of Americans not believing in evolution, we have the government we deserve.

With our winner-take-all, nonproportional system of government in the United States and with all branches of federal government and major media under conservative, antienvionrmental control, a lot of citizens are left disenfranchised. Now more than ever we need to encourage civil democracy by speaking out, joining up, volunteering, or supporting these groups financially so we can still have a voice in democracy.

*If you don't, there's always Who Cut the Cheese? or Great is Good or whatever the hell they're called.

What I learned on my summer vacation

A few marketing lessons learned (or relearned) from a trip to seven states in six days:

- Word of mouth trumps everything else. I stayed at three hotels during my trip. I picked one due to great reviews in a travel book, and rejected another after reading some bad reviews online. And just about all the cities I chose to visit (and spend money in) were recommended by friends.

- Mass media is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Before I went on vacation, I posted about my media consumption habits. My increasing skepticism about the power of mass media was only reinforced by six days with no radio (listened to CDs, my MP3 player, or nothing at all the whole time), almost no TV (but I did watch about an hour of stuff on Hulu), and very little printed newspaper (skimmed the Panama City News-Herald a couple of mornings, and quickly flipped through the Savannah Morning News one day). I used the Internet a lot less, too. Do I wish I spent less time outside, on the beach, and in the water so I could consume more mass media? Nope. Does this reinforce my sense of urgency with regard to how hard it is to reach today's audiences? Yep.

- Better to do nothing than to put up a bad billboard. Billboards were the mass medium I saw the most of on my trip, but most of them were bad. If it's behind a tree, or you include 87 words on it, or three photos, or it's 200 feet from the road and you use a small font, it's a waste of money.

- But good billboards work. One of my hotel stops and most of my fast food stops were influenced by clean, simple billboards. There's nothing wrong with just using a big logo and an exit number in a really big font.

- And digital billboards are distracting. More than I originally thought, in fact. When the message changes, your eyes are attracted to the sign. Good for advertisers. Bad for drivers. This concerns me a little bit as I see digital billboards becoming more and more common.

- Your customers want you to succeed. In thinking of myself strictly as a consumer for a few days, it occurred to me that we marketers sometimes treat the customer as an adversary--but that's rarely the case. Whether I was eating, shopping, or sightseeing, I was willing to pay for good service, good products, and a good experience. It only got adversarial when promises (implicit or explicit) were not kept.

- Let My People Go Surfing is a great read. After reading this post on AdPulp, I checked out Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard's Let My People Go Surfing and took it with me on vacation. I'll post more on the book later, but it's a must read for anyone trying to find out how to make a living without compromising their beliefs.

- Want to learn what's not important? Go on vacation. This was my first vacation since last July, and it was good reminder that a lot of the stuff on my desk that seems urgent really isn't.

Photo: Bay.tv

Communication resources from YLNI Leadership Institute

Earlier today, I facilitated a YLNI Leadership Institute session on communication, and I promised the class I'd provide a list of resources--things I mentioned throughout the day and resources supplemental to the class. So, here they are. For those of you who attended, thanks for your participation, and good luck with the remaining sessions.

Articles and books
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
“The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
“Employers Cite Communication Skills, Honesty/Integrity as Key for Job Candidates,” National Association of Colleges and Employers
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath
Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit, by Laura Penny

Blogs (Misc.)
The Daily Dose (Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce/Nicole Wilkins)
Downtown Fort Wayne Baseball (Brian Spaulding)
The Good City (Jon Swerens)
Good URL Bad URL
“The Newbie Guide to Blogging” from Lifehack.org
Seth Godin's Blog
SoundBite Back

Employment Communication
“36 Beautiful Resume Designs That Work” by JobMob
VisualCV.com

Instant Messaging
Google Talk
Meebo
Yahoo Instant Messenger

Listening
“8 Ways to Avoid Conversational Narcissism” by Hello, My Name is Blog

Online Classes--FREE
Communicating Across Cultures from MIT OpenCourseWare
English Grammar in Context from LearningSpace
First Year Chinese from Utah State University
Spanish 1 from MIT OpenCourseWare
Spanish: Espacios públicos from LearningSpace

Presenting and PowerPoint
“70+ PowerPoint and Presentation Resources and Great Examples” by meryl.net
Create Your Communications Experience
“Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs” by Carmine Gallo
“How NOT To Use Powerpoint” by Comedian Don McMillan
“Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it)” by Seth Godin
Six Minutes: Public Speaking and Presentations Skills
Toastmasters

Productivity
“The World's Most Organized Man” by Joe Kita

Reference
Definr.com
OneLook Dictionary Search
Visuwords
Wikimapia
Wikipedia

Social Networks
Smaller Indiana
Facebook
LinkedIn
Ning

Tools
ACPL card
Bubbl.us
Dragon Naturally Speaking
Flickr
Google Reader
Google Pages
Jott
PDF Hammer
PDF Online
YouTube

Writing
Daily Writing Tips
Grammar Girl
Journal Gazette Letters to the Editor
The Lonely Writer (e-book) by Geoffrey Hineman
News-Sentinel Letters to the Editor
Synonym.com
Thank-You-Note-Samples.com
“Why Writing Like a College Student Will Kill You Online” by Copyblogger

Misc.
“Did You Know 2.0” from Shift Happens

Presentation Zen author gives your PowerPoint slides a makeover

Most PowerPoint slides look something like this:

But with a little help from Presentation Zen author Garr Reynolds, you can learn how to make them look more like this:

Reynolds' "before and after" slides, along with sample slides from his book, will inspire you to get the most out of PowerPoint. Watch the presentation below to transform yourself into a PowerPoint Zen master.

| View | Upload your own

Hat tip: Six Minutes

SBB's Next Book of the Month

Later this month, SBB will review The End of Marketing as We Know It by Sergio Zyman, the former CMO at Coca-Cola. I'm reading this one at the suggestion of Kyle Lacy of Got Brandswag?, with whom I connected through Smaller Indiana. Thanks for the recommendation, Kyle, and thanks to the reader who suggested SBB giving advance notice of upcoming books of the month. And if you have any books you'd suggest that I put on my reading list, send me an e-mail or leave a comment here.

Final thoughts on The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR

This is the last of three posts on the SBB Book of the Month, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR (you may want to read post 1 and post 2 if you haven’t already). A few more places where I believe the Rieses get it wrong:

• The Rieses argue that the prevalence of “alternative” forms of advertising—their examples include blimps, stadium naming rights, and point of purchase displays—demonstrate that advertising is less effective than ever before. The problem here isn’t that this premise is wrong—they’re 100% correct when they say there’s more advertising clutter out there than ever before. But PR has exactly the same problem. That’s why you’re see PR agencies using more promotional stunts—some very effective—to get the audience’s attention, instead of just relying on earned media. We have more stuff competing for our attention these days, and that’s true whether you’re talking about a full-page newspaper ad or the full-page news story running next to it.

• The most egregious head-to-head comparison the Rieses make is between Coca-Cola and Microsoft. Here’s the crux of the argument: the Coca-Cola brand, launched in 1886, was built on advertising; the Microsoft brand, launched in 1975, was not built on advertising; therefore, advertising must be in decline. Again, I don’t disagree that the rules of the advertising game have changed dramatically, but this example is beyond oversimplified. The reason why Microsoft didn’t need a large advertising budget to build its brand is that they had very little competition. If you had a near monopoly, how much would you spend to advertise your product?

• In a book full of flaws, the biggest one may be the Rieses use an ad from Long Island’s Adelphi University to demonstrate why advertising doesn’t work. The headline: “Harvard. The Adelphi of Massachusetts.” This ad’s failure has nothing to do with advertising itself and everything to do with a horrible ad concept. If you’re an unknown, you don’t take on the brand leader by claiming you can beat them at their greatest strength (especially when you probably can't beat them at their greatest strength). This goes beyond David vs. Goliath: this is David dropping his slingshot and challenging Goliath to a wrestling match. With one hand tied behind his back. After insulting Goliath’s mother. Sure, bad ads won’t help you build your brand. But bad examples like this don’t help the Rieses build a case for PR's supremacy.

Overall, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR provides some good case studies in PR done well and advertising done poorly. But in focusing only on those extremes, the book ignores the true problem that today’s marketers face: both advertising and PR face serious challenges in today’s cluttered, chaotic communications environment, and marketers need to use every tool available to them. Sometimes that’s PR. Sometimes its advertising. And sometimes its neither. But don’t put away that slingshot just yet.

More on The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post about the SBB Book of the Month, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR. Here are a couple of places where I believe the book falls short.

The Rieses contend that today, PR is more powerful than advertising because advertising lacks credibility. And while it’s absolutely true that people today are skeptical of advertising, it’s due in large part to their skepitism about everything, including the earned media coverage that the Rieses proclaim as a marketing smoking gun. One of their supporting arguments is that advertising people rank just above car salesman when it comes to crediblity. But they failed to look at those same survey respondents' feeling about public relations practicioners and media professionals. I might be wrong, but I’d be willing to bet that neither group would rank much higher than those in advertising—and certainly not as high as the nurses and doctors against whom the Rieses use as a benchmark. Both advertising and PR have a credibility problem, and we need to ask ourselves what if anything we can do about it instead of kidding ourselves that one is better than another.

One thing the book does well is reminding readers that advertising should lead to increased sales instead of just hard-to-quantify “awareness.” They support this argument with several examples of campaigns that had no effect, or a negative effect, on the bottom line. Almost without exception, however, the examples they use feature dinosaur brands that have serious product problems or that have experienced major changes in their competitive environment. Sure, you could make an argument that AT&T’s advertising did nothing to help sell its phone service. But what the dozens of competitors who entered the marketplace leaner and more agile than AT&T? And it’s probably true that Chevrolet’s ads have done little to move cars off dealers' lots. But Toyota runs ads, too, and it seems to be doing pretty well nevertheless.

Perhaps the worst example that they use, however, is one intended to show how a brand can succeed even with ineffective advertising. The brand they chose is Target. Here’s an excerpt:

As with many marketing programs today, there’s a disconnect between the advertising and the consumer perception. Target’s advertising focuses on visual symbolism using the "target" logotype, while the targets of Target’s advertising, its customers, talk about wide aisles, neat displays, and hip merchandise. No one ever says "I go there because they have this neat trademark.”

I’m sorry, but this argument is just stupid. Sure, Target's advertising features its logo—but so does nearly everyone in the history of branding and advertising. The message of Target’s ads is that they offer accessible, inexpensive high design, and they are successful because—guess what?—they really do offer accessible, inexpensive high design. Target’s advertising is integral to its success as a brand because it reinforces its differentiated position. You would think Al Ries, one of the men who helped define positioning, would understand that.

Obviously, I have some strong opinions on The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR. I’ll post some final thoughts tomorrow, and after you read those I’d encourage you to give your opinion in the comments.

Book of the Month: The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR

Just as Time occasionally selects a Man of the Year due to his impact on society more than his contributions to society (Adolph Hitler, 1938; Joseph Stalin, 1939; You, 2006), SBB will occasionally offer up a Book of the Month that is more influential than it is exceptional. Our choice for January, 2008--The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR by father and daughter team Al and Laura Ries--is such a book.

Now, given the book’s title, it could be that I’m biased because I work in advertising. But here’s the catch: I also work in PR, so I just as easily could be in the choir to whom the Rieses are preaching. As a result, I ended up looking at the book pretty objectively and without much in the way of preconceptions. As I result, I found several flaws in the authors' logic, an oversimplification of several important issues, and somewhat of an ignorance of the true shift that both disciplines are experiencing. What we’re really seeing today is the fall of bad advertising and PR, and the rise of good advertising and PR. Your audiences won’t let you waste their time, whether you’re doing so in an ad, a news story, or anywhere else. The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR, however, ignores this reality and instead draws only from the best of PR and the worst of advertising. It’s kind of like saying that beef is better than chicken because filet mignon is better than the wings at KFC.

The Rieses seem to have come up with a thesis first and then found evidence to support it, while also ignoring anything that contradicted it. The unfortunate thing is that they could have written a more balanced argument and ended up sounding much more credible instead of looking like they’re out of touch and ill informed.

If you’re looking for a PR how-to manual, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR offers some great suggestions. However, much of what the book says about advertising is either shortsighted or just plain wrong. Tomorrow and Wednesday, I’ll post a few examples of where I think the Rieses miss the mark, along with a discussion of some important issues that affect those who work in advertising , PR, or both. If you've read it and would like to comment, I'd encourage you to do so after you've read all three posts about the book.

Another free e-book from Seth Godin

SBB can't say enough good things about Seth Godin, and here's just the latest reason: his new e-book about web site traffic. If you like what you read here or in Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it), be sure to check out his blog.

If you feel guilty about getting all this great Godin stuff for free, buy his new book, Meatball Sundae. If it's anything like the other stuff he's written, it will be money well spent.

Book of the Month: Buzzmarketing

SBB's first book of the month is Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff, by Mark Hughes. Mark was one of the guys who convinced the town of Halfway, Orgeon to change its name to Half.com, Oregon. But my favorite idea from Buzzmarketing is one that he didn't sell: a thought-bubble-shaped blimp that would have floated over Mount Rushmore.