Climb Aboard the Clue Train

Cover shot of "The Cluetrain Manifesto"
"The Cluetrain Manifesto" by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine and Doc Searls and David Weinberger is the seminal handbook on social marketing on the web. It's funny, irreverent and right on the money when it comes to telling the truth about customers and potential customers already on the web talking about you and your products. The bottom line: "Markets are conversations, talk is cheap, silence is fatal."

It's also very prescient. It was written in 1999, but could very well be a contemporary work to "Groundswell" the groundbreaking social media book by Li and Bernoff (another book I highly recommend reading). Some of the references are obviously dated, but the main points are still relevant today.

I recommend giving it a read. It's easy to get through; written very conversationally. You can read it online at http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html or you can purchase a print copy on Amazon.

Disclaimer - The links to the books' Amazon pages are affiliate links.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook" by Gary Vaynerchuck

Image
I've been following Gary Vaynerchuck online for several years now, but I hadn't yet read any of his books. It wasn't until I heard an interview with him by Chris Hogan on the EntreLeadership podcast about his newest book that I decided to give him a read. I'm glad I did.

The first part of Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook covers some basics of getting online and telling your story in a compelling way. The key, according to Vaynerchuck, is not to shout your "right hooks," or calls to action, over and over. Rather, he describes looking at the art of adding value to your customers over and over again without asking for anything. He compares this "jabbing" to the strategy boxers use in order to get their opponents to drop their guards. When the time is right, they come in with the right hook and, hopefully, knock them out. You, as a marketing storyteller, need to time your jabs (informational value adds) and your right hooks (calls to action for purchases or w…
Read more

Working To Update Automotive Schema Definitions

Image
Since a lot of the work I do revolves around the auto industry, one of my goals is to help extend definitions to automotive Schema.org tagging. The current Schema tagging definitions are great, but there are certainly still opportunities to make them better. As I mentioned in my previous post, leveraging structured data tagging is going to be critical to future success in Organic Search.

The way to do this is to join the Automotive Ontology Group on W3C.org.

If you are involved in website optimization for the auto industry, please consider joining in this effort. Head on over to the Automotive Ontology Group website and sign up. You have to first create an account on W3C.org if you don't already have one.



Read more
Image
I'm very happy to announce that I will be presenting at the Pubcon Pro digital marketing conference in Las Vegas October 7-10, 2019.

I don't yet know what topics my presentations during the main conference will be. I do know that I will be in the Local Search Pubcon Masters Group training session with Joe Laratro on Monday, the day before the main conference begins.

I'll post an update as I get more information.
Read more