It doesn’t really disappoint but it’s not exactly inspiring either. In a nutshell, Godin declares Old Marketing (meatballs) is dead, New Marketing is brilliant (ice cream) but a traditional organisation can’t just employ New Marketing for the sake of it and expect massive results (a meatball sundae). Old Marketing, as you would expect is TV advertising, paying for shelf space, newspaper estate and so on. New Marketing isn’t just blogging and social media, though they are mentioned a lot, it can be the entire business model of the company itself, such as CafePress allowing thousands of people to open their own “stores” selling custom printed shirts and products which CafePress then produce and distribute.

Seth keeps the metaphors and frustratingly short case studies coming at an almost blisteringly fast point, regurgitating points made only a couple of pages ago. In parts it feels very limited; fluffy feel good stories about new businesses offer no actual analysis or statistics and sometimes you question whether the businesses mentioned are actually making profits despite employing this lovely New Marketing. Seth also shies away from actually telling you what or how to do New Marketing and so this is less of a manual and more of a guide to change your mindset about marketing. This it does do well.

Some of the points he make might seem common sense to A-Level Business students but it has to be said that there are many insights and case studies that force you to take a breather and really think about marketing from every perspective; as a consumer making a brand choice, as a current employee trying to achieve results and imagining what you would change if you worked for a big FTSE 100 company.
Overall it’s not a bad book. It won’t tell you what to do but it might change the way you do it. Click here to buy from Amazon.

My kettle is broken… no more tea….. what will I do without tea?!

I woke up this morning and through perserverance, managed to make a half-decent brew by boiling water in a pan and, as usual, logged onto the net and came across the following two replies on Twitter by a company called Stylish Goods:

@philhancox If you like any of our kettles, we can get them sent to you in super-fast time.

@philhancox See if you like any of the kettles here:- http://is.gd/tOYw and you can have a 5% discount as a twitter user.

What an example of wonderful Twittermarketing! First of all, they seem personal and not just automated replies to the keyword “kettle”. They recognised my urgency my stating kettles have a fast delivery time. Score 3 points here; 1 for recognising my Tweet in their marketing message, 2 for triggering the thought process in my mind to view their website for kettles and finally for telling me about their delivery times, all in less than 140 characters.

The second Tweet just seals the deal for me, a nice link and a 5% discount if I decide to buy. Suddenly, this company isn’t just auto-replying any more, they’re helping me out and making me valued at the same time. Unfortunately for Stylish Goods, I’m in a student crib and the maintenance form has been sent off, meaning I should get a new kettle soon. However, I will be moving out soon and I’m so impressed that I will use them to buy a kettle for my new flat.

But whilst the Twitter messages got me involved and triggered my internal purchasing decisions, the website, sadly, turned me off a bit. Clicking upon the link given took me to a page where, above the fold, all I could see was a digital scale and half a hand blender. Where are the stylish kettles? I had to scroll down to see them which in usability (and conversion) fields is a big no-no. It would have been better to send me to the search results for kettle which does just show the kettles but unfortunately neither they nor I can link to because it doesn’t generate a unique URL.

I could mention a lot more about the site that could be improved, but I may save that for another time as I will be doing in-depth website reviews on this blog in the future. I just wanted to highlight Stylish Goods as they brightened up my morning with laser-targeted but effective and friendly marketing to a guy who is skeptical to such tactics. Congratulations guys, now improve your site to really capture those conversions.

This isn’t an advert, but it is a happy coincidence that this incident occured as only last night I was chatting to @hairycornflakes about his new tool, which is in beta release at tweetdock.com. It allows you to target Twitter users based on keywords and even geographical location and send them replies automatically (although you can check the messages first to ensure they will appreciate the message and personalise it for maximum effect). You can use it for more than one Twitter account which means if you have multiple websites, this could turn into one hell of an effective marketing tool and I look forward to using it myself. I’ll blog about the results in the future, but for now, take a peek and see if it could do anything for you.