Book Review: Tuned In

Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs
Stull, Craig, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott
John Wilen & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, 2008

Tuned In provides a six step process for the reader to find opportunities which will lead to the new hot item, termed "resonator." These steps are focused on looking to the outside marketer first to find unresolved problems and understanding the personas of the buyers (not necessarily those of who will use the good or service). Finally, with a great product, the authors provide smart ways of bringing it to market.

This book is useful not only for people who work in business. The ideas can be applied to organizations in different sectors, such as non-profit, government and academic.

It does test your underlying assumptions of what "research" is. It is now not only about reading reports and learning things from books. Its about listening to your customers, and people who are not your customers. The authors even maintain a blog so you can talk to them and other readers about the ideas in the book

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in making something really cool.

Snippets International Part Deux

Sean Mcpheat provides 5 Hot Email Marketing Best Practices to readers of the Fresh Business Thinking.com's newsletter.

At first pass one would say it is most useful to someone just starting out in email marketing, with advice such as "Make sure your email isn’t spam" and "Personalise your emails", but it is a good refresher even for the seasoned professional.

Once you have that under your belt, check out Five Steps to Improve your E-mail Marketing on Practical eCommerce

Finally, Barney Beal, News Director for SearchCRM.com reports that despite the downturn in the economy, marketers are not seeing their budgets going down but moving away from advertising on print, radio and television and utilizing online marketing more and more. Read the full article >>

What does marketing mean to you?

Did you all look at the results of this poll at Online Marketing Blog?

Readers were asked "What 3 digital marketing channels & tactics will you emphasize in 2009?"

Email marketing is fifth on the list after Blogging, Microblogging (Twitter), Search engine optimization, and Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn)! Should I be scared?

If you look at the rankings one way, you might think that marketers are trying to do more with less money. Many of them deal with networks that don't require much investment in money but a certain amount of time.

Let's take some of the theories presented in "Tuned In" (still reading it, so review is forth coming) and evaluate these choices based on whether the marketer is listening to the market or talking at it.

You will see that top five tactics (including email marketing) are about talking. Number six, "Social media monitoring & outreach" is about eliciting feedback.

What does marketing mean to you? Getting the message out about your product or service? Or listening to what people need? Something else entirely?

Did you notice...

It is interesting that despite showing tweets that contain their product name on their web site, Skittles and their parent company Mars did not come out of the gate with an account for twitter so they could interact with their customers. Whether that was planned or not, it brought that candy treat to everyone's mind yesterday.



As Oscar Wilde said, whom I like to quote frequently, "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."



In other news, you may have seen something like this before, but the banner ad in my daily Dilbert email changes every time I open it up.











They are all for the same organization, but I wonder how this functionality could be leveraged to provide fresh content for other sorts of email campaigns. Your thoughts?