Fruitful

All Marketers are Liars

I'm the last stop on the book tour with Seth Godin. We're talking about his new book, All Marketers are Liars. As he states in the book, marketers aren't really liars... they're just really good at telling stories that customers want to believe. Please visit each post and ask questions!

Question 1: Telling Stories
Question 2: Changing Worldviews
Question 3: More different
Question 4: Lies and Damn Lies

To catch up on previous discussions with Seth, please visit the other stops on the tour:
May 23rd - Brand Autopsy
May 24th - Hello_World
May 25th - Church of the Customer (podcast interview)
May 26th - metacool

Lies and damn lies

Last question for Seth:

So I'm the last stop of the tour... is there a question that hasn't been asked yet that you wish had been asked?

Seth replies...

I don't know how to make it clear to US citizens that every successful politician is a big-time liar, and that we, as citizens, need to get over our desire to romanticize or demonize every story that comes along. We're killing people, destroying things and making more decisions than ever before that are nothing but irrational reactions to pre-sold stories. It's one thing to come up with a clever way to market Vosges chocolates. It's quite another, I think, to effectively tell stories that hurt people.

More different

Continuing our discussion (here and here) with Seth Godin on his new book, All Marketers are Liars...

Seth, you talk about how Ford makes Jaguar, Volvo and Range Rover, and they even share parts with cars branded with the Ford name. But most people believe (or make themselves believe) the story that they are exotic cars. Car brands are usually brilliant at aligning with a customer lifestyle or worldview. So what do you think about the new GM badge that will go on the sidepanel of everything from Cadillacs, Saabs and Hummers to Chevys and Pontiacs? Seems like they're taking away the story for high-end buyers.

Seth replies...

GM should have a big DON'T sign on everything they do as a message for the rest of us. What a ridiculous idea (I hadn't heard it before).

I got a very, very angry note the other day because someone read in the  description of my book that the VW Touareg is made on the same assembly line as the Porsche Cayenne. People get upset when you tell them that they are believing a lie. But hey, someone has to do it.

If I ran GM, I'd figure out how to make the cars MORE different. Why doesn't the Saab have Swedish words on the non-essential controls? Why doesn't the Cadillac come with a better version of Onstar? Dollar for dollar, consumers spend more money on ridiculous stories for cars than anything else we buy. GM needs to learn before it's too late that they are NOT in the assembly line business. They are in the business of telling stories.

Changing Worldviews

Next question for Seth:
In the same post I mentioned earlier, I commented that the RIAA as a good example of why *not* to focus on changing customer behavior. But the RIAA is having to deal with a changing customer worldview that does not include them, and they're fighting for relevance. In your book, you talk about aligning with your customers' worldviews... but what happens in mature industries (like the RIAA, or the traditional phone industry threatened by Skype) where changing worldviews -- stories that customers want to believe -- threaten these companies' very existence? As one person commented, "being hated is better than being dead." But surely there's another option here.

Seth replies...

Well, I'm not sure it's better than being dead! Over time, worldviews change. Sometimes they change in response to consistent and diligent work by the marketer (I think, for example, that Starbucks has thrived as the worldview about what to expect from a cup of coffee has changed) and sometimes they change DESPITE that work.

In the case of the RIAA, they made a huge mistake in the wake of Napster's initial success. They needed to see, in that moment, that the people who were most likely to believe the story of "music is free" were EXACTLY the people who would make up their next generation of music buyers.

They tried to counter with a story that was patently untrue. It was a story about how the artists would suffer. The problem is that this is inauthentic. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't spread.

They could have told a different story. The story of Rhapsody or the new Napster. A story of you get what you pay for and a story of all you can eat. It would have meant changing their business model, but on their terms, not on the terms forced on them.

Most of the time, when you see an industry crash and burn, it's because they were arrogant and unyielding in the face of a competitive threat. That just encourages the other side and makes their story easier to tell.

Telling Stories

Welcome to the book tour for All Marketers Are Liars, with Seth Godin!

First question: I recently commented on an article that viewed the primary objective of marketing as "changing customer behavior." I think you would say (paraphrased) that the real objective of marketing is to tell a remarkable story. Seth, can you  comment on the difference here?

Seth replies...

I agree with your take... that changing consumer behavior is an end  product, but not something that you can profitably focus on (you wrote:  "You can say, 'I want to be loved.' But being loved comes naturally as a  result of being loveable, or being loving. Wishing will not get you where you want to go... but taking action and initiating a cause will  generate the desired effect.")

Here's how far I take it in my book: I believe that almost all  marketers do not have enough time or enough money to get people to  change their minds. In order to get someone to change her mind, you've  got to get her to admit that she's wrong. And people hate to admit that they're wrong. What we're seeing instead is a two step process:

1. tell stories that match beliefs that people already have. If I believe that politicians are crooks, then telling me a story about a politician being a crook is a pretty idea to sell.
2. make those stories retellable. In other words, people who believe a story are likely to tell their friends. THEY have the leverage and the time to change minds (sometimes). Not you.

So, take for example UFO abduction. There are a bunch of people pre-disposed to believe conspiracy theories, government cover-ups, deux ex machina explanations, etc. Those folks are likely to believe the UFO abduction story. The next step is that, wide-eyed, they tell their friends about what happened. They go for regression hypnosis to prove it to their friends. Slowly, the word spreads. Yes, this is a ridiculous example, but, when you think about it, so is getting people to spend more than the price of gasoline on bottled water...

Origin of Brands, Part 3

Terrific discussion on the previous post about various branding strategies of McDonald's versus In-N-Out. Then Yvonne changed the subject and I wanted to post her comment here for further discussion. She says:

Let's talk about Amazon.com, Yahoo! and Google and how they've become branded in such a short time. Can you guestimate how far their brand reaches and how long they will continue to dominate the market in their area? Last year, Google was the #1 recognized brand worldwide...so my research showed... above Coke and McDonald's. I'm a new millennium business; I'd like more information on how to brand using the tools available to me today...and the Internet is a big one. Especially, blogging. Can someone speak to that issue, please?

On the subject of Google, Al responded:

Yahoo! was the first Internet search engine, but they lost their leadership to Google by branching out into many different categories (a mistake that Google is currently making.)

Hmm... is Google making a mistake in branching out? Or thinking about the question another way, are they really branching out? I don't think so. Every good brand is the clear answer to a question in a customer's mind. Google built its brand by answering the question, How can I find information online? Now with its searchable gmail and searchable desktop products, Google is now positioned to answer the question, How can I find information? They've done a great job extending the brand by broadening, not changing, the problem/solution equation.

My 2 cents... Al or Laura, do you have a comment for this?

Origin of Brands tour, continued

Continuing our conversation with Laura Ries on her new book, Origin of Brands:

Jennifer asks: You make the point that a brand is designed to fill a hole in the mind, and that brands cannot be successfully transferred to other products or categories. Yet I believe that good brands often grow on 2 different trees or branches; one is defined by the category and the other by the target audience or lifestyle. You say that McDonald's is defined by the category (hamburgers), yet it is also defined by a target audience (restaurant for kids). If you can associate a brand with multiple branches, you stand a good chance of evolving the brand and successfully expanding it to fit other products. McDonald's, for example, can expand from hamburgers effectively IF (and only if) their new offerings fit on the "restaurant for kids" branch. Nike is not confined by the "athletic shoe" branch as it has also defined itself on an aspirational 'athlete' branch, so it has been successful in launching other products under the Nike brand (we'll see about the golf clubs). You say in the book that the Cayenne is the first step in the downfall of Porsche, yet I see it as a successful venture because the Cayenne is designed for the same upscale performance-minded buyer; it doesn't fit on the 'sports car' branch, but it does fit on the corollary high-performance lifestyle branch. The VW Phaeton failed because it didn't fit on the VW 'for the people' branch; the VW Touareg succeeded because it did (despite the spelling of the name). IBM successfully extended its brand from computers to tech services by leveraging its position on the "trusted" technology branch. I'd enjoy your comments and responses on this subject.

Laura responds: There are two issues involved here:

(1) Would the companies you mentioned have been even more successful if they didn’t try to associate the brand with multiple branches?

(2) Were the competitors to these companies asleep at the switch which allowed these companies to line extend the brands?

Take one example. Both McDonald’s and In-N-Out Burger started in California. Both were originally focused on hamburgers, fries and drinks. Nothing else.

Today the average McDonald’s does slightly more than $1.5 million in annual sales while the average In-N-Out Burger unit does $1.9 million.

Which brand has the better strategy? We say In-N-Out Burger does because they still sell only hamburgers, fries and drinks and out-sell McDonald’s.

Both companies made mistakes. McDonald’s by expanding their menu. And In-N-Out Burger by not expanding their geography.

Jennifer asks: There’s a recent article in Reveries Cool News about McDonalds turning around their business through line extensions. I looked up their stock trend and, in fact, it’s more than doubled in the last two years as they’ve moved away from both burgers AND kids. I'd enjoy your thoughts on how that’s happened… because I agree with you; I have no idea what McD’s stands for anymore.

Laura responds: McDonald’s sales are up, but so is Burger King’s. The question is why. My feeling is that McDonald’s has greatly improved operations and that the line extensions have had little to do with its recent successes.

I think you’ll also find that the improvements are likely to be temporary in nature.

Questions & comments welcome!

Origin of Brands tour

Welcome to Day 7 of the Origin of Brands book tour! We've been talking with Laura Ries about this book that she co-authored with her father, Al Ries. On the first stop of the tour at 800-CEO-READ, Laura outlines the premise of the book:

Over the years, one of our key branding concepts has been “Create a new category you can be first in.” For example, Red Bull was the first energy drink. Starbucks, the first high-end coffee shop. BlackBerry, the first wireless email.

For at least a dozen years, however, the business media have been filled with stories about “convergence.” Categories would be coming together. Television with computers, for example. Companies, especially in the high-tech industries were spending billions of dollars trying to accomplish this with very little success.

In studying history, we found that the opposite was true. Categories did not converge; they diverged. The mainframe computer, for example did not converge with any other category. It diverged, creating endless opportunities to build new brands. Apple, Dell, Compaq, Microsoft, Intel, etc.

Jennifer asks: Although John Porcaro already asked questions about Microsoft during his stop on the book tour, I do have a related question: You say that you see Microsoft becoming the world's most valuable brand, and yet they are violating every principle of divergence. By fighting the divergence trend and keeping a death grip on a converged bundle of products, they are trying to win a many-front battle with a single overstretched brand. I wrote a blog post on this (here and here) and would love your comments.

Laura says: Not only did I find your blog astute and very interesting, I also agree with everything you said.

In general, any company that has 95 percent of a market should be asking themselves, did we accomplish this because our product is better or did we accomplish this because of the advantages conferred to a monopoly.

My feeling is that much of Microsoft’s success is due to their monopoly position. Everybody uses Windows because everybody uses Windows.

I think Microsoft would be better off if they introduced a second brand of operating system that would be the opposite of Windows. In other words, a much simpler system for users who find the current Microsoft products far too complicated.

Jennifer asks: What was your rationale for them becoming the world’s most valuable brand, despite their violation of divergence principles? Just monopoly status?

Laura responds: Microsoft is two companies. One is a very powerful personal computer software company, a company built on divergence, a company that has the lion’s share of the market.

(Nothing in marketing works better than dominating a market.)

The other Microsoft is built on convergence. The other Microsoft, by the way, loses money.

Microsoft would be a stronger, more powerful, more profitable company if it concentrated its resources on personal computer software. As a start, they should introduce a second brand of personal computer software. Cheaper, simpler, easier to use.

What do you think? Comments and questions for Laura are welcome!

Origin of Brands book tour

I'm excited to be one of the stops on the Origin of Brands book tour with Al and Laura Ries. Here's the schedule (I'm late posting it due to recent out-of-town travels, but please visit the first few blogs for some good stuff!)

* October 11th - 800-CEO-READ
* October 12th - John Porcaro
* October 13th- David Paull - Dial.Log
* October 14th - BusinessPundit
* October 15th - CrossRoads Dispatches
* October 18th - Learned on Women
* October 19th - What's Your Brand Mantra
* October 20th - WonderBranding

Evangelism 101

Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell at Church of the Customer have created a great little e-book called Testify! How Remarkable Organizations are Creating Customer Evangelists. It's a compilation of 18 case studies from organizations that have mastered the art of word-of-mouth marketing. Check it out!

Free Prize: More on Quality

In the comments section of my first post on Good Enough, Seth says:

What drives irrational humans to make choices are the Free Prizes. We assemble a list of all the options that are "good enough" and then we choose the one we choose for reasons that have little or nothing to do with our needs. Instead, we choose based on our wants.

SO

That means your offering must be "good enough" to make the list. And over time, that bar keeps getting raised. Hyundai, for example, just beat Toyota in the JD Power quality ratings. This means that virtually all cars are now excellent and virtually all cars are good enough. So we're going to pick a car for a reason that has nothing whatever to do with its ability to safely and reliably go from place A to place B.

I think this brings up a good branding issue. Seth, you're right; no one is going to buy a car based on how well it gets them from point A to point B. But if, for example, Volvo is focusing its brand strategy and message on Reliability, then Volvo darn well better be the most reliable car on the market. And for consumers looking for reliability, Volvo would then the most obvious choice. The phone company client I mentioned earlier was 'good enough' at providing phone service, but not nearly as good as the incumbent provider. But we found that small business owners really wanted a phone company that delivered on promises. So now they're working to be the best at customer service and delivering on promises, not to be the best phone provider overall.

So I'd second your comment that products need to be good enough in general, but I'd add that they must be the best at the attribute around which their brand is built. And this core attribute is likely a good 'edge' to begin brainstorming on Free Prizes.

Free Prize: Guts

Second question for Seth on our Business Blog Book Tour:

Q: You touch on a very important issue related to bringing ideas to fruition, and that’s a sense of confidence to push through a very edgy new idea. I ran into this a few months ago with a telecom client. Customers were frustrated with purchasing a line for $29.99, yet getting their first bill and finding that – with all the fees and surcharges – that line really costs about $45. I proposed that my client do something truly novel in the industry: tell the customer exactly what they’d pay for a line, and educate them on fees and surcharges. Sort of a ‘full disclosure’ way of doing business and building trust that was a complete break from how the industry traditionally operates. Of course, my client shot the idea down immediately: we can’t possibly do that, we get a lot of our revenue from fees and surcharges, our line cost would appear to be higher than our competitors, etc etc. And I wasn’t completely confident enough in the idea to champion it; it was pretty radical, and what if it backfired? My reputation was on the line. Turns out that the FCC is now considering a mandate for full disclosure of fees and surcharges. My client – along with everyone else – will reluctantly be forced to do it, yet if they had done it proactively they would have been viewed as a trustworthy champion of the customer.

Long story short, your book talks about how to sell the idea internally to give people the impression that it’s going to work… but what happens if it doesn’t? If you yourself don’t believe deep down that it’s absolutely going to work, there’s no way you can convince others. Most people know that for every idea that works, there are many more that turn out to be complete flops. So I’m thinking that the root cause of the infrequency of ‘free prize’ innovations isn’t because the idea can’t be sold, it’s more to do with the champion’s fear of failure. Can you expand on this issue and how to deal with it?

A: Great question! Of course you can’t be sure that it’s going to work. But can you be sure that the boring status quo is going to work? The fact is that all the major products and brands and services are under threat today, threat from Walmart, threat from being boring, threats from competition. We don’t spend a lot of time in a cold sweat about all that risk, but it’s real and it’s here and it’s proven.

So, what should you do? You should realize that unless you can stand up and say, “I’ll take responsibility” it’s not going to happen, so don’t even try unless you’re willing to do that.

In the case you gave, I think you could ameliorate your risk by doing it as a test, in a small market. What’s the worst that could have happened?

I would have gone even farther and gone all the way PAST the edge. I would have said it costs $49, then sent them the first month’s bill for $45 with a post-it note that says, “We were wrong. After all taxes, it’s only $45. Sorry, but it’s $4 less than we said it was.” Going to the edges gets talked about.

So going to the edge is putting the phrase "no guts, no glory" to the test!

OK, readers... who has a great example of a gutsy, edgy move that paid off?

Free Prize: Good Enough?

Good morning! Today I'm hosting Seth Godin on his book tour for Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea. We're on day 5 of the book tour, so there have already been a ton of great Q&A with Seth. Here's the first question that popped out at me when I was reading the book...

Q. Seth, you say about quality: “Of course your product has to be good enough… but being very good is bad. Being very good is invisible.” But that seems to conflict with the observations in “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. All the companies in his book demonstrated average cumulative stock returns 6.9 times the general market in the fifteen years following their transition from good to great. One of the three core tenets these companies followed is “What can you be the best in the world at?” After comparing great companies versus good companies, Jim concludes that “good is the enemy of great” and that being “good enough” will prevent you from realizing the financial success of great companies. Can you share your thoughts on this?

A. We’re in violent agreement on this. If you’re not the Mona Lisa, not the best in the world, not the one worth paying extra for, of course you’re not great and you don’t win.

My point about “product has to be good enough” puts the emphasis on the word “product.” Because the basic item—the toothpaste, the candy, the copywriting services—it’s all the same. The commodity part has be good enough, but the free prize has to be great. The Free Prize is the packaging or the way you answer the phone or the pricing or the delivery or the bonus of frequent flyer miles. The Free Prize is a gimmick until it turns into the thing that people actually talk about.

So, yes, your commodity, your product, the thing people THINK they’re buying… that has to be good enough. But your Free Prize has to be great.

Free Prize Week

We're in the middle of the Business Blog Book Tour where Seth Godin is promoting his new book Free Prize Inside. There's some great stuff at the first two stops, so be sure to visit!

May 3rd - A Penny For...
May 4th - Brand Autopsy
May 5th - Decent Marketing
May 6th - 800CEOREAD
May 7th - What's Your Brand Mantra?
May 10th - Ensight
May 11th - WonderBranding
May 12th - Business Evolutionist
May 13th - Branding Blog
May 14th - Thinking by Peter
May 17th - A Bold Approach

Brand Biology

Thanks to BrandAutopsy for the excerpt of Al & Laura Reis’ latest marketing book, The Origin of Brands. Looks like another book for my stack (I've been on a fiction binge, and way behind on my business book reading!). Click over to BrandAutopsy for more detail... my favorite excerpt is:

A new brand is like a new species. A new species does not evolve from an existing species. If the “lion” is a brand, you can’t create a new brand by improving the lion. No matter how much you improve the breed, a lion is still a lion.

New species are created by divergence of an existing species. Somewhere in the distant past, the ancestor of the lion (panthera) diverged and a new species was created called a “leopard.” In the same way, the panthera diverged a number of times creating the jaguar, the tiger and other species. That’s the way nature works.

That’s also the way branding works. If you want to create a powerful new brand, you should look for ways that your product or service can diverge from an existing category. In other words, the best way to build a brand is not by going after an existing category, but by creating a new category you can be first in.

Next BBBT: Seth Godin

Be sure to check out the next Business Blog Book Tour, featuring Seth Godin's new book Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea.

When? May 3rd - May 14th

Where?

May 3rd - A Penny For...
May 4th - Brand Autopsy
May 5th - Decent Marketing
May 6th - Dana's Blog
May 7th - What's Your Brand Mantra?
May 10th - Ensight
May 11th - WonderBranding
May 12th - Business Evolutionist
May 13th - Branding Blog
May 14th - Thinking by Peter

Customer Evangelist Wrap-Up

OK, that wraps up the 3/19 stop on the Business Blog Book Tour for Creating Customer Evangelists. We covered how the 6 Tenets apply to the Blogosphere, and we'd love to hear and address your comments and questions!

Next stops on the BBBT include:
March 22 - Danavan.net
March 23 - StartupSkills.com
March 24 - Small Business Blog
March 25 - A Penny For...

Creating a Cause

I'm skipping Tenet 5 (Bite-Sized Chunks) since we talked about it here... so onward to Tenet 6: Creating A Cause.

I suppose every good blog has some sort of cause or reason for being. I started my blog because there’s so much confusion about branding, and I hope that I can share my knowledge to help people become better marketers. If the cause is relevant and important enough, it will attract readers. No forms to fill out, just read and comment if you like.

Jackie and Ben say: People generally read blogs to learn. The cause can't be self-promotion... no one wants to read someone talk about themself. You have to give in order to receive. When your blog has a cause, sometimes you'll need to say some controversial things. Causes generally elicit different beliefs and points of view, which is great because people want to talk about it. If we sit in our office and rant about a subject, we immediately know that it would make a good blog post. That's what generated our article, "How to Ignore Your Best Customers, The Tivo Way." We were a bit apprehensive about posting it; our cause is to be inspiring, yet here we were, taking a company to task and saying what they were doing wrong. But we decided to post it because we thought people could learn from what companies shouldn't be doing. And we got a lot of responses, some really negative and mean, but we were trying to make a point.

Seems like this tenet is highly related to blog branding. Blogs with a central cause or theme tend to create more buzz than blogs that cover a variety of diverse topics (at least that I've seen). How is your blog positioned, or branded? What is the central theme or cause, and how does it resonate with readers?

Creating Community

Tenet 4 of Customer Evangelism is Creating Community. This is one of the benefits of blogging that I hadn’t expected. On the occasions when I’ve written a buzzworthy post (like the recent series on positioning), people come from out of the woodwork to post comments and debate amongst themselves on the subject. I love that I can become a host for a community of like-minded individuals, and our combined thinking ends up benefiting everyone.

Ben and Jackie say... The blog world is a self-organized community. We know -- or can easily find -- the bloggers on any given subject. Look at a blogroll and find the community. "The blog is the community, and the community is the blog." You're part of the community even if you're a lurker, since you can learn a lot from the other members. Sometimes we talk about the "echo in the chamber" because members of a community share similar ideas and values. Chances are, if your beliefs are divergent from the rest of the group, you won't be a member of that community. The key is to attract members, not convert them. That's the Customer Evangelism model. Using the Krispy Kreme example, not everyone loves donuts. That's ok. Just build a community of people who do love donuts. Invite them to join the echo chamber.

As another example, Todd at A Penny For... created this Business Blog Book Tour (BBBT) to form a cross-blog community of business book readers. Terrific idea! How are you building -- or contributing -- to a blog community? How have you benefited from the blog community?

Building Buzz with Blogging

Continuing our application of the 6 Tenets of Customer Evangelism to the blogosphere, we're now on Tenet #3: Building the Buzz (for a chapter summary and descriptions of the 6 Tenets, go here).

The more buzzworthy the blog content, the more links we generate. The more links, the higher the Google rankings. Higher Google rankings mean more visibility, more hits to your blog, and ultimately more links. We also build buzz by finding the mega-hubs and individual hubs for our content (Fast Company and BusinessPundit come to mind for business and marketing), posting comments and catching people's attention. If we’re buzzworthy, we’ll get public notice on their blogs. And we benefit from real-time feedback; if a hub isn’t picking up on our content, it means our content isn’t buzzworthy. Blog hubs are quite astute in identifying buzzworthy content.

Jackie and Ben respond: That's exactly right. Our blog is the most popular portion of our web site; it gets double the hits of the second most popular page (typically the home page). What everyone had hoped to create with web sites, blogs are now achieving. A blog is much easier to update frequently than a traditional web site, so it will naturally create more interest.

The most buzzworthy blogs are the ones that pose the best questions. Scoble does this very well. He'll ask general industry questions like, "What position should we take here?" He's really interactive with the people who post comments and track-backs, which increases buzz even more.

For more thoughts on building blog buzz, here's a post of mine from December that quotes Phil Wolff: "Is your post linky enough?" It's been terrific advice for me as a relatively new blogger.

So in the interest of posing some good questions and generating some buzz... What have you found most effective in building blogging buzz? What's the future for traditional web sites? Are blogs effective buzz-builders for all types of businesses?

Napsterize and Bite-Size

Napsterized knowledge is what blogging is all about. I’m giving away a lot of free intellectual capital on Brand Mantra and it's resulted in one great new client and many terrific business contacts. I’m reminded of one pretty good business blog that’s password-protected. I’d like to expand on some of his posts, but it would be a pain for readers to register before they could read the link… he’s preventing Napterization of his knowledge. My question for Ben and Jackie is, What's the difference in the blogosphere between Napsterized Knowledge and Bite-Size Chunks?

Ben and Jackie say: Bite-size chunks help customers try a product before they buy, and Krispy Kreme is a great example. Salesforce.com offered a free one-year trial before purchase, which gave them a lot of traction in the market... But in the blogging world, there isn't much difference between Napsterized Knowledge and Bite-Size Chunks. It's all intellectual capital.

I thought that the Know-How Exchange on MarketingProfs.com could be a great example of Bite-Size Chunks since consultants are addressing specific problems posed by readers. An answer is a bite-size chunk of how they would solve that particular business problem. Whereas blogs represent Napsterized knowledge -- ie. generic knowledge and opinions that require the readers to apply the learning to their individual situations. Maybe I'm splitting hairs and there really isn't a difference between the two tenets for intellectual capital: what do you think?

Customer Plus-Delta and Blogging

Customer Plus-Delta is all about listening to customers... and blogging is the ultimate connection with customers (readers). Comments, emails and and track-backs tell me how well my content is connecting with people out in the blogosphere. It’s real-time feedback.

Ben & Jackie say: That's right, at least for weblogs that do allow comments. One-way blogs don't work as a Plus-Delta tool since you can't establish and facilitate conversations. Howard Dean's use of his blog as a feedback tool was amazing. The guys who ran his campaign were always asking "What are the blogs saying?" Once they got 600 comments in 2 hours in response to a question. They actively solicited ideas and opinions.

How have you used the Plus-Delta tenet in your blogging (or blog reading)?

Blogging and Customer Evangelism

Good morning! Welcome to the 5th stop of the Business Blog Book Tour (BBBT). I had the opportunity to chat with Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell of Church of the Customer to talk about their book, Creating Customer Evangelists. After reading the book, I was struck with the parallels of blogging with each of their 6 Tenets of creating customer evangelists. So in the upcoming posts today, I’ll address each tenet with both my own observations from reading the book, and Ben and Jackie’s comments from our phone conversation (paraphrased from my fiercely scribbled notes; unfortunately I didn’t have a recorder). They’ll be visiting Brand Mantra to address any questions or comments you may have, so (as always) fire away. This group isn’t known to be shy!

Book Tour: Customer Evangelists

On March 19 I'll be the stop on the Business Blog Book Tour for Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists and the Church of the Customer weblog. I had the priviledge of hearing Jackie speak at an IABC luncheon here in Dallas a couple years ago. She's an engaging, high-energy speaker with great information to share. I look forward to evangelizing the book!