Product Description

“What’s the one thing companies care about? Conversion. Getting potential customers to convert into real, actual, customers. But how do you do that in a world of Facebook, Google, YouTube, blogs, and Flickr? Mike Moran shows you how—by trying lots of little things, studying the results, learning quickly from your failures, and doing it all over again. He gives you a framework for getting over your fears of talking with your customers without a committee to protect your behind. Great book.”

–Robert Scoble
Video blogger of the Scoble Show and Co-author of the top-selling corporate blogging book, Naked Conversations

Start Fast, Fix Fast, and Fix Again: Marketing for Breakthrough Results

For decades, marketers have been taught to carefully plan ahead because “you must get it right–it’s too expensive to change.” But, in the age of the Web, you can know in hours whether your strategy’s working. Today, winners don’t get it right the first time: they start fast, change fast, and relentlessly optimize their way to success. They do it wrong quickly…then fix it, just as quickly!

In this book, Internet marketing pioneer Mike Moran shows you how to do that–step-by-step and in detail. Drawing on his experience building ibm.com into one of the world’s most successful sites, Moran shows how to quickly transition from “plan then execute” to a non-stop cycle of refinement.

You’ll master specific techniques for making the Web’s “two-way marketing conversation” work successfully, productively, and profitably. Next, Moran shows how to choose the right new marketing tools, craft them into an integrated strategy, and execute it…achieving unprecedented efficiency, accountability, speed, and results.

• The indispensable online marketing guide for every CMO, brand marketer, direct marketer, online marketing specialist, strategist, and entrepreneur
• Learn more from your customers–and learn it faster
• Systematically measure online marketing results–and improve them
• Create deeper relationships with your customers on the Web
• Leverage podcasting, social networks, wikis, virtual worlds, search, viral marketing, blogs, and other new tools
• Build a lean, mean conversion machine
• Preview new innovations you’ll be implementing next year and the year after
• Overcome the organizational, political, and personal obstacles that keep marketers doing things the “old-fashioned” way

Foreward xv

Preface xvii

Acknowledgements xxiii

About the Author xxvii

Part 1: That Newfangled Marketing 1

Chapter 1: They’re Doing Wonderful Things with Computers 3

Chapter 2: New Wine in Old Bottles 21

Chapter 3: Marketing Is a Conversation 55

Part 2: That Newfangled Direct Marketing 103

Chapter 4: Going Over to the Dark Side 105

Chapter 5: The New Customer Relations 149

Chapter 6: Customers Vote with Their Mice 211          

Part 3: That Newfangled You 253

Chapter 7: This Doesn’t Work for Me 255

Chapter 8: This Won’t Work Where I Work 275

Chapter 9: This Stuff Changes Too Fast 315

Glossary 335
Index 365

About the Author

Mike Moran has worked on the Web since its earliest days, in both marketing and technical roles, including eight years at ibm.com, IBM’s customer-facing Web site. In 2008, Mike retired from IBM to pursue speaking, writing, and consulting, including serving as Chief Strategist for the digital communications agency Converseon.

Mike is also the author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, and he writes regular columns on search marketing for Revenue magazine, WebProNews, and Search Engine Guide. He’s a member of the Search Engine Marketing Council of the Direct Marketing Association and a charter member of the DMA’s Interactive Marketing Advisory Board. Mike is a frequent keynote speaker on Internet marketing at events around the world, serves as a Visiting Lecturer to the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and he holds an Advanced Certificate in Market Management Practice from the Royal UK Charter Institute of Marketing.

Mike also has a broad technical background, with over 20 years experience in search technology working at IBM Research, Lotus, and other IBM software units. He led the product team that developed the first commercial linguistic search engine in 1989 and has been granted four patents in search and retrieval technology. He led the integration of ibm.com’s site search technologies as well as projects in content management, personalization, and web metrics. Mike led the adoption of search marketing at ibm.com back in 2001 and pioneered product search facilities that dramatically raised conversion rates. Mike was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2005.

Mike can be reached through his Web site (www.mikemoran.com), which is also the home of his Biznology newsletter and blog.

Review

“Corporate marketers charging into the unfamiliar waters of social media can have the same effect as crashing a cocktail party uninvited and uninformed about rules, etiquette and people–thereby alienating the very communities they’re trying to reach.

That’s why “Social Media is a Cocktail Party” is such a useful paradigm for understanding how best to understand the strategy and tactics for marketing on the social web.

Jim Tobin and Lisa Braziel have crafted a clever and insightful guide with practical examples that give meaning and direction for smart social media programs. It’s a must read for marketers and PR professionals of all sizes.” –Lee Odden, CEO of TopRankMarketing.com (from the back cover)

Review

“You have an open invite to join the social media Cocktail Party. Before you show up, you must buy this book so you’ll know how to enter the room, join the conversation, and engage your audience.”

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