jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Good Books On Blogging, PR, Social Media & Advertising

The inbox of books has gotten high enough that I need to review a few so I can see beyond my desk. Today’s episode of Social Media Explorer TV features four books well worth your time to read, depending upon your need and comfort level with the various topics. And the four books offered this time around take a nice stair step up the ladder from beginner to advanced use for internet...

What Inbound Marketing Is And Why You Should Have It

I spend zero dollars marketing my business. “Marketing” in its traditional sense includes advertising, baiting media outlets with press releases and, to paraphrase David Meerman Scott, buy, beg and borrow for leads and attention. The way people find out about my business is through two primary mechanisms: Word-of-Mouth recommendations and finding me through search engine results. Word-of-Mouth,...

How Well Do You Know Your Audience?

I worked with a major consumer product goods company once that insisted that a particular product it offered was to be marketed to men. New to the fold and not afraid to ask the obvious question, I said, “Why not women?” All the market research in the world told them women didn’t like their product. All my personal experience told me they never asked an important audience: women. Image...

Four Styles Of Marketing On Twitter

Marketing on Twitter continues to be one of the most talked about subjects in social media today. The social media purists still sing campfire songs about how you can’t do it. Dell is up to $6.5 million dollars in sales there. While I strongly believe there is no right or wrong way to use Twitter — you can find an audience for anything on any medium with a certain level of critical mass...

Community Building Tips From Spike Jones

Passionate fans willing to knock down walls to tell people how cool your brand is seems to be what everyone in marketing is looking for. My friends at Doe-Anderson helped build an ambassador program around Maker’s Mark bourbon. Sexy product. Passionate people. Fun times. The Harley Owner’s Group is similar. Sexy product. Passionate people. Fun times. But what happens when you are challenged...

One Pixel Of Separation With Twist Image’s Mitch Joel

There are people I’m a fan of and people I am friends with and then there are the rare combinations of people I’m a fan of who I’m lucky enough to be friends with. Mitch Joel is one of them. The author of the recently released Six Pixels of Separation is also the principal of Twist Image, a cutting edge digital marketing shop with offices in Montreal and Toronto. His book is phenomenal...

How To Add Surprise To Your Marketing

It seems every time someone told Andy Nulman he was nuts, he would surprise them. Not surprisingly, his first book is subtitled, “Profiting from the Power of Surprise.” The book is called Pow! Right Between the Eyes: Profiting from the Power of Surprise and discusses how surprise marketing can often lift companies, products and brands to levels of buzz and talk-worthiness that are the...

Learn Word-Of-Mouth With The Supergeniuses

When I got home Thursday, I had a package waiting. It was from Andy Sernovitz, the Word-Of-Mouth guru. Andy has invited me to speak at a one day event he’s putting on in Chicago Dec. 16 called, “Word of Mouth Supergeniuses.” You can learn more on the event website, but keep reading first. The package contained a yellow T-shirt. I unfolded it and read the front. It’s a shirt...

Where Interactive Marketing Dollars Are Going

Forrester Research has released a new report forecasting interactive marketing spend in the U.S. for the next five years. The report, authored by Shar VanBoskirk, is available in its entirety on the Forrester Research website. The report details how certain industries currently spend, and projects how they will spend, on interactive marketing. It also offers some interesting insights for businesses...

An Ad Agency Getting It Right

A stroke of good fortune recently let me to swing by the Boston offices of Mullen, one of the nation’s most successful and, frankly, interesting advertising agencies. The firm works with great brands like Panera Bread, Ask.com, Stanley, CSX Transportation and the Boston Bruins, among others. It also has developed quite a reputation as a social media savvy ad agency. To explore why, I took a...

Baked In Has Great Ideas Baked In

Advertising genius Alex Bogusky and his Crispin Porter + Bogusky colleague and creative thought leader John Windsor have a new book out called, “Baked In: Creating Products That Market Themselves.” I’ve read it and highly recommend it. The point of the book is to deliver a series of recipes to enable you to bake great marketing into your product by making great products. It’s...

Is Your Agency Making Social Media Easy?

One of the biggest challenges brand-side marketers face in dealing with social media is incorporating the necessary time to monitor and respond to conversation online. Marketers are busy people. Most only spend about 10-20 percent of their time dealing with advertising or their agency partners. One of the biggest challenges for advertising and public relations agencies in relation to social media...

Is Seth Godin Holding Brands Hostage?

Seth Godin – Image via Wikipedia Seth Godin announced Squidoo’s latest venture this week. Brands in Public is, as I understand it, an aggregation of conversations about certain brands. Godin’s team has apparently developed a nice way to aggregate and parse out relevant conversation about various brands and put them all together in one big page. That’s not all that innovative,...

Advertising Agencies And Social Media: A Culture Clash

Image by LU5H.bunny via Flickr Advertising agencies around the country are trying to figure out social media. How do we do it? How do we sell it? Do we have to? The answer is probably yes, you do have to if you want to continue to offer a full range of marketing services to your clients, and bill appropriately. Some agencies are doing a good job adjusting, hiring smart social media thinkers...

Good Communication Takes Planning

“We wanna blog!” was the cattle cry from brands and businesses in 2007. Then it was a Facebook page. Now it’s Twitter. If that was you and your social media advisor’s reaction was to go launch your blog/Facebook/Twitter, you’re probably wondering why you haven’t gotten anywhere with it yet. Part of a social media consultant’s job is to listen to the brand...