Neville Hobson (follow him on Twitter) wrote a post yesterday about ghost writing blogs. I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion that “it’s a terrible idea”. I also believe that, when it comes to disclosing the fact that a blog is being written by ‘other hands’, the very thing that makes blogging unique is rendered useless.

There is possibly nothing that underlines the difference between a press release and a blog post more than the expectation of authenticity. We know that a press release has been written by someone paid by the company to present news in a particular way. A press release is successful when its target audience can use the contents to create other content: top-down dissemination of information. A blog post, on the other hand, is more like a step forward in a relationship. A single post may elicit no responses or trigger much of anything at all. But the accumulation of posts over time presents a unique voice and allows trust to grow.

When we discuss blogging with our clients and when we create a blogging strategy for them, we emphasise the need for transparency. We tell them it’s more important to be genuine than grammatically perfect, more important to sound human than to toe the corporate line at all costs.

And yet, for many of our early clients, I ended up writing blog posts. I’ve even ghost tweeted. (The shame, the shame.)

Why? It came down to cash and confidence. We were offering services that were not widely understood (even by us) and we wanted to make them seem more inclusive. We built the blog so we thought we may as well populate it with content, too. Clients, like many people, were often nervous about presenting themselves to the web via the written word and we weren’t confident enough of the principles (and our bank balance) to offer a “you write the blog or don’t have one one” ultimatum.

Those days are in the past. The bank balance may not be a lot healthier but we know that ghosting blogs does not pay - in any way. However well crafted the writing, however spot on the subject matter, in the end the lack of genuine tone seeps through and you’re left with a series of posts that resemble a true voice in the way that semaphore conveys emotion. It’s also bloody hard gearing up to write posts about things that don’t rock your boat in any way.

I don’t ghost blog posts now.

This post was written and conceived by Graham Stewart. Honest.

In truth, except for the twitterati waiting for delivery of their new toys, the Moonfruit campaign has caused mixed reactions - to say the least - among Twitter users. For instance, musician and Tuttler par excellence Steve Lawson suggested unfollowing anyone who used the Moonfruit hashtag. He was not alone in finding the manipulation of the hashtag service/system both distasteful and a PR failure.

Another Habitat?

Possibly not quite on the same scale as Habitat’s disastrous foray into Twitter in June (explained in this excellent post on Social Media Today) but where Habitat’s campaign had sprung from ignorance and stupidity, the Moonfruit campaign was a more deliberate attempt to game the system.

The plan for the campaign must have seemed brilliant. Choosing a MacBook Pro as a prize - and 10 of them - was guaranteed to appeal to a large section of Twitter’s core users. It also ensured the campaign got widespread coverage over and above Twitter itself. Brand Republic, for instance, had an early positive report about Moonfruit on July 1st after the first winner was announced.

Low hanging…..

But what positives did Moonfruit hope to extract from gaming a trending hashtag and gaining a small but still significant percentage of Twitter traffic? It probably seemed a good idea at the time but it’s hard to see exactly where the lead generation was meant to come. And. although the campaign was dressed up in terms of a 10th birthday celebration for the company, there must have been some ROI expectation to make it worth while to cough up for 10 MacBook Pros and their delivery. Are their likely customer base watching hashtags? If I miss out on a MacBook Pro am I more likely to get them to design my next web site?

It’s obvious Moonfruit now have doubts of their own about the value of the campaign, as evidenced by its early termination. They may feel they have lost both revenue and reputation. On the plus side, if their customer base wasn’t watching the hashtags in the first place, it’s probably also unaware of the bad feeling now associated with the campaign.

A wee confession

I tweeted. I did. I used the hashtag and hoped I would win. I spammed Twitter. Only once, though. They made me do it! Think Homer Simpson and donuts: I just had the image of a MacBook Pro in my mind. MacBook Pro, though; not Moonfruit.

At just over £13 after Amazon’s usual discount, this was not a cheap book. (Just checked and the price is now down to £8.66. That will teach me for pre-ordering!) It also ‘weighs’ in at under 175 pages, with lots of white space. Finally, much of the content has appeared before on both MacLeod’s gapingvoid blog and in a document for download (an e-essay) called “How to Be Creative”. As MacLeod himself writes in the preface, this essay has been downloaded over a million times.

So, who’s buying the book? And why?

The same people who read the blog and have downloaded the essay. MacLeod has built an audience based very much on the methods he outlines in the book itself. If ever there was a recursive proof in the pudding, here’s one baked right in.

That’s not to say that MacLeod has simply cashed in on the success of his methodology and reproduced a warmed over version of old leavings. But let’s face it, however wrapped up in the digital world we might be, we still love books. And this is a nice book. It looks good and it feels great in the hands. And it’s not a book you’re going to read once and put to the back of the shelves. This is a book you’re going to keep close and dip into repeatedly. By the time you’ve read it three times, it’s price will probably start to feel pretty much of a steal.

It’s an easy read. I mean that as a compliment. The chapters are blog post short, of course, and they’re continually enlivened - and often reinforced - by a whole raft of great cartoons. The cartoons often hit hardest just when you’re sitting back and thinking that perhaps MacLeod hasn’t really nailed what he wanted to say in the chapter you’re reading. Just as you allow yourself a smidgeon of superiority to creep edgewise into your brain, there’s one of his cartoons sneaking up and hammering your ego with the claw end of the tool.

On top of that, many of the chapter titles and sentences read like well-honed epigrams. MacLeod has a talent for pungent brevity that Nietzsche might have envied. What about these?

“Good ideas have lonely childhoods.” (p14)

“A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.” (p44)

“Avoid the dullards; avoid the people who play is safe. They can’t help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct; they are extinction.” (p71)

“Diluting your product to make it more ‘commercial’ will just make people like it less.” (p90)

“Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle - that is, being human.” (p117)

There’s a certain ‘fuck off and die’ attitude that exudes from a lot of MacLeod’s writing that either grates or wins you over. In my case, I’ve travelled from the grate to the win. Macleod, being MacLeod, won’t give a toss but the reason for my journey is grounded in that very indifference: he talks the talk and then backs it up.

This is a dangerous book in all the right ways. For a start, it’s a blueprint for living the life you know you want. Best of all, it doesn’t come wrapped up in new age style waffle about laws of attraction and spiritual fulfilment. The overriding message is one of hard work. For MacLeod the choice seems simple and binary: work hard to get where you want to be (which may actually be a different place to where you first intended) or choose what at first seems to be the easy option (but which is ultimately the route to joyless middle age) and keep believing that personality or luck alone will be enough to see you emerge from the mass striving to compete in your chosen work or artistic milieu. In other words, if you’re an employer shackled to the idea of keeping your employees competing in mediocrity to maintain the status quo, buy up all the copies you can to prevent them slipping into the hands of your workers.

Everyone else, just buy the book and get started on your new life. Don’t ignore me on this!

In Neville’s words, when it comes to business cards, “The format hasn’t really changed in years.” And when the format remains the same (as Led Zeppelin might have sung in a different context), the emphasis falls on making the card stand out. Witness the success of Moo Cards or, at the other extreme, the approach taken in this video - “Your Business card is CRAP!” - (which could quite easily be straight from a comedy skit - best line: “It doesn’t fit in a Rolodex because it doesn’t belong in a Rolodex”).

I remember when I had my first Palm PDA back in the late 90s and pointing it at other Palm owners and swapping ‘cards’ over an infrared connection. The limitations of the range and the whole need to point devices at each other rather defeated the point but it made us feel cutting edge, even if we never looked at the details of the information we shared - usually because it was with a colleague we’d known for years anyway. When I got a Nokia later, I could do something similar. Again, though, it just wasn’t quite the same as handing out a card.

Neville’s suggestion seems a perfect interim step until we have a means of sharing data universally between devices on a challenge/response setting. You can imagine turning up at a networking meeting and having your phone, netbook, or whatever set up for ‘promiscuous’ sharing, letting you pass your information to everyone who wants it and for your device to accept all data into a secure sandbox for virus checking and approval. Equally, there may be times you need to approve each share - possibly when you need to send different information to different people. In effect, the sharing should be nothing more than a link which the recipient device then uses to access the information specified in the cloud somewhere.

In the meantime, I need to put in an order to Moo for some new cards and find somewhere to store my growing collection of personal cardboard.

Since my days living in north London, the mystery of the ‘Not In Service’ bus that roars past the stop at which you’ve been standing for twenty minutes or more in the evening drizzle has left me baffled. The bus has obviously not broken down and the driver is able bodied. Taking it out of service must be for the benefit of the operating company only.

Blow a Raspberry

An alternative to the ‘Not In Service’ sign, therefore, would be an image of a tongue sticking out and, as the bus passed each stop at which people were waiting patiently for their bus, it could blare out a loud raspberry from its horn. This would have the added benefit of frightening the elderly and small children, as well as simply infuriating all disappointed passengers.

People are generally not unreasonable. If the bus needs to be taken out of service. tell us why. The difference between waiting on a station for a train that is delayed and being given no information and one where the station master (remember those?) keeps you up to date with estimated arrival times is the difference between a potential riot and a calm acceptance. All customers ask for is to be treated with respect and giving them information is the simplest and most cost-effective way to achieve that.

We Can Handle Bad News

‘Not In Service’ is not information. It’s a slap. If the bus is fit to move, pick up passengers or even stop and tell people why they can’t use the bus. If not, use the sign ‘Sorry, Bus Not Safe’ or ‘Bus Needed For More Important People’ or ‘Driver Late For A Date’. Give us something on which to hang an emotional response.

When you remove an expected and anticipated service at short notice, it’s surely a given that you need to tell your customers what’s happening and why.

For the past few weeks a succession of skips have been left on the road outside, filled, removed, and replaced. The work has obviously been intensive and the skip has filled with everything from fence panels to water tanks to bed frames to carpets to wallpaper and old plasterboard. The house has been gutted and work continues.

When everything has been stripped back and removed, it will be time to start building again. There will be new partition walls to create and a new kitchen and new bathrooms to install. Rewiring, too. Then a heck of a lot of redecorating.

The owner obviously thinks it’s worth it. In its previous state, the house served its purpose. Now, with a family member moving back in, the house needs to change to meet new demands.

You can tell where this is going…… Many businesses have got along just fine using the old methods of PR and marketing and advertising. But things have changed. The marketplace is more sophisticated, customers have easy access to a greater variety of products and information, and customers for life have gone the way of jobs for life. It might very well be time that you had a close look at that worn hall carpet and the mouldy tiles in the upstairs shower. Have you had the roof examined in the last twenty years? How about the paintwork on the windows?

It might just be time to give your local skip hire company a call.

I was invited to the preview on Sunday and went up to London with Laura and our three kids.

The Summer Exhibition is a chance to see a huge amount of new art in one place from both upcoming and established artists. It includes painting and sculpture, photographs, printmaking, and architecture. A committee selects around 1,000 pieces from those submitted for inclusion (somewhere in the region of 10,000) and then the 80 current members of the Academy itself get to choose 6 of their own works each to include.

All very nice - but sales is the name of the game

Now, for all the history and artistic endeavour that lies behind the exhibition, one of the main reasons many of the exhibitors put their work on show is to sell them. This is lucky because a large number of the visitors to the show - especially at the preview - are hoping to buy something. Actually, ‘intending’ would be a stronger word. And as you go round the exhibition, it’s great to see the little orange stickers against an exhibit’s number when it has been sold. Many of the prints, of course, can be sold many times. And many were.

So, if I was an aspiring artist, this is where I would want my art to be on show. In many ways, this the Google first page of search results for people looking to buy new art. Even if I was an aspiring artist who believed that my art was so radically different that it bore little resemblance to anything else, I would want to have something on show here.

Low barriers - what’s preventing you from jumping them?

Let’s take the analogy a little further, if only because it occurred to me yesterday as I was squeezing with the family into one of the small rooms of the gallery where the smallest scale works covered the walls (and where the proportion of orange stickers was significantly higher than elsewhere). Imagine the artists as bog standard businesses and each work as a product line for sale (which, in many ways, is exactly what they are - however much you may believe in art for art’s sake). Submitting a work for inclusion costs £25 (I think). Pretty low marketing overhead. Even if the product gets rejected at the store’s buyer stage (the RA’s panel of experts) you’ve spent little and got some valuable feedback (ie not a likely seller). And if you get through? A very good chance of making a sale. It’s like being put on a supermarket shelf.

So, if you’re a company and you have the chance to be one of the relatively small number getting in the face of potential buyers - who have actually chosen to let their faces be gotten into! - what’s stopping you? Why is your web presence so poor? Here are some of the reasons I come across:

1. The web audience in general is not who we’re aiming for. (Excuse me? I don’t think there is a ‘web audience’ any more. Unless that’s a synonym for ‘potential customers’.)
2. I don’t think we have the budget to create a decent web site right now. (But they’ll happily spend thousands every quarter on new brochures which sit in the stock room!)

We’re a B2B organization, so the whole e-commerce thing isn’t relevant. (Right, there’s no place for email and pdf downloads and on-line product tours in B2B.)

3. We have a web site and it has never scored us any business. (That would be because it was designed by the CEO’s godson in 1999, only works in IE5, and contains spelling mistakes and broken links. Classy.)
4. Our site’s there but it never appears in Google searches. (That might be down to the lack of content and general feeling that tumbleweed might blow across the screen at any time. When was it last updated? A brief aside: I was asked to quote for doing some work for a lettings agency in Kent. When I looked at their site and did some sample searches etc I found that they failed to appear in the first 10 pages of search results even when using ‘lettings’ and the part of Kent they were. Lettings agencies from outside the area were getting higher rankings. That’s a sad state of affairs. In the end they decided that spending money to improve this was not worth it. Go figure.)

The list of reasons companies use to back away from improving their on-line presence is as long as the list of sites that come ahead of them in the rankings. And, of course, once they have a web site, many of them think that’s that; no more needs to be done. This is like believing that all there is to networking is turning up and standing in the corner. You’re there but……. what’s the point?

What wasn’t there went unmissed

The range of works on view was huge. There was stuff I liked, there was stuff that I coveted, and there was stuff that sparked no interest in me at all. In that way I was like most of the visitors to the gallery. But I saw stuff I wouldn’t see anywhere else and had I had the spare cash, I think I would have bought at least one piece. All because it was there in front of me.

Get your business on the gallery wall. The web is a summer exhibition every day of the year and you’re missing potential customers by keeping your best stuff in the storeroom rather than hanging in the well-lit rooms of Google and other search engines.

Read the story here.

This is a time when the available tools make content production and distribution a matter of imagination, seizing the moment, and paying for pizza. It helps that it’s a good song, too.

(Remember to share your own favourites - and the reasons for picking them - in the comments.)

New ways of thinking about your customers and your business

6. Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs
- Geoff Livingston with Brian Solis (2007)
This is a book that approaches ‘new media’ very much from a PR angle. That said, Livingston - a respected new media PR practioner - shows quite clearly how traditional PR must adapt to be relevant in the era of social media. The layout of this book is the least appealing of the books on the list but if you set aesthetics aside and pore over the case studies Livingston presents in his very readable style, you’ll com eaway with a plethora of tips and advice on how to best present you company and brand using new media.

7. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly
- Meerman Scott
Meerman Scott’s chunky book looks daunting at first glance. There’s a heck of a lot of information in there. You may be tired by the time you’ve come to the end of the book’s subtitle. However, if you persevere, you’ll find an indispensable guide to all aspects of engaging with customers online.

The author has an engaging style and the case studies and personal stories make for an entertaining read. If you had time to read only one book on this list and wanted something that showed you how each of the various elements of social media can be used to best effect, this is it.

If there’s anything missing, it’s any reference to Twitter. But considering when the book was written - and Meerman Scott now uses Twitter, too - it’s hard to blame the author for that. What it does show is that the lengthy publication lead time for traditional books, coupled with the speed with which new online tools develop, can mean up to the minute books when being written are mere footnotes of history when finally published. This is not the case for this book. Twitter aside, there’s plenty value in the discussion of the more familar social nmedia tools that remain a bedrock of online marketing right now.

8. Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
- Seth Godin
Many people have commented on the apparent flaw in the argument that a purple cow may be interesting but nobody really wants a purple cow. This rather misses the point. Godin’s purple cow is the starting point for a riff on uniqueness, not an example of a great product! It’s what you do around your purple cow that makes the difference. between successful marketing and

His writing style is direct and punchy. Words are never included for the sake of it. Most of Godin’s work takes shape on his blog and the short chapters or sections reflect that. But when you can pack such sharp thinking into so few words, nobody can complain of being short-changed.

What we have in this book is a plea to create the products that people want so badly they’ll talk about them endlessly to whoever they come into contact with. To do that means putting as much - if not more - effort into the qualities of the product rather than relying on clever marketing and advertising later on in the product’s lifecycle. In many ways, Purple Cow is the answer to many of the theses expressed in Cluetrain (see yesterday’s post).

9. Meatball Sundae: How New Marketing is Transforming the Business World (and How to Thrive in It)
- Seth Godin
I make no apologies for including a second book by the marketing maestro. Whereas ‘Purple Cow’ is a passionate hymn to becoming remarkable, ‘Meatball Sundae’ is a timely warning that it’s not just about using tools, however skilfully. Godin’s base metaphor revolves around layering cream and a cherry on top of meatballs. The result is not going to win many flavour awards. This is shown to be the equivalent of simply using new social media tools and marketing techniques when your business remains the same. That’s not to say that the business is bad or the tools are bad. It’s simply that to win with social media - if the decision is made that social media is a worthwhile marketing strategy for your business - requires a change in the way the business works.

This is a big and bitter pill to swallow and some companies will resist the message. In Godin’s usual witty and concise manner, the message is reinforced on almost every page. Anecdote follows anecdote follows metaphor. On reaching the last page, the choice is simple: return to selling meatballs or look long and hard at your business and start making changes to your structure, your products, and your business model.

Nothing stays the same

10. Always be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer
- Eisenberg & Quarto-vonTivadar with Davis
This is obviously not your standard business book. It’s actually laid out like a typical programming text and even includes exercises. So why am I recommending a book that seems to belong on the bookshelf of your webmaster rather than on your desk?

Two reasons, really. The first is that the philosophy behind the book underpins any foray you might make into social media or the web in general: test everything and test repeatedly. And secondly, reading the book gives you a great insight into the technical issues that lie behind some of the decisions you or your team may have to make when it comes to your web site or your on-line marketing or your AdWords campaign. In other words, this book will give you the vocabulary and the data to justify to your bosses why things need to be changed - and how. Finally, if you’re thinking of hiring someone to run your AdWords campaign or to build special landing pages for product launches, it might be a good idea to ask if they’ve read this book.

That’s it for now….

Any list of books will inevitably reflect the tastes of its creator and it’s almost impossible to produce one that doesn’t scream for changes. Please feel free. These are the books I stumbled across - whether by good luck, word of mouth, or interest - when I needed them and I’m equally sure there are many others out there just as good. That’s your cue: tell me what books you’ve read and found useful in the journey to learn more about using the new tools of the internet for your business success. Or tell me which books you recommend to clients to read.

For anyone hoping to get to the crux of what defines social media or hoping to point their boss or a client towards some books that state the case more eloquently than you feel you can do yourself, it can be hard picking winners from among the huge range on offer.

To that end, in this post and the next I’m listing 10 that I believe will take you on a great journey down the main roads of social media and new marketing and what it means to your business. Here’s the first 5:

The manifesto

1. The Cluetrain Manifesto- Levine, Searle, Locke, and Weinberger (1999)
The book is an expansion of the original 95 theses that the authors posted to www.cluetrain.com in 1999. In an echo of Martin Luther nailing his own 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Schlosskirche in 1517, Levin, Locke, Searle, and Weinberger were looking to spark their own reformation; this time in the way businesses and the internet interact. The first sentence reads, “A powerful global conversation has begun.” That was the spark.

Some of the most important theses - and which lie behind many of the subsequent developments in new marketing and social media - in a book full of important theses, are no. 1: “Markets are conversations.”; no. 19: “Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.”; no. 26: “Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.”; and no. 74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it”.

The essays in the book reveal that the internet is not about the technology itself but how it lets people connect to, discuss, and change the businesses they use. This is the book that got many of us started on the journey and is still a guidebook worth turning to when faced with unfamiliar territory. Smart businesses see it not as the manifesto of a group of angry customers but as a blueprint for how to adapt in a new environment in which they are no longer in complete control.

Learning to listen and engage

2. Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers- Scoble & Israel (2006)
This was really the book that gave blogging its business credentials. Conversations may have evolved and new tools have come to prominence but the case studies that pack this books remain relevant and underpin the core social media concept: namely, when businesses listen to their customers, they’re likely to succeed.

Like all the books on this list, the book is a joy to read and there are take-away concepts on almost every page. If your company doesn’t already have a blog - and even if it does - this book will inspire you to start one or improve on the one you have.

3. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies- Li & Bernoff (2008)
This is the book that shows you how to implement social strategies on-line for your business. It’s a book with tables and graphs and fifteen pages of notes at the back. It’s also written by two analysts working for Forrester Research at the time. And yet, it’s a clear and concise read and each case study is presented in such a way that the problems to be solved, the tools implemented, and the benefits gained are all easy to understand.

This is the book to take to your boss if he or she needs convincing that some other company has already succeeded with the strategies you’re trying to put in place.

The on-line business environment

4. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture- John Battelle (2005)
Most people use Google for on-line searching. Even when they don’t, they use the term ‘to Google’ to describe what they’re doing. This search traffic dominance - and the revenue generated by AdWords that follows from it - has given Google huge wealth and the ability to reach out into areas. Now, for any company hoping to benefit from the internet, Google is as much part of the environment as business regulations, audited accounts, and corporate assets.

John Battelle’s book is so much more than the story of one company’s phenomenal growth to financial success. He combines wonderful writing and excellent investigative journalism with an in-depth understanding of all things related to the internet. The result is a book that reads like a cross between a thriller and popular science. And yet it’s a business book. Still the best analysis of why search is so important and how Google came to dominate a market nobody believed existed.

5. The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand
- Chris Anderson (2006)
Chris Anderson is another excellent writer adept at bringing into sharp focus the region where technology meets the business model. This book is a much expanded version of an essay that first appeared in Wired magazine and does nothing less than force a rethink of the way businesses need to think about markets on-line. In effect, because the reach of the internet is so vast, there is a market for just about any conceivable product and service.

What makes the book as exciting as much as well-written, is its representation of a world where businesses can create niche products and be confident of a level of profitability. A perfect antidote to ‘blockbuster’ thinking.

That’s enough books for one day. I’ll expect you to have read them all by tomorrow, when I’ll add the final five books on my list.

If you’ve read them already, what did you make of them?