Unmarketing



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Hardcover
256 pages
ISBN 9780470617878 Published Sept. 2010
John Wiley & Sons
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Unmarketing
Stop Marketing. Start Engaging.
By Scott Stratten 

Related Blog Posts
New inBubbleWrap giveaway: UnMarketing
Posted Oct. 7, 2010 4:13 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

In everything we do, as business people, as employees, as leaders, we are marketing ourselves. We are presenting our ideas, hoping for buy-in. We are presenting ourselves, hoping for acceptance. Scott Stratten's new book, UnMarketing, reminds us that marketing is really about communication--true communication with give-and-take, back-and-forth--that compels people to get together on the same page whether that page is matching up the right product to solve a problem or bringing a group together to gain momentum for a good cause. To get better at (un)marketing--yourself, your ideas, your product--reading this breezy but intricately plotted and infinitely helpful book is the place to start.

Read more about Scott Stratten's UnMarketing and enter to win a free copy here.



Friday Links
Posted Sept. 3, 2010 11:10 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ Chris Guillabeau's The Art of Non-Conformity will be released on Tuesday—a book I hope everyone reading this blog will pick up. On his blog yesterday, he briefly discussed Seth Godin's departure from traditional publishing before laying out the Strategy, Tactics, and the Plan for the Next 97 Days he has devised for entering the publishing arena that Seth is leaving. And his plan is the only plan that has ever succeeded: think big; work hard. Responding to the notion that “The only authors who sell books anymore are those who have popular blogs,” he writes:

Where does a popular blog come from—does the blog fairy descend from the sky with a passionate group of readers, all eager to support a new writer?

It's a valid question, and we are glad this dedicated, unconventional (indeed, dedicatedly unconventional) individual has taken a step into traditional publishing, and we wish him the best on his Unconventional Book Tour.

If you'd like to learn more before picking up a copy of his book for yourself, you can read the interview Callie Oettinger did with him over at Steven Pressfield Online, or dig into some of his online offerings.

➻ Scott Stratten's UnMarketing also comes out next week, and in true social-media guru fashion, he did a 140-character interview on Twitter with new PR pros. Some advice:

@ssiewert: How can young pros/Gen Y apply their years of personal experience online to achieve business objectives?

@unmarketing: You have the advantage, since you’re already online. Be yourself, have an opinion but also be humble. You don’t know everything yet.

➻ The Bullish on Books blog had a great guest post from our dear friend Erika Andersen today, entitled You’ve Been Laid Off – Now What? She used the space to discuss how, once you declare an intention, or "put up your sail to catch the wind you’re looking for—it makes you available to other winds, as well." And Erika knows. She is one of the best advisers in country and the author of two outstanding books, Growing Great Employees and Being Strategic, the latter of which was recently made into a PBS special (Check your local PBS listings for the airtime, or purchase the DVD at shopPBS.org).

➻ The Economist recently took a look inside The innovation machine, reviewing Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble's book recently released on the topic, The Other Side of Innovation. From the article:

Many would-be innovators deal with the trade-off between efficiency and innovation by rejecting traditional management entirely. They repeat mantras about “breaking all the rules” and “asking for forgiveness rather than permission”. They set up skunk works (small, autonomous units with a remit to innovate) and mock the boring corporate types who write their pay-cheques. But again this is counter-productive. Mocking the corporate establishment only encourages it to starve you of resources.

They also touch on Warren Bennis's Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership briefly, and thought it looks like a great book, I think they did so only to have an excuse to introduce the topic of innovation by writing "Today there is no hotter topic in management theory than 'sperm in the air.'"

➻ Bob Sutton, author of the soon-to-be-released Good Boss, Bad-Boss, wants to know... Is Your Boss A Certified Brasshole? And he has devised a test for you to find out.

➻ Mitch Joel, author of Six Pixels of Separation, writes a twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun. His most recent post discussed the 10 Best Books For Back To School Business Reading, and his list is very solid:

I personally think that if you have read all of these books, just go ahead and forgo going back to school and get on out there and start conquering the world.

➻ The 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style went on sale this week, but you can get the original edition (1906) for free. Head on over to Papercuts to figure out how.

➻ "In addition to being a bullfighter and magician, he's a lazy river, a slow moving train, a future hall-of-famer playing through the pain, he's a grizzly bear." And his son is a book reviewer.



Friday Links
Posted July 16, 2010 11:27 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ My favorite release of the month so far has been Diary of a Very Bad Year. It's a series of interviews (an entire book's worth) Keith Gessen of n+1 did with one "HFM," an anonymous hedge-fund mananger, from late September 2007 to the late summer of 2009. It's an insider's account of the financial meltdown from someone who saw finance not as a money-grabbing proposition out of college, but as an "intellectual vocation." n+1 posted a number of excerpts in advance of the book's release, the most intriguing of which (to me) was Bullies and Bankers.

➻ Another n+1 editor, Chad Harbach, was interviewed by Matt Robison at The Morning News with a great group of writers about the convergence of sports and literature, sports literature, and how "Leigh Montville, it turned out, was never a woman." It's reading that begets more reading, as each of the writers talks about their favorite sports pieces. Strangely, the finest piece of sports writing ever put to page, John Updike's Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, was not mentioned.

➻ Bob Sutton has thoroughly covered the topic of swearing recently, and he summed it all up very fecking nicely in the post on The subtleties of strategic swearing. It contains links to many of his previous posts and podcasts on the issue, which will leave you more thoughtful on the topic than you probably need to be, especially in this day and age when you have characters like Hugh MacLeod and Julien Smith out there swearing casually as a mother[lover]. Maybe they're just really strategic?

➻ Shelf Awareness did a great job this morning of quickly Dissecting Amazon, and references a Milwaukee Journal Sentinal article on the affect "everyone's collective love affair with Amazon" has had on local bookstores—in particular the company we grew up in, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops.

➻ Friend of the company and University Press Book Traveler John Ecklund has written an interesting history of our that company—one seen from his perspective as an employee at Schwartz. Part 1 focuses on a our late owner David Schwartz's shocking experiment with a crassly commercial business book promotion, and it's even more shocking success. Part 2 discusses the hiring of our peerless leader, Jack Covert, to follow up and expand that success:

Enter Jack Covert. Jack and his wife Ann were proprietors of “Jack’s Record Rack,” the legendary music store on the east side of Milwaukee. [...]

I don’t think Jack or David really knew for sure that the idea of selling big quantities of books to corporations would ever really bear fruit, nor how long the experiment to find out would have to last. But there was a willingness to commit resources and tweak the program until it got traction.

It's now 25 years later, and we're still experimenting.

➻ At the conjunction of business books and the music industry (as Jack is in the history above), we have The Lefsetz Letter ("First in Music Analysis"), which reviewed Rework recently, relating the book's lessons to the music industry, and an Indie Launch Pad interview with Scott Stratten, author of the soon-to-be-released Unmarketing.

➻ Inder Sidhu, author of Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profits and Drives Tomorrow's Growth, wrote about How to give up power and get more done for The Washington Post this week. He details how, "Instead of choosing between a traditional command-and-control management model, or a more egalitarian one, smart business leaders are embracing the power of the 'and.'"

➻ John Tierney had an interesting column in the Times late last month about Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, and how—while it's no good for reading comprehension—it may be very good for the creative process (if you're able to keep track of where it's wandered).

➻ James Mathewson, editor-in-chief of ibm.com, wrote recently about How to Measure the Value of Editors, how a simple edit turned us from subjects to citizens, and how "well edited pages do 30 percent better than unedited pages."

➻ Matt Ridley, the author of the intelligent and provocative Rational Optimist, was a speaker at this month's TED Conference. His talk was about When ideas have sex and how all that really matters is how intelligent we are collectively.

➻ Susan Orlean wrote a hilarious piece in The New Yorker about the tremendous turnover in the publishing industry and how it has affected her as an author.

➻ It's a good weekend to be in, or come to, Milwaukee. Well, it always is, but this weekend is especially nice, because it's Radio Summer Camp!

➻ Fans of the suddenly ubiquitous Old Spice commercials might enjoy the College Library Parody.

➻ "I warned you. With mogwai comes much responsibility. But you didn't listen."



unGeeked Elite: A Social Media Event
Posted April 15, 2010 7:01 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Milwaukee will soon be hosting the first nationwide unGeeked Elite event. The conference is being organized by Cd Vann, owner of SohoBiztube.com, who defines unGeeking as "the widespread adoption of trends, strategies, and tools that allow us to enhance and embrace internal and external marketing campaigns, enhance customer service, strategize effective sales efforts, and develop better PR campaigns.” The focus of the event will be "to form a community of social media, marketing and branding professionals and pundits."

And they couldn't have found better folks to bring in for it. Chris Brogan, author of Trust Agents and Social Media 101, and Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate, will both be delivering keynotes—as will Scott Stratten, author of the soon-to-be-released Unmarketing.

We can recommend both Chris and Sally personally, as they are both old friends of the company. We first met Chris when he and Julien Smith wrote Trust Economics, the ChangeThis manifesto that begat their book. And we met Sally when she attended our first Author Pow-Wow around the time she released her fantastic debut effort, Radical Careering. (She later sent us a box of brass knuckles, which I would explain further, but it's a better story without the explanation). And speaking just before Ms. Hogshead is another friend and Pow-Wow attendee, Phil Gerbashak, a man as consistently bright as Florida and the author of 10 Ways To Make It Great.

Other speakers include:

You can find more information and RSVP at sohobiztube.com.




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