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Posted Aug. 18, 2009 4:00 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-Life Lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing by Emanuel Rosen, Broadway Business, 384 pages, $15.95, Paperback, February 2009, ISBN 9780385526326
One of the first books I recommended when I started writing Jack Covert Selects reviews in 2000 was Emanuel Rosen's The Anatomy of Buzz. Ahead of his time, Rosen wrote the first book on word of mouth marketing, using the word “buzz” to describe people talking about the products and services they love. At the time, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point had just come out and opened the floodgates of interest in how ideas spread. Rosen's The Anatomy of Buzz should be considered just as significant a publishing event.
For this new edition, Rosen went back and rewrote two-thirds of the book with updated research, theories, and anecdotes that have been developed over the last decade. The work of BzzAgents and Brains on Fire, standout word-of-mouth marketing agencies that didn't exist when Rosen wrote the first edition, now appear alongside his original discussions of the phenomenon of Birkenstocks and the African soap opera Soul City. The role of social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, and Yelp now appear as examples of the power of personal networks in word-of-mouth marketing.
Rosen's new information discusses primarily the nuances of word-of-mouth marketing. While he says that historically "most marketing research focuses on finding the right message that will persuade someone to buy a product," he explains that agencies like Proctor & Gamble offspring Tremor are now more intent on finding out what people will talk about. Or, in another example, rather than focusing on "what" people talk about, Andrea Wojnicki focused on "how often" people talk while earning her doctorate at Harvard,. She wanted to know what influenced the frequency with which people talk about their experiences. She discovered that while experts and non-experts shared bad experiences equally, experts told twice as many people about a good experience as non-experts did.
By reviewing The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited, I am doing something I haven't done before—recommending a book for the second time. But when it comes to understanding how and why ideas spread, there are just as many reasons to read Rosen now as there were almost ten years ago.
Jack Covert Selects: More Than You Know
Posted June 7, 2006 5:10 a.m. by jack
More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places
by Michael J. Mauboussin, Columbia University Press, 288 pages, $27.95 Hardcover, June 2006 ISBN 0231138709.
For the past two years, I've said that the new business book explains big ideas; it shows us how to look at the world differently. The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, and The World Is Flat all fit that bill. What if one book could give you a flavor for all of them? More Than You Know comes pretty close.
Author Michael Mauboussin, the chief investment strategist at Legg Mason, believes the investment community is overly influenced by its way of thinking. The book is a collection of 30 essays he wrote as a newsletter titled "The Consilient Observer". You won't find consilience in the dictionary; it means the "jumping together" of knowledge. Maubossin hoped to better understand various stock market phenomena by studying other disciplines for clues.
Each essay starts with quotes from his sources. He then spends a few pages talking about key elements of the source. In one essay, he talks about ant colonies, in the next its world class chess, followed by the concept of "herding" for psychology. The chapters end with how each topic applies to investing.
The strength of the book is its wide breadth of sources. The concepts of "affect", behavioral finance, and power law distributions, are some of the concepts for Blink, The Wisdom of Crowds, and The Long Tail. Because each idea is boiled down to its essence, you'll spend a little more time contemplating their broader applications.
Check it out and find out how everyday life influences financial logic.
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Jack Covert Selects - The Tipping Point
Posted Jan. 20, 2002 8:37 a.m. by katie
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell, Back Bay Book, 290 Pages, $14.95 Paperback, January 2002, ISBN 0316346624
When The Tipping Point first came out in hardcover last year, it was an expansion of a New Yorker piece Gladwell had written previously. Normally, I (re)recommend very few books as they are re-released in paperback, but this book is an exception. Not exactly a business book, The Tipping Point is more of a social concept. And yet, when I read it, I found it to be one of the best marketing books I have read. The book explores the point where an idea, product, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Gladwell uses stories such as Hushpuppies shoes and how certain books became best sellers to illustrate this phenomenon. He divides consumers in to groups: Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen. Each group is in some way responsible for making products and ideas tip. The absolute marketers prize is the Maven because he/she is the type of individual that others listen to. In the afterward, Gladwell explains the concept of Maven Traps and how you can create them.
Dont think this applies to your business? Well, I believe what we all do is to try and sell the must have product or be the hip place of the moment? That is the object of the game, correct? Intriguing and well-written, if you havent read The Tipping Point yet, it is well worth the price of a hardcover.
