BradPace.com

This week at am at sunny Las Vegas attending the Webmaster World / Pubcon conference.  In the past this conference has has some of the best content/classes on internet marketing and web development.  I will be posting on each session I attend.

Yesterday they opened with a keynote address from Craig Newmark the founder of Craigslist.com.  I have to say I had high expectations for this keynote.  I hate to say I was very disapointed!  Craig is currently doing Customer Support at craigslist and even reports to the director of CS. He was very clear about his limitations that he as not a good manager or a good programmer.  He talked about how craigslist was started and their history.  BORING!  The basic story was that he lucked into it.  He just built a small service for his friends (that he acted like he didn’t even really like) and grew it into craigslist.  He was clear that they made many mistakes and that their only advantage was they where first to market.  There was no strategy behind it.

Then he went into a very strange rant about Gutenberg being the first blogger and that Martin Luther Kink Jr. was also a blogger.  Somehow trying to convey that the technologies we consider new aren’t. It was out there and hard to follow.

So if you read my blog you will also see that I was also not happy with the Keynote address at SES this fall in San Jose.  This one was even worse.  I think that a keynote speaker needs to be just that a “GOOD SPEAKER”!  They need to attend one of Guy Kawasaki‘s speeches and learn what a good speaker sounds like.

I just finished reading the book “All Marketers Are Liars” by Seth Godin. I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it. I am a bit embarrassed to say this, but this is the first Seth Godin gook I have read. My sister-in-law, Jill Piacitelli, gave it to me for Christmas. Jill is a big fan of his. She was invited to his big conference because he liked the non-profit she heads up. She is the national director of Alternative Breaks. I guess that for each of his conferences he invites one non-profit to attend for free.

Here is the description from Amazon on the book:
“Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better-and look cooler-than $20 no-names . . . and believing it makes it true.

Successful marketers don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story. A story we want to believe.

This is a book about doing what consumers demand-painting vivid pictures that they choose to believe. Every organization-from nonprofits to car companies, from political campaigns to wineglass blowers-must understand that the rules have changed (again). In an economy where the richest have an infinite number of choices (and no time to make them), every organization is a marketer and all marketing is about telling stories.

Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner or the iPod.

But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That’s a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers and Marlboro.

This is a powerful book for anyone who wants to create things people truly want as opposed to commodities that people merely need.”

I really like how the book explains that when people are marketed to they put your message in their own “World View”. And to market effectively you have to target their world view to make it effective. It is a simple idea but really makes sense. He lists many examples to prove his points and to back up his claims. Many marketing books do not do this. The end of the book was a bit “slow”. But over all, this is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

Jill also gave me his book “The big moo”. I would also like to read “Permission Marketing”. I know that this book is a business standard and I need to get my hands on a copy.