Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

Business Book Review – Inbound Marketing

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A blogger, an SEO and a social media expert walk into a bar…

One of the tricks about building a good library is finding books at every level of expertise. For new media workers, this couldn’t be more important – we all have varying degrees of skill in the ten or fifteen areas we need to approach regularly in our jobs because, let’s face it, none of us is “just an SEO” or “just a blogger.” With so many of our skills being relatively new, and so maleable to the moment of their use, we not only need books that address multiple levels of skill across a variety of disciplines, we also need material that’s at once precise in its detail, and timeless in its theory.

Inbound Marketing: Get Found using Google, Social Media and Blogs is exactly the right mix of these attributes.

The book focuses on the wide-funnel approach new media tools are allowing businesses to use to grow. The premise, that many businesses now have the ability to grow simply by making themselves available on the web, is a big deal these days – and it’s working for a lot of people. Using new media tools, companies like Zappos and foundations like Wikipedia (both featured in the book) have done amazing things; in addition to building business or awareness, they’ve participated in a fundamental cultural shift. The Pitch, as it was even five years ago, is no longer the only way to get customers. The secret is now (as it always has been, but for different reasons) to Be Remarkable.

Each chapter in the book tackles a range of subjects from simple definitions of blogging, social media, and inbound marketing theory – all the way up the chain of specificity to customer conversion on blogs, landing page best practices, and picking PR agencies. The format really appealed to me – definition, reasons behind the benefits of whichever subject was being looked at, followed by a case study highlighting a great example of people doing it right. This practicality worked quite well, lending a sense of education, and the feeling of action-ability to each subject.

For example, here are the sub-headings in the chapter on blogging, one of the longest in the book:

  • Getting Your Blog Started Right
  • Authoring Effective Articles
  • Help Google Help You
  • Making Your Articles Infectious
  • give Your Articles a Push
  • Starting Conversations with Comments
  • Why Blogs Sometimes Fail
  • The Gift That Keeps On Giving
  • Consuming Content with RSS
  • Subscribe to Relevant Industry Blogs
  • Contribute to the Conversation
  • Tracking Your Progress
  • Inbound in Action: Whole Foods

In fifteen pages, Halligan and Shah take the reader through the entire cycle of effective blogging – from design needs to article development. It’s an impressive feat, especially since the information is approached from a universal best-practices direction.

And that’s just blogging – there’s so much more in this book.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media marketing, what skills to hire for when searching for marketing professionals, choosing and measuring PR agencies… The range of subjects isn’t just fit for a marketing professional, much of this information could be used by anyone doing online work – and should be! Web designers could benefit from understanding how marketers use conversion tools and metrics. Programmers who understand the needs of bloggers could help develop better systems.

The list goes on.

Inbound Marketing is an interesting read. The presentation is highly textbook-like in its instructional tone, but Halligan and Shah have a dynamic writing style that keeps interest for longer than any instructional text I’ve ever read. The subject matter at once applies to beginners looking for an understanding of basic online marketing theory – and provides insights for intermediate marketers as well. Experienced web professionals may find themselves a little under-informed by this book – but I’d still heavily recommend it as a reference, especially when looking to communicate at a more introductory level.

In short; Inbound Marketing belongs on the reference shelf of every online professional, because of its no-nonsense approach to very complicated subjects. The broadness of its information means the book itself will remain relevant for some time.

I say; buy it if you haven’t already. Get Inbound Marketing: Get Found using Google, Social Media and Blogs by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah from Amazon.

Small Update: This book has been revised and updated as of 2014 – but I haven’t read the new version yet, so I can’t endorse it in detail. I’ll probably read it eventually, and a link to any future book review I do of that edition will go here when and if it is written.

Book Review – Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

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Outliers on FlickrI picked up Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success during the Christmas season from the HMV that’s next door to my store in the mall. It happened to be on sale, and I’d heard some decent reviews – I didn’t know what I was getting into, though. It’s not an overstatement to say that Outliers has changed something fundamental in how I do my work, what I see as my advantages, and where the idea of success has totally fallen down around my ears.

Let me explain.

The book is glibly subtitled “The Story of Success” but it’s really not. It’s the story of people who have taken opportunity where they saw it, and identified more accurately their strengths and interests, compared to the rest of us. I have to assume that this is either Gladwell’s summation of what success is, or that the latter simply didn’t fit on a cover as well. Either way, by about fifty pages in, my head had been blown clean off my shoulders about four times.

The first noggin knocker came with the formula the book would follow; identify a seemingly privileged set of people, or an individual, and examine the individual’s roots. Find out what it was that put this group or person where they are, and totally remove the shiny pedestal from their feet. This has helped me see celebrities in a new light, one that thankfully makes them more human.

The second came from Gladwell’s style. He’s a journalist, and it shows, but he’s also a phenomenal storyteller. As a writer myself, I’m always really interested in how authors compose their ideas, and draw the reader through the story as if by way of treasure map. By the time I had figured out where the X was on Malcolm’s map, I was only twenty pages in – but still, the book didn’t get boring, and that’s all about presentation.

The third brain buster was the shear weight of information. From the beginning of the first chapter, where Gladwell dissects the birthdays of hockey players, right up to the last few pages where he tells the story of a Jamaican woman who moved to Britain for love of knowledge (arguably the best story in the book), the statistical density is high. It speaks to the power of Gladwell’s writing, as well, that this barely becomes overwhelming, and that it’s so understandable.

The one that really baked my noodle, however, and that’s changed my life approach in certain respects, was one really simple idea, the one that takes a page to explain, but requires Gladwell to make universally accessible: Your personal history, everything from the beginning of the universe until now that went into the making of the You that you are, provides you with the infinite capacity for wealth, success, the realization of all your dreams, and total, utter fulfilment in whatever flavour you can conjure. It requires only that you identify where you need to be for your highest good, and that you act on that highest good without hesitation, without compromise, and without any thought to how much work you’ll need to do.

There really is no such thing as an overnight success, but you can become one, if you find your highest good and work yourself to every bone you’ve got to get there. Because once you’re there, you can change the world – not just for yourself, but if you do it right and well, for everyone after you.

The people, places and organizations Gladwell has studied in this book: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Chris Langan, Joe Flom, the city of Harlan, Kentucky, Korean Air, rice paddy farmers in China, and these are just a sample. These people, places and organizations build on each other toward that inevitable truth. Your hard work is not enough to make you an outlier. But your hard work at something your entire chronology an ecology have uniquely prepared you for can shift the very earth you walk on and turn your touch to a golden blessing – if you do it right.

By the time Gladwell tells the story of Daisy Nation and her twin daughters in the final chapter, he has taught an entirely new world view, one that prepares the reader to receive the story, which he relates in a very flat, biographical way for portions, with the light of the Outlier on it, and make unwritten connections proving the concept in a beautiful manner.

I would buy this book again. I’d buy it for friends. I’d buy it for you, if you haven’t read it (if I had the cash to spare) – or I’ll lend you mine if you’re in town and can convince me it’ll make its way back to me in one piece. Or, if you want, you can also go buy yourself a copy here because this is definitely a book that’s worth having, and coming back to again whenever you’re feeling downtrodden on the road to success.

Photo by me!

Here Comes The Lunatic Fringe!

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old west travel failure on FlickrThe landscape of language is changing. As political correctness makes its ever-quickening attacks on etymology, we’re seeing a lot of phrases we could trust to mean certain things replaced with what seem to be much less demanding, or much less threatening ones. Sometimes this can mean good things for certain groups – “blacks” are now African Americans, which is good, and “retards” are now broken into many diverse groups which accurately reflect whatever integrated dysfunction they’re affected by. These are very good reasons for political correctness.

There are a number of bad reasons to become over-specific of our language. Mostly these boil down to either panic, sense of threat, or a need for control. I get this – you do too, right? No need to overdo it.

What concerns me lately though is how often we throw euphemisms aside, and just flat out replace one word with another, or change the use of a phrase, without letting anyone else know. Sometimes this is slang, other times its buzzwords. Sometimes…

When was the last time you heard the term “lunatic fringe?” Do you remember? Did you read it somewhere? I’m reading Six Pixels fo Separation by Mitch Joel, and he mentions on page 90 during an examination of the history of the acceptance of blogging, that in 2004, bloggers were seen as “… people living in their basements, typing about their cats. It was only being done by the lunatic fringe.” This is a totally valid point, but it made me realize I haven’t heard the term lunatic fringe since, yep, probably about six years ago.

What do we hear now? Early adopter. Insidious, isn’t it?

In 2004, bloggers were unaccepted, the weirdos known for having girlfriends in the US – or in Canada, if you’re from the US instead, whatever, right? – with bad haircuts.

Find a picture of Steve Wozniak from 2004- ok, Woz hasn’t changed much. But he’s much better accepted as a rockstar in wider circles, recently. Go find a picture of Matt Cutts, or Robert Scoble from 2004. Here’s a Google Image search if you feel so inclined. Scoble is the quintessential early adopter. Would he have been called lunatic fringe in 2004? I suppose we’d need some of his friends to speak up, but I doubt it. And yet, the term early adopter is being employed to describe the very same behaviours we attributed to bloggers less than ten years ago.

What happened in 2004 when the bloggers attacked? We circled the wagons, knuckled in and prepared lacklustre legal defence against poorly informed miscreants. Now? Businesses have shifted from the defensive to courtship, there’s even a bloggers’ lounge at CES this year (can you tell I’m bitter I didn’t get to go?). And it’s not that the ecosystem has changed. Yes, blogging has become accepted, even encouraged, if we go back to SPoS and just about every other marketing book coming out in the last two years.

But what’s changed about our portrayal of the blogging culture itself?

Once, the lunatic fringe attacked, and drove us back into a huddled circle, a bastion of right and good and true. Now, we’ve become the supplicants, praying for the Gods of the Blogosphere to bless us with yet more linkbait (read as ambrosia) and say nice things about is. SO much so that the FTC in the United States just had to issue a papal bull demanding that bloggers fess up to sponsorship.

What changed? New media used to be the Lunatic Fringe, encroaching on all that was tradition and margin and blue chip. Now, the Early Adopters are leading the way, having discovered a path toward enlightenment, community and equity.

Damned etymology.

Photo by tibchris.

The Horrible Trap of the Successful Writer.

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This post originated as a comment on Justin Kownacki’s post about Stephenie Meyer, Twilight and the Very Bleak Future of Culture. It got a bit bloated, so I thought I’d drop it here instead, because I feel the points are valid.

I’m frustrated that fame as a writer is so ephemeral. Seeing the “of the decade” lists come down, usually recalling only the last two years and claiming it represents the entire ten, is always a hassle for me – but there’s something to be said about Meyer’s fame.

Yes. Her books are formulaic. But they work; this means she’s either oblivious to her own skills as a businessperson, or is so masterful at marketing she ought to start a firm. Clearly, she has an understanding of the genre and how to communicate it the rest of us simply can’t grok. I don’t think you’re being elitist, I think people just lump “books” together and call it literature.

Is the Twilight series a set of decent fiction novels? Dunno, only watched the movies. As movie-fodder, they survive quite well, even if they do immediately suffer some problems I’ll riff on tomorrow.

Is it literature? Resounding no. Literature usually addresses cultural phenomenon, rather than becoming one. The problem Twilight is having is exactly what the Harry Potter series had; it’s a half-decent fiction series of semi-filling plane-ride worthy books idolized and beatified by its fan base.

That was the original comment I had intended to leave on Justin’s site. Courtesy got the better of me, as did a few ideas.

I watched New Moon last night for the first time, oddly before this riff began, and it made me a bit frustrated in and of itself. I’ve never read the Twilight books – I don’t intend to. Neither have I read Harry Potter, though I may eventually. Part of the reason for this is how I treat movies and books in general, and it’s part of why I was annoyed at New Moon not only as a movie, but as a potential book as well.

When authors publish their first works, a lot of it is tailored around being a possible stand-alone story. Even larger format works like the Wheel of Time, Harry Potter and, yes, Twilight, can and do stand aside as self-contained stories. They have to. What if you don’t earn out your advance? What if it doesn’t sell?

But then it does sell, and authors are left scrambling to make two, three, or ten more books work. What was geared to be a story now becomes a very strong prologue. This is especially annoying in trilogies, because the middle part – as New Moon is, as Matrix Reloaded was, as The Two Towers was – is pretty much guaranteed to be entirely filler. There’s no purpose, aside from levelling the page counts into acceptable levels, for most middle books. I’m aware I’m generalizing, but the looking at New Moon from the perspective of a writer expecting part three, it’s a lack-lustre long form prologue and build up to the final pages or scenes. It doesn’t help that the inevitable cliffhanger ruins any sense that there’s a proper ending.

This gets mitigated sometimes in longer running series. Wheel of Time, for example, famously steam rolls its page count on purpose. Robert Jordan was a hell of a writer, but even I gave up after nine books mostly because every book was just putting off the inevitable. When you can write an entire book explaining why the main character is slightly more or less happy on a day to day basis, you’ve got word-count gold. This is one of the reasons I love Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series so much; every one of the now ten books can be taken as a self-contained story within an overarching myth-arc.

What does any of this have to do with Stephanie Meyer? Simple: whether she knows it or not, she knows her business, which is selling books. The trouble with this is that the series she’s created have so effectively done their job that, in the absence of real commentary and lesson, the subject matter has become the substance, and the subject matter simply does not stand up under scrutiny.

The Cullens and their ilk are not vampires. I’m sorry, vampires do not sparkle. They can’t go out in the sunlight and just get prettier. Meyer’s interpretation of the entire genre worries me in part because I was a White Wolf geek back in the day, I come at gothic horror more from the realm of Poppy Z Brite rather than early Ann Rice like most people did. To say that seeing the vampire genre “warped” bothers me is a horrific understatement, but it’s the most adequate I can afford to make because, clearly, the books sell.

Anyone who wishes to get anywhere with words from their keyboards needs to respect it. Hate it all you want, but respect it.

As for culture? There will always be schism. If the meteoric rise of Stephanie Meyer can tell us anything, it’s how quickly superstar authors are forgotten. After all, the final Harry Potter book came out two years after Twilight was published. It broke swift-seller records. The movie isn’t even out yet. But who got on the list as author of the decade? Stephanie Meyer.

I have a lot of respect for anyone who can turn a dream into a book in three months, then go on to sell millions of copies globally. I can only hope that when my own efforts fruit, they’re so handsome.

But that doesn’t mean I have to force myself to think Fangirls and Fanboys are anything other than sheeple until they demonstrate some understanding of exactly why they like the object of their adoration just so much.