Bloggers R Us

Direct marketing has grown beyond its roots in traditional mail order to embrace a host of new technologies, customer relationship-building techniques, and performance measures. Today, businesses and nonprofits of all kinds use direct marketing, which now garners 25% of the U.S. marketer’s budget, surpassing newspapers and broadcast TV.

Hailed as the “bible” of direct marketing for over 30 years, Successful Direct Marketing Methods has been completely updated and expanded with all the latest tools and techniques needed for success in today’s digital, multi-channel marketplace. Written by world-renowned direct marketing experts Bob Stone and Ron Jacobs, the Eighth Edition of Successful Direct Marketing Methods contains major revisions to chapters on the creative process, fully covering the development of direct mail advertising, catalogs, and print advertising. The Eighth Edition also explores such new topics as:

• The expanding objectives of direct marketing in the digital age
• Techniques for optimizing customer acquisition, up-selling and cross-selling, reducing defections, extending loyalty, and improving retention
• CRM applications, data mining, call center, campaign management, and sales force automation
• Customer experience management–connecting customers and brands at every touch point
• Brand building with direct marketing tools and techniques
• The growth of direct marketing in Europe, Asia, and Latin America
• Methods of international marketing–both direct and telemarketing

Successful Direct Marketing Methods offers professionals a comprehensive roadmap for direct marketing success across today’s multiple marketing channels.

The age of the faceless corporation is over. In the new business era of the twenty first century, great brands and products must evoke a dynamic personality in order to attract passionate customers. Although many organizations hide their personality behind layers of packaged messaging and advertising, social media guru and influencer Rohit Bhargava counters that philosophy and illustrates how successful businesses have redefined themselves in the new customer universe.

Personality Not Included is a powerhouse resource packed with bold new insights that show you how to shed the lifeless armor of your business and rediscover the soul of your brand. Sharing stories from the ethos of the world’s weirdest city, to how Manga has taken the comic book industry by storm, to showcasing brands like Intel, Boeing, ING, and Dyson, Bhargava shows you why personality matters from the inside out.

In Part One, you’ll be introduced to the key components to building a personality and learn how to:

• Recognize the greatest myth that most marketers blindly follow, and how to get past it
• Use the “UAT Filter” to understand the personality of your organization and products in order to develop a communication strategy that drives your marketing
• Create your company’s “marketing backstory” using techniques pioneered by Hollywood screenwriters
• Harness the influence of “accidental spokespeople” and use it to your advantage
• Navigate the roadblocks of using personality that come from bosses, peers, investors, and lawyers, without getting fired or flamed
• Pinpoint and capitalize on the moments where personality can make a difference

Part Two is packed with guides, tools, and techniques to help you flawlessly implement your plan. It features practical, step-by-step lessons that help you effectively move from theory to action, and includes a valuable collection of guides, checklists, question forms, printable resources, and more.

Don’t be another faceless company-learn the new rules for succeeding in the social media era with Personality Not Included.

Use ANGELS and Web 2.0 Marketing to Drive Powerful, Quantifiable Results
For every marketer, strategist, executive, and entrepreneur

Today, marketers have an array of radically new Web 2.0-based techniques at their disposal: viral marketing, social networking, virtual worlds, widgets, Web communities, blogs, podcasts, and next-generation search, to name just a few. Now, leading IBM marketing innovator Sandy Carter introduces ANGELS, a start-to-finish framework for choosing the right Web 2.0 marketing tools—and using them to maximize revenue and profitability.

Carter demonstrates winning Web 2.0 marketing at work through 54 brand-new case studies: organizations ranging from Staples to Harley Davidson, Coca-Cola to Mentos, Nortel to IBM itself. You’ll discover powerful new ways to market brands and products in both B2B and B2C markets…integrate Web 2.0, experiential, and conventional marketing…maximize synergies between global and local marketing…gain more value from influencers, and more.

Includes information, case studies, and working examples for next generation marketing strategies such as:

•  Social networks with virtual environments, including Second Life
•  Online communities including Facebook
•  Viral Marketing and eNurturing
•  Serious Gaming
•  Widgets
•  Wikis
•  Blogging, including Twitter
•  RSS
•  Podcasting
•  Videocasting

Whether you’re a marketing professional, Web specialist, strategist, executive, or entrepreneur, this book will help you drive immense, quantifiable value from Web 2.0 technologies—now, and for years to come.

While personal blogs take up much of the blogosphere, blogs are quickly gaining popularity in business as an inexpensive and amazingly effective marketing tool. It’s time for a practical book about business blogging: this is the first book to demonstrate how businesses are blogging and how you can use blogging technology to converse with your customers to build your brand and sell your products.

Written from the business person/designer’s perspectives, this book shows how businesses can leverage current, real-world blogging techniques, tools, and platforms to promote and enhance their ventures. The key idea is that the conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog. Filled with practical information and a how-to approach, this book provides case studies of companies as large as Boeing or General Motors and as small as Clip-’n-seal. Readers will learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content, and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.