Book review: Citizen Marketers - Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba.

PS: 8.5

Finished reading Citizen Marketers yesterday evening. And as written in my pre-book review I stick to my first impression that it shows the other end of the spectrum of The Long Tail and Permission Marketing.
Which of course does the title embed so I’m stating the obvious no doubt.

The 1%-ers (yeah, I’m one ;-)) creating content on the new media (blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the likes) are an important and fast growing group of influential marketers (without being paid for it by the brands), most are advocates, fans or ambassadors of these brands or products who don’t like to be let down or ignored by their ‘heros’.
And brands are advised to get used to it, to adept to it, even to embrace it or become loosing brands.

The one sentence in the book that really captured it for me was:

“You are your Google Results.”

Negative postings in the old media brands could always see as: “Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish & chips wrap-around”, people forget about it in no time.
Not any longer with the new media: once logged, tagged, spidered it is there to stay, to be brought back at a click of a mouse on the search results, any time, any where.

Brands, companies, even organisations better get their Citizens Marketing strategy together and ‘practice’ what Kent Blumberg wrote only a few days ago to handle negative criticism or feedback.

Next stop: "Survival is not enough" (Shift Happens) by Seth Godin

Side-note: as an ‘outlaw of culture’ I practiced my 1% influence today on Squidoo and created a new lens, ‘highlighting’ the silence of the Squidoo team on a question a fan (me) asked them three times and circumventing their fixed modules of Amazon.com (in order to make money for my chosen charity, not for myself.) 

Comments

[Kent Blumberg]

I love it! Another great book to read. (The pile is growing.) Thanks for the review and the link, Karin.

[Karin]

and thanks vice versa, Kent