It's a fun read (in no small part due to the book's packaging) and well worth the effort because the teachings are practical and, for the most part, easy to apply.
In keeping with the band's "experimental" style, Meerman and Halligan urge readers to push beyond marketing best practices of a bygone era and embrace continuous trial and error.
If that advice makes makes you nervous, you probably already feel out of sorts in the new age of marketing. If so, Meerman and Halligan's book will help you get acclimated.
Here's just a sampling of the lessons you'll find (there are a couple hundred altogether in the 150-page book):
- Organize your marketing team around three accountabilities: lead generation, lead conversion and lead analysis.
- Abandon annual marketing plans in favor of monthly ones. Each month, execute for 19 days; then spend a day assessing and planning activities for the next month.
- Give graphic designers the freedom to play with your branding elements.
- Involve all your employees in social marketing and teach them how to help your organization through "Lunch and Learn" meetings.
- Delete all content from your Web site, blog posts, and emails that resembles your competitors'.
- Communicate product news to your most loyal customers before you communicate it to anyone else.
- Create an e-book or video about your industry's future and give it away.
- Instead of lashing out at competitors, find ways to strike mutually beneficial deals with them.
- Skip over middlemen (sorry, sexist again) of every sort.
- Identify a cause-related nonprofit consistent with your brand and begin giving part of your profits to it.
