I read a lot of books written by people a lot smarter than me. Unfortunately, I don’t always remember the great lessons I learn after I have completed a book.
To help fix that problem I decided to start jotting down the things that I find particularly memorable.
So now I’m taking notes as I read. And every so often I feel I should share with you the things that interest me the most.
This is not meant to be a book review. It’s just a list of some easy to digest nuggets that I pulled from the book I’m reading. I hope that you find some of them useful.
The Book
I’m currently reading a book by Bob Pearson, Chief Technology & Media Officer for WCG, called Pre-Commerce: How Companies and Customers Are Transforming Business Together.
I’m halfway through the book, and here are the tidbits that I felt I needed to highlight.
NOTE: The items in quotes are taken verbatim from the book. The items without quotes are my interpretations of ideas from the book.
- “The Pre-Commerce world demands a new interpretation of the Four Ps.” The new model consists of the Four As – awareness, assessment, action, and ambassadors.
- “The web is the greatest research tool ever built.”
- “Your story is no longer the most important message. What matters is how your audience discusses and validates your story.”
- The 80/20 rule, where 20% of the people do 80% of the work, does not apply online. On the internet, roughly 1% of the people are original content producers, about 9% of the people are the content distributors, and the remaining 90% are the lurk-and-learn crowd.
- “The topic is more important than the brand.”
- “Customers don’t care about your carefully crafted story; they care about the one piece of it that interests them. The topic is where influence happens.”
- “Your customers live in a meme-driven world. If you don’t identify and research your own brand memes, you’ll never know who’s influencing your customers and how.”
- “Your company needs to capture more than content; it needs to navigate the entire river of influence.”
- When researching content producers in your industry or product space, you should “track their reach, relevance, and ability to syndicate content on a particular topic.”
- “Conversations end due to a lack of content, not a lack of passion.”
Final Thoughts
Did any of these resonate with you? I really love that last one about why conversations end.
Oh and I definitely plan on sharing more insights from the second half of the book once I have finished reading it.
Before I go, I have to ask…what are you reading?
