Archive for May, 2009

Punk Marketing is out in paperback now…Buy it from Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/paperpunk. Here is our press release with all the details. Mark and I changed it a lot to make it up to date for a recession age.

Enjoy. Comments? Twitter us at www.Twitter.com/punkmarketing.

Hey Kids: For Immediate Release

–Now in Paperback–

Ever hear of WIMPLASH? Every economic indicator is moving in the wrong direction and the outlook seems grim. Instead of throwing themselves into the fight, marketers are suffering from what Punk Marketing’s Laermer and Simmons call “wimplash,” the inability to move up, down or sideways. So Punk Marketing is back and better than ever.

The paperback Punk Marketing—in stores and on street corners May 19—is peppered with examples, case studies, faux pas, jokes, and practical advice that every marketer needs right now. A recession provides a momentous opportunity for anyone selling ANYTHING to use whatever budgets they have intelligently. The faint-hearted will retreat to traditional while the wise engage consumers by recognizing a shift in power from corporations to consumers.

Laermer and Simmons, the established, unstoppable authors of PUNK MARKETING: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution (Harper Paperbacks; May 2009; $16.99, trade paperback), are anxious to have their message heard. They write, “More and more and even more consumers are now not consumers but content creators and distributors of really good material too.” As consumers become less passive, traditional marketing campaigns are obsolete.

According to these dudes, snappy TV ads that used to sell products effectively are not potent during a crazy time like this. A myriad of social networking sites, video on and offline, below-the-radar sites, DVR action, teensy pamphlets and fliers, mobile meandering and whole mass of entertainment options have segmented the viewing audience. For companies to promote their products, they must target consumers accurately and work with them to serve their needs.

The book that critics called “blunt, fair, fearless and outrageous—just like the marketing style they espouse” gets its groove on by discussing organizations that have been successful by reaching out to their core demographic in new ways. The authors lift their hands and shout—err, write: “Consumers want to feel the company they buy from has their absolute best interests at heart; so for them that means being treated respectfully as sole beings and not units in some amorphus lump.”

In addition to some of the Punk approaches marketers are now taking, technology has revolutionized marketing. Smart marketers are finding ways to successfully reach consumers via text messages about exciting deals. RFID technology may some day enable a shop to tailor their product offerings to the personal dialections of the consumers. “One of your authors, a professional futurist/show-off, once envisioned a time when you or we can walk by a shop and a special discount or menu would pop onto our teensy screens,” Laermer and Simmons write.

Called a “Book You Should Have Read” by Advertising Age last year, the updated, PUNK MARKETING introduces a radical new approach and a new lexicon to a discipline desperately in need of an overhaul. Founded upon a 100% revised set of assumptions about how consumers interact with brands, it is more than theoretical analysis; it is a set of usable (and funny, and arguable) tools for the modern marketing revolutionary.

According to Laermer and Simmons, it’s high time for marketers to recognize this and change their Fail-oriented ways before the guy or gal who replaces them does it for them.


About the authors:

Richard Laermer is a top trends and marketing speaker, author of the best-selling book Full Frontal PR and the brand new 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade, as well as the CEO of veteran agency RLM PR. He is known for his Marketplace commentaries on NPR, hosted the cult makeover series Taking Care of Business on The Learning Channel and is a frequent commentator on CNNMoney.com while co-managing the BadPitchBlog (badrelease.com) for the PR industry! He is also a regular writer for HuffingtonPost (www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-laermer) and helms the new teaching site, HowToFame.com, launching in June.

Mark Simmons has 20 years of experience as a top marketer in the US and his native England , and has been at the topmost edge of new techniques while running his own Anti-Corp agency and as the LA head of groundbreaking bad boy agency Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. Simmons recently launched social enterprise USELESS, dedicated to helping people use less while giving more. He is a full-time rock star marketing consultant toiling for, among others, Gore and Gates, which has brought the planet further from extinction. Prior to all this good, he was one of the top marketers at Coca-Cola in Atlanta. 

About the book
Title: PUNK MARKETING: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution
Author: Richard Laermer and Mark Simmons
On sale date: May 19, 2009
Price: $16.99, trade paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 978-0-06-115111-8
Imprint: Harper Paperbacks

Contact:
Barbara Teszler
212.207.7727
barbara.teszler@harpercollins.com

I recently had the chance to interview Twitter CEO and co-founder, Evan Williams, a nice lad who grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska. In this exclusive interview Evan talks about how Twitter came about, how it has evolved and, and his approach to innovation. Read on…

Twitter wasn’t Evan’s first breakthrough product. In 1999 he had started a company called Pyra and, while working on a project management web application as a way to keep track of the project, the team wrote script to turn a personal website into a blog, which eventually turned into Blogger. “It wasn’t at all what our company was planning go do, it was very much just an idea on the side which seemed like a very small idea compared to what we were working on.” They basically just stumbled on the idea behind Blogger.

Evan says that his co-developers had more discipline than he did so wanted to focus on the original product, but he couldn’t bring himself to drop it. “I just couldn’t get rid of the Blogger idea, it kept nagging me,” he says. And he eventually convinced his co-developers to build it on the side. But, “it turned out to be more interesting than then original plan” and Blogger started getting some traction, so eventually they shut down the original project to focus on it. Blogger became very successful and Evan and his partners sold their company, Pyra, together with Blogger for an ‘undisclosed sum’ to Google in February 2003.

With Twitter, Evan says it was similar in some ways, but different in many others. By that time he’d left Google and started a new company, called Obvious, to develop ideas. He called it ‘obvious’ because, he says, often after an idea has been developed other people will say, that it was “obvious” from the start. Compared to Pura, “we were further along with the company,” he says. “We had raised venture capital and were about a year into the company. We were more like 14 people instead of 3. We were focusing on a podcasting product that wasn’t really taking off and so were actively looking for new ideas.” And Twitter was one of the ideas they came up with.

But, why did he think it was a good idea?

It’s not as if there weren’t enough ways to communicate with friends when Twitter was conceived (it was launched in March 2006) - blogs, email, IM, phone…even F2F (’face-to-face’ in Internet jargon). “I don’t know,” says Evan. “A lot of it, for me anyway was gut.” He’d seen how people had used Blogger and saw the similarities with Twitter, and he saw its potential. “Once we had the prototype and were using it ourselves, then it was very clear it was interesting. It was immediately compelling to the small group of us using it.”

But, Twitter didn’t take off overnight. In fact, despite the success of Blogger, he knew Twitter would difficult to explain to the finance folks. He didn’t try to convince the the original investors in his new company of the value of Twitter and eventually he bought the company back from them. “It would have been a tough sell,” admits Evan.

Since its launch three years ago, how people use Twitter has evolved. “It’s changed quite a bit in the ways people use from what we originally imagined,” he says. “It’s continually surprising. Even though we have had the notion for a while that Twitter has the potential to be very big, it’s the way it’s grown and the different uses and the reality of it becoming big in so many different ways is always surprising.” When he first used it he took it much literally, ‘what are you doing?’ to update friends. It’s now become much broader than that. People have learned “It’s just a way to communicate something to a bunch of people at once.” It’s now become a way to find out what’s happening with the things people care about - whether friends, news, events, a band, a sports team.

(Of course Facebook has it’s own ‘what are you doing now?’ feature, but Evan thinks that people use it very differently to how people use Twitter because Facebook is for people in their social circle, wheras Twitter doesn’t have to be.)

He thinks media usage will continue to evolve and before long other things will come along that’ll make Twitter look pretty primitive. But, certain new patterns in media have now started to stabilize. For instance, the reverse chronology time-line (most recent stuff first) seen on blog posts (like this one) is now how people consume media, whereas not too long ago it was a novelty. And, “one that will be obvious to everyone soon is that all media is social media. There will be very few examples of media that stands alone and don’t have commentary from other people.” A positive thing about media, he believes, is that people question its credibility a lot more now than they used to, and media sources - bloggers, twitterers - will get a reputation for being credible when, and if, other people say they are credible.

Obvious doesn’t exist as a company any more, it’s all about Twitter. The plan had originally been to develop more products like Twitter and spin them off into their own companies. “In the case of Blogger and Twitter the ideas that became interesting were not the ideas the companies were founded for,” he says. The most interesting ideas are often hard to fund at first because they are so new. Most times, he says, it’s almost impossible to start something on the side (like he did, twice), you just say, “I can’t do that.” So, he “wanted to create environment to pursue those sort of ideas and where it would also be okay if they didn’t work” - the ideas that exist somewhere between hobbies and ones needing venture capital money.

While the theory behind Obvious is sound, “in practice it didn’t really get off the ground,” he says. “Twitter was getting to the point where it deserved to be its own company. I found myself gravitating towards Twitter and I didn’t know if I wanted to be in a mode where I was switching my focus so much. Multiple times a day I was switching projects and I found, for myself, that way of working didn’t work at all. I came to the conclusion it was better to do one really big thing than lots of small or medium things, and there was nothing that I could think of that was potentially as big as Twitter.” So, Evan is not even thinking beyond Twitter now.” Twitter’s the biggest possible thing I could do,” he says.

I asked him about his creativity. “I’ve always thought of myself as very creative. I’m not a ‘wacky’ creative, I’m more of an innovator and I see potential in things and I see opportunities and I’m good at synthesizing ideas.” He’s very clear that he didn’t invent Twitter, but he did see what it could become. “I’m good at recognizing new ideas when often the people who came up with them don’t recognize them themselves that they’re good ideas.” His skill is partly in “questioning assumptions, which I think is a core thing in creativity. I’m continually asking ‘are we thinking big enough?’ and pushing the team towards not just solving the problem we have today, but thinking much bigger, thinking ‘well, why are we stopping there?’”

And, when it comes to innovation, he is more of a doer than a talker. “I’m a big believer in just trying stuff,” he says. “I don’t want to debate too much whether or not something’s a good idea until we see it in action.” This is possible with web applications in particular where it’s often just as easy to try it out as talk about it. “The Achilles heal of successful products and even companies is that success locks you into a certain mode and it allows the upstarts to come in and try something completely different, or just different enough to be superior.”

During his time working for Google Inc., despite its reputation as one of the most innovative companies around, he saw a lot of projects not able to get off the ground because Google were focused on much more important incremental improvements. “You have to accept a certain amount of discomfort if you think there’s a better way to go.” At Google they use endless amounts of data to make the decisions and are constantly testing new things on a very small percentage of users and seeing their reaction. But, there are many innovations for which that process doesn’t really work, where numbers don’t necessarily tell you the story. “Sometimes you just have to go with your gut,” says Evan.

Talking of his own background, he says, “I definitely think people can learn how to ‘do’ creativity, but I think for the most part people ‘unlearn’ how to do it. At grade school my parents were told by my teachers I would come up with the right answers, but the wrong way. Even if I knew the answer I didn’t want to get to it the way they wanted me to get to it.” He strongly believes that creativity is often beaten out of kids at school, it’s about coming to the same conclusions as everybody else.

He rejected that philosophy, but rebelled in a quite way by throwing his energy into changing the status quo through technology. “It was a nerdy form of rebellion,” he says.