The Engagement Principles

Book sites and blogs couldn’t be a more natural fit.
Avid readers love to discover a new author whose work they can mine for many titles. So the opportunities for connections between reviewers, readers and booksellers abound.
Allibris Book Blog
Allibris is a network of booksellers, so buyers can log on and seamlessly search many, many booksellers for [...]

I’ve long said that engagement marketing offers smaller players the chance to trounce their bigger, slower-moving competitors.
That theory has been embraced by Isis - a small manufacturer of outdoor clothing for women - who just fired up the Isis For Women blog.

While the blog is brand new and its “voice” has yet to come to [...]

Clients ask me about e-mail marketing.
Not because they want to expand their use of it. Instead, they fear being labeled “spammers.”
They might be right.
In fact, a recent Marketing Sherpa case study says B-to-B e-mail is twice as likely to be falsely blocked as spam.
“We’ve known for three years now that the false positive rate for [...]

BzzAgent is a word-of-mouth marketing agency - a company that recruits everyday folks (that’s unpaid everyday folks) to act as agents, generating “buzz” about the agency’s clients.

It’s a cutting-edge marketing concept from a cutting-edge marketing company. Naturally, they’re committed to a cutting-edge blog.
The 90 Days of BzzAgent
BzzAgent’s initial blogging effort was “90 Days of BzzAgent” [...]

I recently received an e-mail from the CRMGuru newsletter.
Frighteningly titled “Humanizing the Digital Brand Experience” it contained the following two graphs of copy:
Emerging media channels reach broadly across all age, gender, income, and ethnic groups now that 79% of US households are online and 84% have mobile phones. These mainstream consumers have new – and [...]

The Penguin books blog has been online since July, 2006 (at least according to their archives), but it provides an excellent example of a passion-based industry leader reaching out to its customer base via engagement.
The comment count looks good, and the level of discussion is literate. It looks like they’re off to a strong start.

In [...]

A comment from another blogger reminded me of a topic I was noodling around earlier, but hadn’t gotten right.
It’s about bandwidth. Not the Internet kind, but the engagement kind.
The idea is simply this: your typical customer/prospect has limited bandwidth available for your message. Yet the available bandwidth of the engaged customer is enormous.
To reach the [...]

Engagement Marketing isn’t yet generating a lot of buzz, but to the 11,000 attendees at the ad:tech show in New York, it was the hot topic.
David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America, spoke Nov. 6 at length about engagement in his keynote titled, “From the Alley to the Avenue.”
“I don’t care [...]

Even a cursory reading of my blog should suggest strong support for small business blogs (medium and big biz blogs too).
And why not? As some one who plied the waters of interrupt marketing for so many years, I’ve come to realize the benefits of engagement marketing, especially in light of the new media channels opening [...]

I’d love to sit and blog more today, but the skies are clouding over, rain is coming, and it’s a perfect day to go fishing.
So I’m going fishing. But I’ll leave you with this…
In the wake of the YouTube acquisition, the thoughtful-but-wordy Communities Dominate Brands (CDB) blog wrestles with the concept of building an online [...]