“Thanks to the Internet, buyers now know as much – if not more – about a company’s products and services than the company’s salespeople.

“This is because sales people are taught to sell features. Buyers, on the other hand, want to know how a company’s products / services will solve their business problems. Sales people often don’t understand their prospects’ businesses, so you end up with a real disconnect.”

So posits Ardath Albee, author of the new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale (McGraw Hill, 2009). And it’s this disconnect that’s made it marketing’s job to nurture prospects – via online content.

Content, says Ardath, has to address people’s concerns – it has to be an “anchor for conversations to happen.”

It’s developing the strategy behind this content that is the basis for Ardath’s book. “Prospect demographics are no longer enough,” says Ardath. “You have to know who your buyers are, their challenges, their likes, and their dislikes. You have to figure out how these people will find your company online when they have no idea you exist.”

Ardath’s book gives you a solid grounding in how to use online content to help these buyers find your company and then engage with you – from developing the content strategy (including personas) to creating “contagious content” that ultimately results in sales.

What I like about this book is that Ardath incorporates traditional marketing strategy with the new reality of marketing online. As she adroitly points out, the Internet has changed how we do business – not just because we’re all online searching for stuff, but because the Internet has put buyers in control of the sales process.

The book is filled with lots of practical advice on how to create the types of content that educates buyers as well as how to repurpose it (i.e. a blog post becomes a white paper that becomes a Webinar that becomes a series of Tweets). And, she explains how to tie your content marketing efforts back to the sales process using marketing automation tools.

Says Ardath, “I’m really enamored with marketing strategy, how to make it work and how to spread online content virally. I want to know how to get into buyers’ heads and what makes them choose the next step in the buying process.

“What it comes down to, quite frankly, is about adding value and not talking about your products. The companies who do that via content will be successful.”

You can purchase eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale at Amazon. You can learn more about Ardath – and see how she uses content to engage prospects – by reading her Marketing Interactions Blog, following her on Twitter (@ardath421), or connecting with her on LinkedIn.

The founders of HubSpot, Inc., Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, last week announced the publication of their new book, Inbound Marketing: Getting Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs (Wiley).

Full disclosure: I edited this book, so this post isn’t a book review nor was I paid (or even asked) to write it.

. . .

The one reason I really like Inbound Marketing is because Brian and Dharmesh talk about viewing one’s Website as a city or hub. You can have a Website that’s a small town, like Bath, New Hampshire (pop: 893), which has one road in and out — like this:

Or, you can have a Website that’s New York City where all roads, trains, buses, and planes lead to it — like this:

Because a small town Website has only one road to it, it has little in the way of visitors.

A large city Website has hundreds of ways to visit due to links from blogs, industry portals, other Websites, social media, and search engines — hence it gets loads of traffic all day every day.

If you want your Website to be an asset, you must view it as a thriving metropolis, and as Brian stated at HubSpot’s book launch party on Friday, October 16, you have to use all of the tools currently available to encourage people to visit it.

The more roads or paths you create, the more traffic you drive to your site, and the more leads / conversions / sales you get.

That in a nutshell is the basis of inbound marketing (a term coined by Brian and Dharmesh).

Brian and Dharmesh wrote Inbound Marketing because they wanted to share what they’ve learned as the founders of HubSpot and why marketing is changing. In it you’ll find their explanation for why inbound marketing works, and why it’s really important that you “get” the concept of inbound, as well as hundreds of practical tips for creating your own inbound marketing hub.

Although I consider myself a fairly sophisticated Web marketer, I learned quite a bit while editing Inbound Marketing. The book is an easy and interesting read, it’s geared toward small business owners, and it’s full of “real world” case studies on companies, from Zappos.com to Whole Foods Market, using inbound marketing tactics to reach customers and prospects.

So be sure to pick up your copy of Inbound Marketing — and be sure to download HubSpot’s new e-book: Hiring in the DARC Ages: Are the Right People on Your Marketing Team?

The e-book is a chapter from the Inbound Marketing book and it’s really fabulous as Brian and Dharmesh explain how to hire people who understand social media and inbound marketing — and how to apply it. After reading it, I realized I bring far more value to my clients than I knew.

Brian and Dharmesh, thank you again for the opportunity to work with you, and congratulations on your book and business success.

Ok, let’s get a couple of things out of the way.

First off, I am a huge fan of David Meerman Scott. I love his books, his e-books and his blog. I also like him — he’s a great guy and always willing to share his expertise.

I’ve also known David for almost 10 years — he was one of my first clients when he worked for a now defunct “dot com” company. He emailed me when he went out on his own and we’ve kept in touch ever since.

And last but not least, my client, Dr. Helaine Smith, is featured in his new book, World Wide Rave : Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories (Wiley, March 2009). I was one of those who received a galley copy.

Although I love David and his ideas, I was slow to see the value of social media. Because I work for B2B companies, I valued — and still do — traditional marketing practices like trade shows, white papers, direct mail and the like.

You know, the stuff that delivers LEADS.

But a revolution has taken place — and no where did I see this more clearly than with my own business.

The more I got my name “out there” using tools like this blog and LinkedIn and now Twitter, the more business came my way.

But I still didn’t quite buy into social media — the value of which I could see for a consultant like me or a dentist or even a hot Internet marketing company like HubSpot or a way cool company like Cisco.

But a company that manufactures high-tech widgets that only engineers could love?

No way, Jose.

But then I sat in a meeting last week with said bunch of engineers — and we’re talking the hardcore type — and one of them said, “You know, LinkedIn has a number of groups for our industry” and I just about fell over.

Social media is not about creating a company profile on Twitter and then sending people to your products and services pages via propaganda disguised as “Tweets.”

Social media is not about replacing your traditional marketing collateral with YouTube videos and then waiting for leads to drop out of the sky.

And social media is definitely not about creating content and then having people hand over their name, rank and serial number in exchange for this content.

As David says in his book, social media is about combining the many online  tools available and using them to reach your buyers directly by having people spread your ideas — with no strings attached.

For you marcom and PR folk steeped in traditional marketing and PR, this means letting others talk about your company without you “controlling the message.”

I really like World Wide Rave. I like it because David takes the time to answer many of his critics — and in the process, gives marketing and PR professionals ammunition to use when advocating the use of social media.

I especially like the fact that he dismisses the myth that a successful World Wide Rave only means that millions and millions of people view, listen or read your content. As David says,

A World Wide Rave is about reaching your buyer personas — the people who will be interested in your products and services. For you, that might just be 10 people. Or ten million. No matter the size of your market, when people are spreading your ideas online, it’s the best endorsement possible and a proven path to increased sales, fame and fortune.

David is doing lots of fun stuff to promote his book, which is due out March 3, 2009. Right now you can access his World Wide Rave blog and see the locations around the world where people have photographed themselves with his World Wide Rave poster — from the Boston area to Antarctica!

This poster campaign is just one clever way to conduct a World Wide Rave — one that *any* company can do with minimal cost and effort.

Judging by some of the conversations I’ve had with people, marketing is seen as something that’s deceptive, difficult, and energy-draining.

One woman business owner once said to me, “The thing I hate about being in business is that I have to get up every morning and market myself.”

(Truthfully, I had never considered business ownership in quite this way, probably because for me marketing is akin to breathing. I do it without thinking about it.)

Fortunately, people who fear or loathe marketing now have a great resource that explains how to make one’s marketing effortless: Gravitational Marketing: The Science of Attracting Customers by Jimmy Vee, Travis Miller and Joel Bauer.

The book is based on the fact that it’s easier to attract clients when you develop an “intellegent marketing system that positions you as an expert.” This positioning, the authors state, “causes qualified and interested prospects to come to you.”

What I like about this book is that it gives you real examples of using informational or educational materials to market your business. For example, experienced marketers know that for B2B lead generation direct mail letters, it’s better to “market the offer” (i.e. a white paper or report) rather than market the company’s product or service.

That’s because people will respond to an offer for information that will make their jobs easier or give them an edge — versus responding to a sales pitch. This concept is the same whether you’re in B2B or B2C.

The authors explain in detail how to use this “gravitational marketing” concept in direct mail, print, free publicity, the Internet, and radio and TV.

For experienced marketers/business owners who use this type of “info guru” marketing to successfully position themselves and their business, much of the information will be a review — although I did pick up a few excellent nuggets.

But, for those of you who dread marketing, this book will help remove your pain and give you a clear set of instructions for making your marketing automatic and effortless.

Be sure to check out Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller’s Gravitational Marketing Website and blog. The Website is filled with freebies and the blog has some great info, too (I love the photos they use!).

In the 1990s and throughout the first part of this century, the Big Three American car companies based their businesses on the SUV and big truck boom — a decision based on the fact that gas was cheap and plentiful at the time.

Humvees, full-sized pickups, and Chevy Suburbans — with their single digit MPGs — were hot vehicles for people who didn’t worry about future gas shortages.

Sales soared. Ford Motor Company even based its turnaround to profitability plan on SUVs and trucks.

Toyota, however, chose a different path. Instead of building low-mileage vehicles and coasting to “victory” on short-term sales, the company quietly invested over $1 billion dollars in developing a high-mileage, fuel efficient vehicle based on the fact that fuel shortages would happen again.

The result: Toyota’s hybrid technology, which has made the Prius and Hybrid Camry two of the top selling automobiles today.

Although gas prices have certainly helped hybrid sales in the short term, Toyota has overtaken Ford and is closing in on GM due to how it runs its business in the long term and its storied TPS — Toyota Production System.

David Magee covers the rise of Toyota in his book, How Toyota Became #1. Not a “corporate hagiography . . .  nor a corporate biography,” the book outlines the “principles, lessons, and strategies that helped make one company one of the most successful and inspirational in the world.”

If you’re a student of lean manufacturing, the auto industry, and exceptionally told stories about exceptionally great companies, then these are reasons enough to read How Toyota Became #1. Magee’s writing is crisp, clean and very easy to read. The book reads like a novel — the story so well told I raced through it in a matter of days.

If you’re a small service business, a freelancer, or a consultant, however, then this book becomes a must read.

Lean manufacturing precepts seemingly have no place in an office where “work” is based on ideas and providing services, such as accounting, graphic design, and even copywriting.

However, Toyota’s rise to greatness isn’t based on instilling mind-numbing production systems and order on employees. Instead, the company constantly seeks to find “waste” in its systems and processes — from the manufacturing floor to the managerial suite.

All employees are encouraged to seek out mistakes, question systems, and continually make improvements, no matter how small, to their jobs and the company’s systems.

It’s common knowledge that plant workers can “pull the cord” at any time during the production process if someone finds a problem.

The production line comes to a complete standstill — sometimes for up to a full half hour — until the problem is resolved.

What astounded me is that the cord is pulled over 5,000 times a year at the Kentucky plant alone.

Imagine how much your business could change — and profit — if you actively sought out and rectified problems in your systems this way every single day.

Reading this book made me see that any business, including my own, can improve quality and reduce “waste.” At Toyota, for example, problems are not simply “fixed,” they are analyzed and solved through the “five question” method:

Why did the machine suddenly stop? Because it blew a fuse.

Why did a fuse blow? Because the fuse wasn’t the right size.

Why was the wrong sized fuse in the box? Because one of the engineers put it there.

Why did the engineer do that? Because somebody in the supply room issued the wrong size fuse.

Why? Because the stock bin for fuses was mislabeled.

How Toyota Became #1 isn’t a how-to on developing business systems and processes.

Instead, it’s an insightful and thoughtful account about how a small Japanese company started off building looms in the 1930s and slowly built itself into a multinational manufacturing juggernaut – all the while maintaining the culture, values, and ideals upon which it was founded.

You can find a fair number of books that will tell you how to find new business — books on marketing, promoting yourself, networking, generating sales leads, etc.

However, few books actually address the very real pain of being so booked solid you have no time to even think about growing your business — or making changes to your business model so that you’re not working so many hours and can actually enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Sure, you can get books such as the E-Myth Revisited and Getting Things Done. Both are great books, but neither one really addresses how taking your business to the next level involves a great deal of soul searching . . . and fretting . . . and taking one step forward for every two or three steps back.

Michael Port, in his latest book, Beyond Booked Solid, takes you on this journey.

In Beyond Booked Solid, Port discusses how to address our own self-created business problems that we encounter once we’ve stepped up to a higher level of play.

According to Port, we need to “solve these new problems with a more sophisticated level of thinking than that which created the problems in the first place.”

It’s this “sophisticated thinking” that Port covers in his book. In succeeding chapters he talks about how making changes to your business and yourself is a continual process — indeed, if we’re serious about being successful, then we’re never quite done making continual improvements.

What I like about this book, and what makes it different from other “how to” business books, is that Port explains the process but leaves it up to you to decide what is best for you.

In other words, he  doesn’t say, “Do it this way and you’ll be successful like me.”

Instead, he has you delve deep into yourself to determine what you want from business and from your life, and then explains the various ways of getting there based on your priorities and business model.

What I also like about this book is that Port pulls in a great many ideas from many different sources. Indeed, he names this very process: cross-appropriation.

Due to his ability to see and adopt new ideas from outside his “disclosive space,” Port is able to use seemingly unrelated ideas in connection with taking a business to the next level.

For example, he repeatedly talks about Toyota and its mission to continually improve its automobiles and how business owners can apply this idea to their own office proccesses — including answering email! (It works, too.)

If you’re looking for a book that will tell you how to get more clients, read Port’s first book, Book Yourself Solid.

If you’re at the stage of the game where you’re completely overwhelmed with too much work, don’t remember the last time you took a day off, and can’t seem to find the time to work on your business because you’re too busy working in your business, read Beyond Booked Solid.

As soon as I finished reading it, I immediately knew what my next step was: signing up for Basecamp, an online project management application. I’ve been using it for two days now and don’t know how I went this long without it. 

As I’ve written before, I “get” LinkedIn, but I don’t see how it can help my business.

I’ve had a few people tell me LinkedIn is a contact management system, but I use ACT!. LinkedIn does not give me the ability to keep track of prospects’ and customers’ histories (plus spouse and kid names, birthdays, home address and phone numbers, etc.), so it’s not a place where I would keep track of contacts.

Other people have said it’s a social networking site, but I prefer face-to-face events where I can chat with people and catch up on their lives.

So, it was with relief that I found Jason Alba’s book, I’m On LinkedIn — Now What???

Like me, Jason found LinkedIn just was not working for him. As he states in the intro:

I knew that if I could figure out what all the buzz was about, and learn how professionals were using LinkedIn to improve their businesses and careers, I could benefit. But at first I just didn’t understand what I needed to do.

Jason then proceeds to explain exactly what LinkedIn is — and what it is not. To wit, LinkedIn is a networking tool, but it is not a social networking site like Facebook or a contact manager. (It’s also not a “time hog,” to use Jason’s words.)

LinkedIn is ideal for becoming known within other people’s networks — something I intuitively knew but couldn’t articulate.

That’s because some people prefer to ask their networks for recommendations — which is how crisis management expert Jonathan Bernstein heard about me. He posed a question to his LinkedIn network and someone recommended me.

How you can get more out of LinkedIn

A few of the things I learned from this book include the typical things, such as how to write a better profile and why recommendations are important.

However, the main thing I learned — and which I had no clue even existed — is that LinkedIn members have the ability to post and answer questions. Click on the “Answers” tab and you’ll find dozens of topics ranging from health and medical to marketing and PR.

And, this is where the lightbulb went on. Michelle Vranizan Rafter, Contributing Editor for Workforce Management and a business and technology reporter, posted the following question: “What’s your favorite blog for writers?”

Twenty three people responded to her post — and that’s how this blog got listed on Michelle’s WordCount blog in her post, “Best Blogs for Writers.”

Bottom line: if you have no clue why you should be on LinkedIn, or if you want to get more out of your LinkedIn experience, read Jason Alba’s book. The first thing I did after I read it? Made my profile “public.”

Two days ago I met with two gentleman to talk about developing a new Website for their firm.

The meeting progressed as these types of meetings usually do: we talked about their business, their objectives, and how they wanted to communicate their message.

The discussion had one crucial difference, however. On the conference table, front and center, sat David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

The two gentleman had read the book cover to cover and had digested its message to their very core.

Consequently they interlaced much of David’s wisdom in their discussion about what they wanted with regard to their new site.

I wanted to stand up and cheer when one of them said, “What David says, and we totally agree with, is that it’s all about the customer, not our egos.” Hooray!!!

Which is why I am very pleased that David has issued a new free e-book, “The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word of mouse spreads your ideas for free.”

I have to admit, viral marketing scares me a bit. I do associate it with hip “buzz marketing” agencies who can put together clever campaigns that burn through the Internet.

I changed my mind after reading David’s e-book.

Suddenly my fingers were itching to write down the ideas that came to me as I raced through his content.

You don’t have to be a hip, 20-something, Starbucks drinking, Twitter using, Facebook addict to make viral marketing work for you. No, all you need is some time to think out a campaign, a modest budget, and this is key — an understanding of how viral marketing works.

This is the piece David gives you in his new e-book. I’m not going to spoil the fun by telling you what he writes about. Download the book for yourself — and then put together your viral campaign.

For the first time since I moved to the East Coast, I’m disappointed I no longer live in the Silicon Valley.

That’s because Daniel Lyons, the person behind the highly popular Fake Steve Jobs blog and author of the book, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, is only doing a West Coast book tour — including a reading at the center of the anti-Apple universe: Microsoft (The Borg to Fake Steve fans).

According to reporter Carolyn Johnson in today’s Boston Globe article, “The iPhony,”

After over a year of psuedonymously skewering “Beastmaster” Bill Gates and the “Faceberg” who founded Facebook, Lyons was outed by The New York Times in August as the writer of the blog that has become a must-read among the technorati for its acid tongue-in-cheek take on how the real founder of Apple Inc. might view the world – and the members of the media who are watching him.

I had the chance to read Options over the weekend.

Simply put, it’s terrific. Ok, it’s hilarious — to the point where my husband and son kept asking, “What *are* you reading?” — because I couldn’t stop laughing.

The conversations and events are so close to real life you can picture everything happening, including the pot-induced conversations with Larry Ellison, the Hillary Clinton donation shakedown at a tony Silicon Valley fundraising meeting, and Bono giving away his custom iPod to a homeless person.

So Dan, did you get to meet the Beastmaster himself or is that classified?

I have a few books on copywriting that I refer to repeatedly: Bob Bly’s The Elements of Copywriting, John Caples‘ Tested Advertising Methods, and David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising. These are books I’ll never resell on Amazon. One, because they’re that good and two, because they’re filled with underlinings, notes, and dog-eared pages.

Steve Slaunwhite’s new book, The Everything Guide to Writing Copy, is also destined to become one of my top reference books.

(Full disclosure: Steve and I are very good friends — but I’d write the following even if I didn’t know him.)

In this approximately 300 page guide, Steve explains how to write — well basically everything and anything that needs to be written in order to sell something.

What I like about this book is that the information includes writing for the Internet as well as ”lingo” and writing strategies that many of us might not know.

Although the copywriting strategies are brief, given the nature of the book, what you do get is factual and useful.

For example, I don’t write video scripts. But, should I need to write one (especially with online video becoming more mainstream), Steve includes an entire section that covers this topic as well as writing radio spots and even billboards.

A book of this type can easily overwhelm the reader, but not in this case. The content is broken down by subject matter and type. Short paragraphs, bullets, and sub-heads make it easy to find what you need. 

I especially like the smartly placed call-out graphics which draw the eye to important information, and that these tips are placed within the body of the main text, versus the margin. (I hate when my eye is dragged from the middle of the page to something hanging out in left field.)

More important, Steve’s prose is clean and smooth as silk, making this book, like everything Steve writes, a true pleasure to read.

In short, this is a great reference book for the pro or someone just starting out. In fact, I plan on giving a copy to my friend who recently started a copywriting business.