Seth Godin's free Tribes ebook

In case you don't read Seth Godin's blog, here's a link to his post about his new ebook. It acts as a sort of companion to his new book Tribes, which launches today.

I haven't had a chance to read all of the case studies in the ebook yet, but I read a good deal of them on the Tribes site that Godin set up. He really found an amazing group of people with vast, fresh ideas, and the studies that I've read so far have been thought-provoking.

Aaaaand, because I love a shameless plug, two of the case studies were written by yours truly. Look for "Group Mind & the Improv Musical" and "The 12-Hour Geek Tribe." I would love to hear what you think, good or bad.

E-book review: 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies

One of the many facets of WonderGroup is search engine optimization/keyword research. One of the blogs that has helped inundate me with information on SEO is the Wordtracker Academy, which emailed me earlier this week to promote a new e-book.

Check out 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies here. Here's what I thought of it:

PROS
--> Very digestible-- each tip has its own clear, bulleted page with no additional fluff.

--> While much of the content is basic to SEO, many of the tips offer new perspectives and helpful tips.

--> The book provides a great list of free tools I hadn't used before.

--> The author, Aaron Wall, is great about keeping a conversational tone, and using anectdotes and examples to clarify his points.

CONS
--> It feels like no one even proofread this thing once. Words like "chuncks" (chunks) and "coveing" (covering) would have been caught with even a basic Spellcheck, and mistakes like "inking" (linking) and "forward" (toward) mean that no human took the time to scan the final product. This kind of thing drives me crazy. They even misspelled URLs they were making a case for ("competer.com" for compete.com). Sloppy.

--> The first thing that I did was print the book off so I could read it at my own pace, mark it up, pass it on, etc. While mostly this wasn't a problem-- the layout is really great for reading it on the printed page-- the book is heavy with hyperlinks. If the URLs had been spelled out instead, I could see this book being much more useful in the long-term. My printed version is much less useful than it could have been.

OVERALL
--> Worth the $27 we spent on it, because the content is the most important thing and there's a lot to be learned here.

Word of Mouth

Over the course of lunch yesterday I started reading a book... and kept reading a book... and finished reading a book. (It ended up being a long, but massively productive lunch... in case the boss is reading.)

The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II is available on Amazon, but also as a completely free ebook. Here's where things get interesting: I found out about this book through a post on Seth Godin's blog. Author Dave Balter apparently gave ebook rights to a few prominent marketing bloggers-- in fact, you can't even get it directly from his post on his company's blog.

The word of mouth generated in this fashion speaks for itself. It isn't just smart, and it's definitely not a gimmick... it's putting your money where your mouth is.

Probably the most important fact about this whole thing is that the book is good. It's full of fantastic ideas, anecdotes and humor* about viral marketing, WOM and how marketing concepts fail. None of this would work without the strong product behind it.

Check out the ebook and let me know what you think. If you're motivated, you can get through it in 2-3 hours. ;)

*The book quotes The Big Lebowski, in case you think I'm hawking some kind of dry textbook.