Join the Age of Conversation Bum Rush tomorrow at Amazon
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I've been selected, along with some 274 others, to participate in the sequel to the wildly successful The Age of Conversation, a book phone number lead about emerging media and marketing, collectively written by more than 100 authors from around the world.
Todd Andrlik calls the sequel
The most massive authorship undertaking in history. We’re talking Guinness Book baby!" It's not often one gets to help make history. Needless to say I'm very honored to take part.
In a subsequent post
I'll explain the purpose of the sequel in further detail. For now, I want to mention that tomorrow, Saturday, March 29, is what's being called Age of Conversation Bum Rush. The idea is to generate as many touch points around the web as possible so that it will be hard not to spot the Age of Conversation activity.
Buy the Book & send others
This is the #1 call to action, because this is where we want to see the most impact. NOTE: Please buy 1 copy at a time because Amazon counts bulk orders once, and please use this affiliate link, which will help us in tracking sales. Remember, all the proceeds from the book sales and referrals will go to charity.
Blog About It
Make sure you have a prominent link to the Amazon listing so that readers can easily purchase the book. (Remember to use the affiliate link above. All of these earnings will go to charity as well. Twitter Commentary - You can follow @Freshpeel, @DrewMcLellan, @servantofchaos for tweets on this tomorrow. Also, any tweets you do on the topic, please use code #AOC so that it can be picked up by Twemes. com.
BTrackback or Comment
The post that Chris Wilson leaves on his Fresh Peel blog March 29, at 12am CST, so that everyone can follow the conversation and help promote exposure on social sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del. icio. us, etc.) Digg the posts listed on Chris' site and send emails and shouts to friends requesting Diggs.
Stumble the posts listed
Bookmark your posts on Del. icio. us. Add your post to other social media outlets ( Technorati, Ma.gnolia, Furl, BlinkList, Newsvine, Facebook, etc.)
Send an email to your friends about the Bum Rush for AoC.
Keep talking - Get on ooVoo, iChat, Aim, or where ever you like to talk, and start talking.Dr. Wilson said that, if you looked closely at the wall, you would notice cracks between the blocks of stone that comprised it. He referred to them as "niches." He said the pilgrims would stuff these niches with slivers of paper, which were their prayers.Dr. Wilson went on to recommend
That we do the same thing in our marketing; rather than trying to scale the entirety of the wall, we should find an unfilled (or partially filled) niche and fill it. Brilliant!
I incorporated both the principle and his illustration into the book Realty Blogging, suggesting that blogs are good niche marketing penetration tools. Now that we've morphed somewhat from blogs to other forms of social media, I want to suggest that the future of social networks is in the niches. Broad-based networks like Facebook or MySpace my have won the network wars in terms of the massive amounts of traffic they garner every day, but my experience has shown them to be largely ineffective for niche marketing purposes.
For example, most Facebook groups go unattended with very little participation. You'd think groups of three, four or five hundred (or more) would be a beehive of activity. Most aren't.
I think a much more effective model is the creation of indigenous, self-standing niche networks like the Society for Word of Mouth, which maintains a focus on using WOM for marketing purposes, The Workbench, a small business network started by John Jantsch, or one I just learned about this morning, E.Factor, a niche network for entrepreneurs. To me, these hold the greatest promise for mining the goldmine of intellectual capital contained among the members and truly proving themselves to be viable, worth the investment of time. And, using tools like Ning or KickApps, the things are so easy to start.
Social media strategist Paul Gillin holds similar views. He says ">vertical market sites are where the "more interesting" opportunities lie, citing niche communities for healthcare, the elderly and moms.