MackCollier.com

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IKEA Shuts Down Popular Fan Site IKEAHackers

A few years ago, the band Blink 182 was getting ready to release its new single.  It went to YouTube and found thousands of instances where fans of the band were illegally using its music in homemade videos.

The band cataloged over 100,000 instances of copyright infringement by its fans, then instead of sending lawyers after them, Blink 182 made the video for its new single from videos created by its fans.

Then the band thanked its fans.  For stealing its music.

This example is in contrast to how IKEA recently reacted when it discovered a popular fan site called IKEAHackers.  The site, which is where fans of the brand share their ‘hacks’ for making its products better, has been delivered a Cease and Desist letter from IKEA.  According to its lawyers, the brand objects to the fact that the fan running the site has inserted advertising on the site in an effort to offset the costs of maintaining it.  As the site’s owner explains:

Needless to say, I am crushed. I don’t have an issue with them protecting their trademark but I think they could have handled it better. I am a person, not a corporation. A blogger who obviously is on their side. Could they not have talked to me like normal people do without issuing a C&D?

IKEAhackers.net was set up in 2006 and truly not with the intent to exploit their mark. I was a just crazy fan. In retrospect, a naive one too. It is not an excuse but that was just how it was when I registered IKEAhackers. Over the last 8 years the site has grown so much that I could not juggle the demands of a full time job and managing IKEAhackers. It also costs quite a bit to run a site this large. Since IKEA® does not pay me a cent, I turned to advertising to support myself and this site.

To clarify, IKEA has every right to do what it feels is necessary to protect its brand and its images and likeness.  My guess is that’s the true motivation behind IKEA’s actions, and it feels if it spins that it doesn’t like the site due to the advertising on it that it might lessen the negative PR hit.

It’s also worth noting that this story will be hot for about 3-4 days, then most people will forget about it. Except for fans of the site, many of which were also IKEA fans.  Were.  

I mentioned the Blink 182 story at the start because it along with the IKEA story is a perfect example of the difference between how most rock stars view its fans and how most brands view its fans.  Both the brand and the band saw that its fans were acting in a way that could be viewed as damaging to its image and even copyright infringement.  But while Blink 182 saw fans illegally using its music as a possible opportunity, IKEA saw fans running the IKEAHackers site as a possible threat.  

That’s an incredibly important distinction.  And it brings up another equally important distinction between most brands and most bands.  Most brands have little to no connection with its fans, so as a result they don’t understand them and they don’t trust them.  While most bands are connected with its fans so they do understand them and do trust them.  Blink 182 understood that its fans weren’t trying to hurt the band with its videos on YouTube, they were trying to help the band.  IKEA apparently doesn’t see the IKEAHackers site as being helpful to its brand, instead it sees it as being hurtful.

How could IKEA have handled this situation as if it were an opportunity instead of a treat?  If the brand was really worried about advertisements on the site, then make a deal with the fan running it to have her remove all ads, and in exchange IKEA would sponsor the site for the amount she would have earned in ad revenue.

That turns a negative PR event into an incredibly positive one for IKEA.  It generates new fans for the brand, and everyone wins.

It also validates to IKEA’s fans why they were right to be fans of the brand.

The lesson: When you feel your fans are acting in a way that could hurt your brand, understand that your fans love you, and look for a way to work with them, instead of against them.  The only thing worse than ignoring your fans, is giving them a reason to stop loving you.

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 4: How and Why Online Communities Form

Welcome to the fourth episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show!  Yesterday during the #Bizheroes chat on Twitter, we were discussing the power of communities.  I wanted to talk about that a bit more in this episode of #FanDamnShow.

Here’s the transcript from yesterday’s #Bizheroes chat, please let me know what you think about this episode!

 

Here’s a direct link to the show and you can subscribe in iTunes if you like!

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show is LIVE!

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I’ve been waiting 7 years to say this, but I have a new podcast to tell you about!  The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show will be focused on marketing topics and how companies can better connect with their customers and covert them into passionate fans.  If you’ve read this blog or Think Like a Rock Star you know what you’ll be hearing.

Show Notes:

Hope you enjoy it!  The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show will be short by design, because as I explain in the episode I dislike hour-long podcasts.  Most episodes will be 15 minutes or less, and the first one clocks in at just under 8 minutes.

Hope you enjoy it, and let me know what you think!

If the above player doesn’t work for you, here’s a direct link to the episode.

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How Figures Toy Company is Masterfully Using Social Media to Build Product Demand, and Giving Me Back My Childhood At the Same Time

If you grew up in the 1970s as I did, the odds are you owned a toy created by the Mego Corporation.  The company made its hay with dolls (today called Action Figures) and its most popular line was The World’s Greatest Super-Heroes, giving children everywhere their first exposure to characters like Batman, Spiderman and Superman.  The figures were incredibly well made and detailed for the time, including cloth costumes that could be removed (and then lost).  One of my earliest childhood memories is as a 6 year-old taking my $6 and going to TG&Y and happily spending six week’s worth of allowance on a Robin doll.  Those were the days.

And a company called Figures Toy Company is now helping me relive those days.  Last year the company announced that it had acquired the DC Comics license and would be recreating these magical Mego figures of my childhood in near perfect replicas of the originals.

I’m not sure exactly how you ‘squee’, but I think I did it back in January when I first discovered this news.  I immediately started checking out FTC’s website and social media presences  for more information on the figures, and that’s when I realized that FTC is doing a wonderful job of leveraging social media to build demand for these figures.

First, let’s consider the market for these figures.  At $25 and up, these figures aren’t for priced to sell to children, they are primarily for adult collectors, and more specifically adult collectors that are fans of Mego figures.

One of the points I make in Think Like a Rock Star is that fans want special access.  They want to go behind the scenes and get a backstage pass.  FTC has been releasing these figures in ‘Waves’ of 4 characters at a time.  In most cases, they announce the upcoming wave 6-8 months before the product officially goes on sale.

So how do you keep fans excited for 6-8 months?  By giving them special access and a look behind the scenes.  Here’s what FTC has been doing:

1 – After the initial figure wave announcement, they then show pictures of the sculpt of the figure’s head.  This gets fans excited and gives them a better idea of what the final figure could look like.

2 – Next, they’ll reveal the prototype for the completed figure, giving fans a much better idea of what to expect.

3 – The first two steps take place over several weeks, so by now it’s about a month or two prior to the expected on-sale date of the figures.  Next, FTC will post pictures on its Facebook page that show the figures being assembled in its factory:

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4 – Finally, the figures go on sale!  Then when they arrive, delighted customers take pictures of them and send them to FTC, who then turns around and posts the pictures from its fans on its Facebook page:

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And along the way FTC is using its Facebook page to answer any and all questions from customers, often giving them nuggets about future releases.

From a marketing standpoint, this level of transparency is exactly what fans of these figures are clamoring for.  There’s been no shortage of geeking out on blogs and forums about these figures, and fans across the board are thrilled with FTC for being so open about the process.  Giving fans better information about how the figures are made and detailing the process helps build demand for the figures.

And it’s leading to big sales for FTC.  The first wave of 4 figures were released in November of last year, and barely six months later the entire wave has sold out and the products have been retired.  The lesson here is if you have passionate fans for the products you make, give them MORE information and behind the scenes information about the products they love.  It could have a BIG impact on your business’ bottom line, as it is for FTC.

PS: Yes FTC is getting my money as well!

FTCBAts

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Study: Popularity is Determined More By Peer Pressure Than Quality

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This morning I came across a fascinating study (via NPR) done by Princeton professor Matthew Salganik who attempted to learn why works of art become popular.  In essence, Salganik wanted to know if popularity was based more so on the actual quality of the art, or does social influence play a role?

To find the answer, Salganik surveyed 30,000 teenagers and let them listen to 48 unknown songs by unknown bands.  What Salganik did was divide these teenagers into one of two groups.  The first group would listen to the music and then rate the songs from one to five stars.  Then after listening to the songs and rating them, the person would then have the opportunity to download the song for free.  This was the ‘independent’ group.

The second group was called the ‘social’ group, and it was divided into eight smaller groups.  Each person in each of these eight groups follows the same process as the independent group.  They listen to the songs, then rate them and finally are presented with the option to download the song for free, or not.  The big difference is that with the social group, every member can see how many times every song has been downloaded by members of their group.  In short, they can see which songs are popular within their group and which ones are not, and they have this information available to them before they rate each song.  But they are only able to see the popularity of the songs within their group (of eight groups within the larger social group).  They can’t see the popularity levels for the songs in the other 7 groups of the larger social group.  Also, in some cases the songs are ordered based on popularity (most popular listed first) and in other groups the popularity of each song is shown, but the list isn’t sorted by popularity.

What Salganik found was that when participants were made aware of the popularity of the songs (but the songs were not sorted based on popularity) that the more popular songs were rated more highly.  When the songs were actually sorted according to popularity, this affect was magnified.  So the popular songs became much more popular and the songs that were lower ranked became even less popular.

Salganik appeared at the Thought Leader Forum in 2011 and explained in more detail some of his findings from this study:

There’s this idea that the more people can see what other people are doing, the more they’re going to find the best thing. But in fact, what we see is that when people can see what other people are doing, they start following people, who are actually following other people who are following other people. And this process of following can become decoupled from the underlying reality.

To give a concrete example from these experiments, there is one song, “Lockdown” by 52 Metro, again a song no one has heard of by a band no one has heard of. In one world, this song came in first. It was the most downloaded
song. In another world, this exact same song came in 40th out of 48. This exact same song competing against the exact same other songs.

But you can see to the extent that when we have these kinds of feedback processes, when people are following what other people are doing, slight initial fluctuations at the beginning can become locked in, and then that leads to
very different outcomes, even for the exact same song.

Isn’t that fascinating?  All of this points to a fundamental truth: We as human beings gravitate to that which other human beings have identified as being ‘popular’.  We trust each other and seek out input when we are choosing, especially when given a wide variety to choose from, as the participants in Salganik’s study were given.

The takeaway for your business?  That much of the purchase decision the average customer makes is simply based on feedback from other customers.  Which is exactly why your business should be embracing and engaging with its most passionate customers so that they can help connect with other customers before they make a purchase.

Remember, rock stars don’t have fans because they are rock stars, they are rock stars because they have fans.  If you want to be a rock star brand, you need to learn to connect with your most passionate customers in much the same way that rock stars do.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Since this study was rooted in music (where ‘quality’ is more subjective), does that mean peer pressure has less impact on the popularity of products such as say, travel luggage, where the criteria for what defines a quality product is less subjective?

Pic via Flickr user Gonzalo Baeza  

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Brands, Stop Chasing New Customers and Ignoring Your Existing Ones

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Now is a good time to be in the market for a new satellite television provider.  The two main competitors, Dish and DirecTv, are throwing all kinds of incentives at you.  iPad minis, free DVR upgrades, free Visa cards.  Free, free, free.

The catch is, you typically have to be a new customer to take advantage of these offers.

It’s backwards, and it’s bullshit. When you reward new customers instead of existing ones you are training your customers that it pays to leave you.  Valuing new customers and ignoring loyal ones basically mocks your repeat customers.

Many industries do this, especially when the space is dominated by 2-3 competitors with very similar offerings.  Companies have to constantly offer new and additional incentives for new customers because they aren’t giving loyal customers any incentive to remain loyal.

Rock stars typically do the exact opposite.  Fans are rewarded.  Fans get special access, they get VIP treatment.  They typically get the best seats at concerts, they are the ones that get secret shows, they are the ones that get first access to new products and breaking news.  With rock stars, new customers are ignored in much the same way that many markets ignore existing customers.

I’ve talked about this before, but you build loyalty and create fans with rewards, not incentives.  Offering me products if I will switch to your company doesn’t win my loyalty to your brand, it simply gives me an incentive to take advantage of the offer.  I may have to sign a 2-year contract to get all the goodies, but if you have ignored me and my business, guess what happens in 2 years?  I will switch to your competitor, because they just offered me prizes and incentives for switching.

You are training your customers to leave you.

It’s not about offering incentives for new customers, it’s about offering rewards for existing customers.  Because referrals from happy customers is a far better marketing tool for you.

If the goal is to acquire new customers then you need to follow the rock star marketing model: Focus on delighting your existing customers, with the understanding that this will encourage your existing customers to become fans who will bring you new customers.   

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Why Context Makes Word of Mouth Marketing So Powerful

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Tomorrow I’ll be speaking in Birmingham to the Alabama Banker’s Association, presenting Think Like a Rock Star.  One of the points I’ll be making is the power of your fans utilizing context in their word of mouth.  We all understand the power of word of mouth, and there is a raft of research that proves that a product recommendation from another customer is considered more valuable than a marketing message from a brand.  We know this.

But what we often don’t appreciate is the power of context as it applies to word of mouth marketing.  When customers market to each other, they tailor their message to make it more appealing to others, based on their knowledge of the person they are talking to.  This is incredibly powerful, because your friend likely understands your wants and needs better than the brand that’s trying to win your business.

For example, a bank might be rolling out a new mortgage offering it wants to promote, but you know your friend is looking to buy her daughter her first car, so lower rates for auto loans is more important.  A fan of the bank would promote it to the friend with the daughter based on that context, understanding that the friend isn’t interested in a mortgage or re-financing their home right now.

Here’s another example that I’ve witnessed multiple times on Twitter.  I’ll be chatting with someone and we’ll start talking about my book and I’ll mention they should read it.  They will respond with something like ‘Thanks, I’ll check it out!’  Then a few minutes later, a friend of their’s will tweet them and say something like ‘I’ve read Think Like a Rock Star and it was great!  It would be perfect for your company, you should buy it!’  Then the person will say they are going to buy it.  My recommendation (as the author of the book) wasn’t enough to convince them to buy it.  But when their friend steps in and endorses the book, and adds context to why it would benefit them, that clinches the sale!

The end goal for your brand is to communicate a relevant marketing message to your customers because the more relevant the message is, the greater its chance of converting into a sale.  But sending relevant and customized messages to every customer would have exorbitant costs, which is why brands send a few select marketing messages out designed to reach the mass market.

But your satisfied customers are the link that gives other customers those relevant marketing messages that convert into sales.  This is exactly why word of mouth works.  And when you connect with your satisfied customers, you empower them to better communicate relevant selling points for your brand, to other customers they come in contact with.

Real business benefits from connecting with your biggest fans.  Look back at your own experiences and think about what has worked for you, are you more likely to purchase an item based on seeing a cool commercial, or hearing a recommendation from a friend you trust?

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Brands, You Have to Build Your ‘Trust’ Muscle

Steve Jobs was probably the greatest business orator and speaker of the last 50 years.  Jobs had a wonderful talent for delivering amazing presentations and captivating an audience.

With that in mind, watch this short video of Jobs prepping for his first on-air appearance in 1978:

Isn’t it interesting to watch a fidgety and obviously very nervous Jobs say “You need to tell me where the restroom is too, because I’m deathly ill, actually, and ready to throw up at any moment.”  Then he adds to someone off camera “I’m not joking!”

Yet 40 years later in 2007, he was delivering the presentation to launch the iPhone, considered to be one of the greatest business presentations of all-time.

Experience is a wonderful teacher, and it molded Jobs from that fidgety computer geek in 1978 to a polished professional that became the gold standard for delivering compelling business presentations.

Today, we’re asking brands to do something equally scary on a scale they’ve never had to before: We are asking brands to trust their most passionate customers.

One of the things that struck me the most while writing Think Like a Rock Star was to delve into the differences between how rock stars approach engaging with their customers versus how brands do.  While many brands are reluctant to connect directly with their customers and give them any control over messaging or promotion, rock stars literally view their customers as marketing partners that they trust to act in the rock stars’ best interest.

This graphic explains why:

InteractionsInteraction leads to Understanding which leads to Trust which leads to Advocacy.  Rock stars are constantly seeking interaction with their fans, because they not only want to better understand their fans, they want their fans to better understand them.  Because rock stars know that when their fans understand them, they can then trust them, and advocate for them.  Also, since rock stars understand and trust their fans, they know that these fans will act in the rock star’s best interests.

Most brands never start on this path because they don’t seek to have those interactions with their customers that are freely available thanks in great part to the rise of social media tools.  If brands would interact more with their fans they would begin to understand them more, which leads to trust, which leads to advocacy.

Which is also a two-way street.  When your brand purposely shuts itself off from your customers, you are also restricting the customers’ ability to interact with you, and then to trust you as well as deadening the chances of having that customer advocate for your brand.

And here’s why it’s an unfounded fear:  Because when you interact with your customers and they understand you they also trust you.  So not only will they advocate for you, they will also spread your message and trust you to spread the message that you give them.  This is what so many brands misunderstand about their fans, they believe their fans will spread a message that’s inconsistent with their ‘messaging’.  Instead, fans will want to work with your brand to make sure they are spreading the message that you want them to.

But it starts with your brand taking the first step to reach out to your customers and trusting them if you want them to trust you.

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The Greatest Marketing Lesson: Passion Trumps Control

We all want to be rock stars, even brands.  Because rock stars have fans that love them like this:

Fans that so passionately love their favorite rock star that they literally break down and start crying when they talk about them.  And brands don’t have that. Except, when they do:

So if we accept that brands can have fans that love them just as passionately as rock stars do, then the question becomes why don’t more brands have such devoted fans? 

When I started writing Think Like a Rock Star, the question I wanted to answer is why so many rock stars like Lady Gaga have fans that love them, while most brands do not.  I expected to learn that rock stars simply have an innate advantage when it comes to creating and cultivating fans.

In fact, I learned that rock stars aren’t doing anything to create and cultivate fans that brands can’t do.  Instead, the answer to why rock stars have fans and brands don’t lies in what brands aren’t willing to do.

The Greatest Marketing Tool Ever Invented

The rock concert.

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I just love this photo.  Look at those smiling faces!  Happy people in the audience, and on the stage.  Everyone happy, happy, happy.

Think about what a rock concert is.  It’s a way that rock stars have created to:

1 – Give a special experience to its biggest fans (that helps validate why they are fans to begin with)

2 – Sell that experience to its fans

3 – Sell merchandise to its fans

4 – Bring its biggest fans together in one place and connect them to each other

That fourth and final point is what makes concerts so valuable to rock stars.  Sure, the ticket and merchandise sales create a huge direct benefit to the rock star, but bringing all those fans together is an incredible driver of positive word of mouth for the rock star.  Think about it, thousands of people that share a common interest are placed in the same area for several hours.  What are they going to do before and after (and during) the concert?  Interact with other fans and talk about how and why they love their favorite rock star.  It helps validate why they are fans, and when they leave the concert, those fans will feel better about being a fan of the rock star and by extension better about themselves.

In essence, the fans are marketing for the rock star.  Those fans are going to go home and tell all their friends about what an amazing experience the concert was and they will encourage their friends and family to attend a concert as well.  So the simple act of connecting fans to each other is incredibly powerful.

And it’s backed by facts and science.  First, there are a plethora of studies that word of mouth is a more effective and trusted form of communication than any type of communication that originates from a brand.  IOW if you want to sell your widget to my friend Tim, the odds are that my telling him to buy your widget will result in a sale long before your commercial will.

Additionally, science backs the power of letting passionate people spread your message.   Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute concluded that it only takes 10 percent of a population holding an unshakable belief in order to convince the majority to adopt that same belief.  In fact, the scientists found that this will always be the case.  This study speaks to the power of letting your most passionate fans spread your message.  It’s no coincidence that two of the most popular business case studies for building fans (Maker’s Mark, The Fiskateers) both have elements built into it that connects fans to each other.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the average brand won’t trust its marketing messages with its most passionate customers even if that brand understands the business value of positive word of mouth.  Because even though most brands understand and appreciate the power of word of mouth, they value and covet having control over the marketing messages they send their customers even more.

So then the answer to why rock stars have fans and brands do not goes back to simple marketing.  But not so much the message itself, but how that message is conveyed to others.

If we accept that the average customer views another customer to be more credible than the average brand, then we also must accept that the average customer views marketing messages from another customer to be more credible than marketing messages from the average brand.

What you gain in control, you lose in credibility.  We talk about how brands need to build ‘relationships’ with their customers, but healthy relationships are built on trust.  If your brand doesn’t trust its customers, you probably won’t keep them very long.

Pic via Kmeron

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Teaching Marketing Students to “Think Like A Rock Star”

You might understand marketing technologies like social media and mobile search, but can you explain them so that someone new to marketing would understand the value of these tools to their business?

Since 2010, I’ve taught a four-week course in New Media Marketing in the Internet Marketing Master of Science program at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida. At Full Sail, students earn their master’s degree in 12 months, and the pace is intense.

Given that the tools of the trade change frequently, I’ve always emphasized principles and approaches, rather than relying too heavily on specific social networks or technologies. My objective is to provide students with skills they can apply in a variety of industries to best suit their unique goals.

The Professor’s Conundrum
Throughout my tenure, I’ve updated the course materials, topics and exercises, but continued to encounter certain objections from students.

1. “My company can’t use mobile (or social media) because…” 

The rest of that sentence could be “our clients are older and don’t use mobile or social media,” or “mobile marketing is too expensive for small businesses,” or “I don’t have time for social media marketing.”

Whatever the nature of their objection, I had to counter the student’s own resistance, which took up valuable time and hindered the learning process.

2. “My company already does X.”

Many students base their course projects on large companies with robust marketing plans. These companies have tried many of the approaches we cover, leaving students little room for expansion or experimentation in the name of learning.

If we were talking about blogging and online video, I’d routinely run into situations where students’ companies were already using these (at least to some extent), though possibly not to their fullest potential. I needed a way to ensure that the course would prove valuable to students in any industry, from all types of organizations.

The Interview
In August 2013, I interviewed Mack Collier for the MarketingProfs podcast about his book, Think Like A Rock Star. I read the book prior to our conversation, and felt incredibly energized and excited about his approach to helping brands build their business by turning customers into fans using techniques effectively used by rock stars to build a fan-base.

I was surprised to learn that very few companies had any type of formal program in place for cultivating brand ambassadors. While Mack and I talked, I kept thinking about how valuable a skillset my students would have if they understood his approach.

Students could analyze their audience to identify influencers and fans, research where their target audience spends time online and off, and develop an outreach plan that would help them to achieve specific program objectives, as well as support larger business goals.

The Epiphany
After my talk with Mack, I had an epiphany. I could use the principles from Think Like A Rock Star to build a course that would teach students to create a completely customized approach, based on their specific business goals and audience: one that would offer value to all students’ businesses, large and small alike, whatever the size of their budget or current marketing mix.

As Mack had observed in our interview, very few organizations have brand ambassador programs, so offering interested students the option of creating that type of program would equip them to blaze a trail in the marketing industry by supercharging their company’s word-of-mouth marketing.

The Plan: Complete Customization
In the first week, students would set their business goals and create personas for their organization’s customers, influencers and fans.

Then, students could engage in audience analysis, identifying actual targets for outreach.

Using this insight, class participants would create a plan to implement influencer outreach or launch a brand ambassador program (either full-scale or smaller-scale, like a customer feedback panel).

Finally, students would spend 25% of the class covering measurement, which is an area of critical importance that marketing professional can’t afford to ignore.

In an effort to ensure that students had access to course content that accurately and thoroughly covered these topics, I worked directly with Mack to create custom webinars for each week’s lesson.

For each of the four weeks, we created lessons that would enable students to apply the concepts of influencer outreach and brand ambassadorship to all kinds of businesses. I provided additional course materials on content marketing, social media, and mobile technology, so that students could learn more about their channels of choice once they knew where their audience was on- and offline.

The Results
Having run the revamped course once, I can already see that students’ submittals are much more detailed and applied to their specific business objectives and audience, and that they’ve acquired valuable skills for audience research, metric selection and measurement that will serve them well no matter which vertical their business operates in.

Instead of teaching every student every approach, we narrowed the universe of possibilities to those uniquely suited to each class member’s industry, business goals, and audience preferences.

I’m excited about the course, but more excited to see what students do once they’ve graduated from the program. Mine is just one class in one program at one university, but my hope is that the success these students will bring to businesses across all industries will inspire other organizations to establish deeper, more lasting relationships with their brand’s influencers and fans.

Even if other businesses continue to lag behind, my students can reap the benefits of the first-mover advantage. That’s not such a bad outcome, either!

I’m incredibly indebted to Mack for his contribution to the class, and highly recommend him as an instructor or trainer in his own right: he’s a fantastic marketer and educator.

Any organization that wants to learn how to implement influence marketing or create a brand ambassador program would do well to retain Mack’s services, or at least buy a copy of Think Like A Rock Star for everyone on the marketing team.

Clearly Mack’s lessons work: I’m a passionate advocate of his approach to marketing, and recommend his book every chance I get. If you want to talk more about it, drop me a line: like any true fan, I love talking about it!

Kerry O’Shea Gorgone teaches New Media Marketing at Full Sail University. She also hosts the weekly Marketing Smarts podcast for MarketingProfs. Find Kerry on Google+ and Twitter.