smart, fun and provocative read

It's a fun book to read and to look in, the words are carried very well by the layout and choice of typography. I read it in one go. <br /><br />It starts off with some rather provocative pieces of advice but gradually build up great arguments. A very good philosophy on creativity indeed.

The Chuck Norris Cain from Kung Fu of Business Books

Ok, if you have to read one book to get your head around the new social media tools and how to get the best from them then this is the one. I am a fan of J Fields and T Ferris but Gary's direct, in your face style is refreshing enabled me to finish this book in one sitting!<br /><br />The way he explains everything is easy to understand and his passion literally leaps off the page.<br /><br />As a consequence of reading this book I have now started my own blog and am already planning my next career move using the advice from Gary I have picked up.<br /><br />I now want Gary to come to my company to convince our current marketing department to change the way we use our marketing budget which is still way too focusssed on TV as opposed to social media. I have already set up a Tube Mogul account for my company which has generated more traffic and interaction than our display campaigns have which cost substantially more!<br /><br />Look forward to the next book!<br /><br />PS - Gary don't worry about those people out there giving you poor reviews. It's easy to sit on the sidelines, but at least you have had the stones to get off the bench and into the game...<br /><br />

Easy To Understand & Practical Book on Social Marketing

This a very practical book to help you understand the importance of social marketing. It shows you a variety of ways that you can start using easy tools to promote your business or website. I liked the examples of various businesses who had taken these ideas on board and who have created real success with them. <br /><br />Would recommend this for internet newbies or experienced marketers - you'll definitely learn something new or be inspired to try different ideas.

If you buy just one digital marketing book...

Avinash Kaushik has been de-mistifying the world of web analytics for years through his excellent blog Occam's Razor. He took us deeper into the murky world of Java-script tagging and standard reports with his comprehensive"Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" in 2007. Now he has written a book that all digital marketers should buy, read and leave on their desk to refer back to on a regular basis.<br /><br />Web Analytics 2.0 shows us how to move from shovelling buckets of meaningless"clickstream" data around our organisations and develop a love for true insight. In short he encourages us to move towards adding qualitative data to our limitless supply of quantitative data in order to really understand what people are doing on our sites. We must learn to use our hearts as well as our minds.<br /><br />Lets take a simple example - that old favourite of"Engagement". Marketers run so many analytics reports to get a fix on engagement that the lights in most offices regularly dim. And the bad news according to Avinash is that you will NEVER be able to measure how much people are enjoying themselves on your site just with the click-stream data. For instance, to paraphrase Avinash, 2 people visit your site and spend 10 minutes looking at 12 pages. Both happy right? One loved your site, but the other was frantically trying to find some content and gave up after 10 fruitless minutes - you will never ever ever know this just from your data. We'll need to augment our click-stream view with some kind of attitudinal research and Avinash guides us through what tools to use and how to get the best of them...in this case an on-site survey with simple questions such as"did you achieve what you set out to do on our site today?" will take the guesswork out of our analytics. <br /><br />So Avinash takes us on a journey to show us where we should be using our hearts to make sense of data. On our way we look at the need to move away from once a week reports to continuous streams of meaningful data; we are constantly reminded that customers, not marketers, are the best people to inform us what our site should look and feel like; and we are taken on a guided tour of the mountainous areas of competitive insight and told how to mine it profitably.<br /><br />But this book does so much more than just change the way you think, critical though that is. It shows you what buttons to press to make your reports more actionable, tells you what sites to look at when considering additional solutions and gives clarity to virtually all the web analytics jargon terms. Some of the content will be familiar to regular readers of his blog (like the excellent explanation of multiple-tab time on site calculations!) but that makes this even more of a reference book for all our analytics needs.<br /><br />As you may know I am a huge fan of testing everything that we do in digital marketing and so the chapter titled"Failing Faster: Unleashing the Power of Testing and Experimentation" took me around all my favourite sites in the digital marketing landscape: A/B testing, Multi-variate testing and some really sound advice about where to start and a few quick wins to get you in the mood! <br />Avinash shows us that web analytics is woven into all our digital marketing activity - from search to site usability and email campaign analysis to off-line integration. I even spent a rewarding few minutes simply reading the sub-heads and being reminded of things we ought to be doing all the time:<br /> - Segment or go home<br /> - Five Rules for creating a Data-Driven Boss<br /> - The Key to Glory - Measuring Success <br /> - Context is Queen<br /> - Failing faster - unleashing the power of Testing and Experimentation<br /><br />So there we are - a digital marketing book that takes you from thinking differently to doing better, packed with explanations about the things we ought to know about (or showing us how wrong we have been!). It comes with a CD brimming with Podcasts, Video and Powerpoint material as well as lists of additional resources. It's taken me 2 weeks to work from the start of the book to the end but it's been a fantastic journey...and at over 450 pages you may want to pack a lunch before you set off!

A must for anyone interested in design

I had this book on pre-order and was quite excited to see it published as I've been reading David's excellent blog for a long time. When the book arrived I was not disappointed, it's written in a very informal and informative way. You feel you are there speaking with David himself. <br /><br />Logo Design Love gives a great insight to the process of creating identities for your clients and offers useful tips for recent graduates and old hacks alike!<br /><br />The book is packed with great advice for all ranging from dealing with the dreaded 'design by committee' to the tricky questions that clients may pose. Logo Design Love is not yet another 'answer book' but truly gives an insight to the process of creating identities and discussed the pitfalls you may encounter and how to avoid them.<br /><br />What I particularly liked about the book is the way David discusses how, in retrospect, assignments may have been approached in a better way and as a designer you are continuously learning from your work. For me, many other books on design simply show the end result, Love Logo Design takes you through the process and gives invaluable advice along the way.<br /><br />It's must for anyone interested in logo design and I even recommended it to a design student this afternoon.

Consumer Behavious a European Perspective

It is a very easy to read book which brings actual examples to explain the issues.

Mooooooooooooooooooo

I recently bought the The Big Moo: Stop Trying to be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable which is excellent and works with the Purple Cow, which in essence says that you need to make your products (services, ideas) unique and remarkable so they market themselves.<br /><br />I like the Purple Cow and most other Seth Godin books because they don't pretend to offer you n-steps to success (which there never are). Instead he offers insight, ideas, motivation and a new way of looking at things - ie much more valuable than a bunch of steps that everyone else is following.

I buy this book for every designer I employ.

I buy this book for every graphic and web designer I employ. I cannot emphasizes enough how good and how practical this book is. Anyone associated with the design and advertising world should read this book; it will give you great foundation onto which to build your own strategies. In my opinion it optimizes what should be taught at Art College or University. Every creative should be accountable for their work and that means the results their work generates, this book goes along way into explaining the facts of life in the real world. Some of the research in this book is as relevant today as the day it was published. For you web designers out there, you know you can't hide for much longer due to tools like Google analytics, get yourself a head of the game and read this book.

Good for me, the sales novice

I've been slung in the deep end of the sales pool and needed a mentor to help me swim. I feel I have it in this book, although I must admit I'm still in the early stages of it. He seems to know what he's talking about and I'm poring over his every word in the hope that a little of his sales magic will rub off. It's not a book I can dip in and out of randomly, it's one I've had to read page by page in chronological order. Perhaps that's why it's taking me a while to get through it. Still, I'm happy with my choice.

Please don't buy this book

What a waste of money. The author must be laughing all the way to the bank. This really is the most absurd psychobable tosh imaginable. Please do not buy this book. I have rated it as one star because the system won't let me not rate it at all...Persuasion Skills Black Book: Practical NLP Language Patterns for Getting the Response You Want

A good perspective

It's useful for helping you step back and evaluate the creative process. Short enough that you can read it often - which helps reinforce its message. I'd recommend it.

If you care about your online business - this book is for you!

This book is a must-buy for anyone having interest in Web Analytics or in online business, whether you are a beginner, an experimented Web analyst, an online marketer, a marketing manager... It covers lot of topics from the basics to more advanced ones (A/B testing, segmentation, processes, organization, framework...). It is written in Avinash Kaushik's unique style that makes it easy to read, funny and entertaining. You won't get bored. For me it is constant source of inspiration as I keep diving in it regularly.

Brilliant

What can I say, I picked up this book and didnt put it down until I had finished it. I was scared to death of cold calling and had absolutely no idea where to start fixing my ums and ers, how to begin wording what I wanted to say, or asking the right sort of questions.<br /><br />Not only did this book help me with all of that, but it inspired me and made me even want to go and start calling people up, because it's one step to the top of the mountain, don't take that step and how do you expect to get up there? We all know that, but the writer of this book really motivates you with the tools to back you up on your journey.<br /><br />Brilliant.

The Noble Art Of The Consigliere

This is a most useful book on how the professional adviser must act if they are to secure and retain the trust of their clients. It avoids the Dale Carnegie"Just Be Nice" approach by analysing why one wants to generate trust and how it is done. There is no argument that if you find you do not like a potential client you should walk away (and, speaking from personal experience what a joy that is); there are also some handy suggestions of how to do this if you are not a free agent in such a case but working within an organisation.<br /><br />The proposed responses are, of course, written by and for Americans and come over as deeply insincere in the mouths of the British, but they are not scripts but proposals. You can easily adapt them to different cultures because, however it is expressed, the basis of trust is the basically same in most cultures. <br /><br />The book acts as a valuable specific to those that suggest various up-selling strategies or ones in which the advisor portrays himself as The Top Man. By shifting one's vision to how this is perceived by the recipient we can see that up-selling can work, but only if the client leads you to it. The book's key is in constantly restating our approaches in terms of how they are perceived by the potential client, not how they address our internal needs and aims. It is a policy that I've found pays dividends.<br /><br />Recommended.

It's time for a paradigm shift

Socialnomics will give you a perspective on life and business that is vital. It's time to do a paradigm shift if you already haven't done that.<br /><br />This book makes me believe that we are all heading for a better world consisting of high quality services and products and more power to the people.<br /><br />There will be no more room for halfhearted services and products. Businesses has no other choice than to minimize their detrimental impacts because all activities will be open to view by people utilizing the social media revolution.

Insightful!

Noted sales trainer — and the head genius of cold calling — Stephan Schiffman succinctly describes 25 effective sales techniques. Each tip gets a short chapter with a nugget of advice, an example or two and a pat on the back to send you out the door charged up and ready to go. It doesn’t matter if you’ve heard some of these common sense ideas before because Schiffman’s compilation is so on-target, lively and encouraging. This little volume reminds you of leading sales techniques — or habits, as Schiffman calls them — that will build your customer base and increase your sales. If you’re in the business of one on one product or service sales, this will boost your communications, planning, knowledge, rainmaking, visibility and confidence. Schiffman tells you to ask people what they do and help them do it better by selling into their priorities. Seems clear enough to us, given that the author doesn’t only write — he also sells.

high quality

I am amazed how full of information is this book ! It's worth buying it because it enlightens you about marketing online , giving a lot of examples. It's not only theory but also practice with a lot of links to different websites that are useful to understand or study a certain matter.High professional in my opinion.

Disappointing

This book was a huge disappointment. Firstly, the subtitle is very misleading, as it is a book devoted almost entirely to influencing people within specific business interactions, which I found, and I imagine many others would find, completely unapplicable to their own lives. Even if the skills given in the examples are transferable, I see no reason why there shouldn't have been a broader range of circumstances cited as opportunities for persuasion. The title: 'The art of influencing people' gives an air of all-encompasing grandeur, however, the 'wisdom' on offer in this book is extremely limited, not just in applicability but also in quality. The number of scenerios which demonstrate blindingly obvious 'interpersonal' errors followed by stellar alternative approaches would, if combined, be very amusing in the context of guiding sitcom-writers-to-be. However, given its intended audience it is almost offensive. The opening page of chapter one in fact contains one of the most worthwhile, and frustratingly ironic, nuggets of wisedom, not from Borg but, from an 'unknown author': 'An ounce of intuition is worth a pound of tuition'. This is very fitting given that the tuition given here is intuitively used by most people, rendering the book pointless: all fat and no meat.

This one went straight back to Amazon!

Some reviewers had mentioned the complexity of this book and I have to agree that it seems to lack structure.<br /><br />I am not exactly daft (having written two technical books myself) but I just could not get my head round this one.<br /><br />Shame really as I had it express delivered at great cost.