Steve Rubel links to an AP article today about how younger email users are favoring other newer forms of communication like social networking sites, instant messaging and text messaging – and they see email as “a good way to reach an elder – a parent, teacher or a boss – or to receive an attached file.”

Email’s problems have caught up to it, and the early adopters and the more tech savvy younger generation have been quick to catch on and are looking elsewhere for more appropriate communication mediums:

“And there is a very strong sense that the migration away from e-mail continues,” says Lee Rainie, the director at Pew.

For many young people, it’s about choosing the best communication tool for the situation.

As email emerged as a mainstream form of communication, we still used the phone, but transferred many phone tasks to email. Some things just didn’t need to be done by phone, and in fact, worked better over email.

The same goes for email and new communication mediums, but now email represents the phone and people are transferring tasks away from email by using other technologies like RSS and text messaging.

Email is not going away, it still has plenty of uses, but people are thinking outside the inbox and adopting new technologies .

FeedBlitz, the popular RSS to email service with over 50,000 active feeds has recently taken on financing and is also hiring. I took the opportunity to check up with Phil Hollows, founder of FeedBlitz to get an idea of how FeedBlitz has evolved as a blog marketing tool and what he has in store.

“As I look at the RSS to mail market today, one of the core strategic decisions I have to take is deciding what we’re not going to do, because the realm of possibilities is so large. It boils down to this. Our mission is messaging using RSS and related technologies to underpin what we deliver. And our philosophy is to make your messaging work with whatever services you want to use. So you will see us enabling greater and simpler integration with third party services, instead of adding features or services that are already successful and prevalent in the broader market. We will stay focused, in other words. We’ll also make it easy for third parties to integrate FeedBlitz into their sites and services. “

The insights offered in the interview range from how FeedBlitz got started, to how it was marketed to become the top RSS to email service, as well as some interesting ideas on how to use RSS as a marketing vehicle. Hollows also gives these three tips for blog owners that are users or considering use of RSS to email tools:

1) Why not? You’ll get 10-50% circulation boost, push content delivery, better SERP placement, gain lead information, develop metrics, all automatically.

2) Customize your emails to match your branding and messaging, and enable subscriber tracking metrics to measure your activity and effectiveness.

3) Don’t wait. It’s fundamentally free, takes only a minute or so to set up, just do it.

FeedBlitz also offers a blog/RSS search site called, FeedAdvisor which recommends feeds based on subscription patterns. Information about the new features coming up with FeedBlitz as well as the positions they are hiring for are posted on their blog.  The full interview is over at Online Marketing Blog.

The news is out on the Blogbeat.net site and the FeedBurner blog of the blogbeat acquisition by FeedBurner. On the blogbeat site a comic newspaper “They Daily Analytic” headline reads, “FeedBurner Invasion! Planet blogbeat acquired by FeedBurner Overlords”.

Blogbeat functionality will be incorporated into FeedBurner’s StandardStats service and integration will be complete during fourth quarter 2006. Current blogbeat customers will get a refund as the new service is free. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The addition of blogbeat technology should further enhance FeedBurner’s lead as a RSS resource for bloggers or will it? The reviews I’ve read about blogbeat haven’t been that great. I did a trial a while back and went back to the trusty analytics package I’ve been using for years. Integration into the FeedBurner control panel would be convenient though.

The “UnConference” is all the rage right now… an agenda-free gathering of like minded souls who seek to learn from each other’s wisdom… an “expert free zone”… no sponsors… no official speakers or panels. Since Dave Winer began to promote this idea earlier this year, it seems that every new conference wants to be an “UnConference”, therefore freed from the sins of conferences past.

No doubt the standard approach to conferences has abused the trust and credibility attendees place in the promoters of these events: vendor speakers giving the same talk they gave at the last 5 conferences they spoke at, sales pitches from the podium, vendor stacked panels, outdated and irrelevent content. Believe me, I used to review conferences and even put on a few back in my ClickZ days (at which fyi, we didn’t allow pitches from the podium, did not invite vendors to speak or participate on panels, but depended upon industry experts instead), but is the UnConference the best solution we can come up with to the current model?

I remember well the first “UnConference” I ever attended. It was way back in 1972 when I was in high school. I was a part of this radical coalition called “Student Alliance” which sought to give high school students more freedom and choice than they were given at that time. One day, I received a mailing from a group of similar “Student Alliances” from all over Wisconsin (I was living in Green Bay at the time) who sought to hold a conference among the various Student Alliances from all over the state. And guess what? The pitch sounded remarkably like the UnConferences that are being popularized today: no agenda, no speakers, just a collective sharing of our common wisdom and experiences. All of us were experts. And by god, it was FREE! Made sense to me. So I set aside a weekend in February, bought a bus ticket, packed up my goodies for a great weekend and headed to Madison.

To make a long story short, the weekend was a total disaster.

In a vacuum, strong voices can and will emerge, and despite rhetoric to the contrary, they will quash the voices of those who don’t share their views. Friday evening, which we set aside for “agenda setting” rapidly deteriorated into chaos when a coalition of feminists (it was still in its early days at that time) took over the meeting and issued a series of demands which included banning anyone from the conference who uttered any of the sexist words or phrases from the list which they so kindly provided.[Today, none of us would utter any of those words or phrases in a public setting under any circumstances, but at the time, it was a radical notion, for example, to ban the use of the word “girl” or “bitch”.] They took up an enormous amount of time and bandwidth with their rhetoric and demands, so after about three or four hours, we called it a night and decided to reconvene the next morning to see what we could do about setting an agenda for the weekend.

Next morning, the Marxist coalition decided it was their turn to take over the agenda setting session, and before you knew it, all hell broke loose and no agenda ever got set.

So you had about 150 teenagers from all over the state who came there to learn from their peers what they could do to more effectively impact change in our schools and we ended up doing absolutely nothing. Actually, we ended up doing the kinds of things that teenagers did at that time with nothing to do, no adult supervision and no agenda.

Beyond the profound sense of disappointment I felt, I was pissed that I had wasted an entire weekend, the bus fare, the cost of meals. I didn’t look forward to reporting back to my fellow members of Student Alliance of Green Bay East High School that nothing got done, I learned nothing and had nothing to give.

I’m not saying here that all UnConferences or even BlogOrlando in particular will end up in chaos with all attendees going home empty handed. But I am saying that without some sort of preset agenda and without a seeding of real experts who can address the relevant issues, you risk losing more than the price of admission (free). You risk the value of however many days of time you invest. You risk airfare (steadily climbing as we speak), hotel and food expenses. And you risk coming home with a profound sense of disappointment having wasted your time.

Fact is, I’d be far more interested in attending BlogOrlando if I knew that there was going to be an agenda in place, some sort of schedule, coverage of topics that I wanted to learn more about, experts on hand that are qualified to address them and yes, I would like to have a few sponsors and vendors there demoing their latest (or even better, upcoming) new products and services. Properly handled, sponsors and vendors can make a tremendous contribution the quality of a conference. It’s great to go home with a few good tchotchkes and some stories about the cool new products you saw demoed. Better yet, it’s great to blog about them!

It seems to me that, bottom line, the UnConference movement is at it’s core anti-commercial.

While I agree with them that I don’t want the conference agenda spoiled by sales pitches given by VPs of Marketing who paid for their time at the podium, it doesn’t mean that a quality conference can’t be properly planned, informative and useful… AND produce a nice profit for the promoter (who takes on enormous risk, believe me) through charging for admission and providing a venue for sponsors and vendors. It also doesn’t mean that a conference can’t provide a venue for the experts within the audience to be heard and to exchange ideas.

Conventional conference organizers have abused the trust and good will of their attendees, that much is clear. But the UnConference is not the answer.

I talk with lots of different potential clients about adding weblogs to their online mix and am happy to roll out the usual list of benefits, including establishing a dialog with customers, offering up a 24×7 focus group, garnering feedback on potential product plans, and even featuring specific products or services to a dedicated subset of your community.

This time, however, I’ve received an email from a large ecommerce retailer with a slick Web presence but no “face” to the firm and sporadic problems with customer service and quality control. They ask:

“what you would do with a blog or two and what the benefits would be for us?”

Before I start free-associating my answer, I thought perhaps you, dear reader, might have some interesting or innovative ideas about how to leverage a blog to make an ecommerce company better in the online world?

Anyone working in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry knows that title tags are one of the most important elements on the page.

By default, blogs usually put the blog name first and then the name of the post. In the past, I have suggested rearranging those to put the name of the post at the beginning of the title tag to increase the keyword prominence within the tag itself. Or perhaps you should just drop the name of your blog altogether from these permalink pages.

I also shared how to customize the title tag of your blog’s home page.

But such tools are really quite crude. What you really need is a tool to fine-tune title tags on individual pages — from the home page, to category pages, to tag pages, to permalink pages. This may not work on your blog platforms but it definitely works in WordPress, so let me explain how to do it in WordPress and then you can try to fit it into your own blog platform if you are running on something else.

The idea is to create a custom field. We’ll call that field title_tag for the sake of argument. When that field is defined, the text in that field is what gets displayed as the title tag. If that field is not defined, then it defines the title the way it normally does.

In WordPress, you can define a custom field on a post and a static page. But what about category pages? Or tag pages (if you’re using a tagging plugin like UltimateTagWarrior)? Well, for category pages, there’s an easy answer: a category’s description (editable under Manage: Categories in the admin). For tag pages, there isn’t an easy answer as there’s no obvious place in the database to stick the custom titles.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a WordPress plugin that set this all up for you and knew where to grab the custom title from and when to display it? Well, you’re in luck! I just wrote it!

Introducing… the SEO Title Tag plugin.

This fantastical new plugin won’t just utilize the custom field as described above. It will also make your UltimateTagWarrior tag pages more search optimal by placing the tag name in the title of tag pages. It will reorder your blog name to go at the end of the titles. It will use the category’s description as the title tag on category pages, if defined. It will allow you to set a custom title for the home page (changable in the plugin’s Options page in the WordPress admin).

Once the plugin is activated, you will simply need to make a single edit to your header template, which is under the Presentation tab in the WordPress admin. (This is described in the installation instructions.) Then you’ll be able define custom title_tag fields in your posts and pages to your heart’s content!

Not running WordPress? Hmm… why not? 😉 Ok, well the concepts outlined above should still be applicable to many other blog platforms. Whether the approach will work on a specific platform — Movable Type, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, etc. remains to be seen. I’m not really familiar with those platforms. But I doubt it would work on a hosted blog platform like Blogger.com, TypePad, and WordPress.com. Have fun!

BlogOrlando is an unconference that will be held in Orlando, FL from September 22-24, 2006.

This FREE event is open to bloggers and non-bloggers alike from Florida and anywhere else (so far we have one international attendee). We hope to bring together a good cross-section of folks to discuss blogging, podcasting, public relations, social media, citizen’s journalism and other related topics. In addition to the Friday event we are planning some outings at the local theme parks over the weekend. This event is as much a social/family gathering as it is a ‘work’ gathering, so bring the family (kids included).

Shown below is a tentative schedule for the weekend:

Thursday (9/21): Travel day for most, perhaps an informal dinner that night
Friday – day (9/22): BlogOrlando unconference at Rollins College
Friday – evening (9/22): Full-on geek dinner somewhere in Orlando
Saturday (9/23): Blogger day at one of the Disney parks
Sunday (9/24): Travel day, or stay an extra day at the Disney parks

For more information or to register, visit BlogOrlando.com.

According to a recent announcement by the US Department of Defense, a new study of blogs, to receive $450,000 in funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is not about warblogging but about what sort of help blog research may provide in ‘fighting the war on terrorism’.

Two scientists at Framingham, Mass. Versatile Information Systems Inc., Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist and Dr. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, president, will be managing the project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information�.

Heady stuff.

I share some of blogger Tim Oren’s concern over the ‘ontologically-based’ part of the project description and the possible implication of a ‘one-theory-fits-all’ approach, especially in terms of cultural difference. But as Oren observes, there could be some useful civilian spinoff as well as militarily applicable outcomes.

I looked for signs of a blog, either corporate or individual, on the Versatile Information Systems website, but to no avail. Without knowing whether or not the scientists blog, I wondered which would be better for a scientific study of blogging, for the scientists to have practical, personal experience of blogging, or not?

And as a former public servant and sometime consultant to government, I wonder what possibilities this story suggests for further blogging research/consultancy in the government space?

Recently JupiterResearch dropped a media release that has the social media scene buzzing. And well it should for the prestigious JupiterResearch’s study revealed that “… 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.”

That’s significant. Actually, I found that to be a little too signifcant.

According the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki (written by Chris Andersen of Wired and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext) Wiki to as of April 18, 2006 29 (5.8%) of Fortune 500 companies had a blog. If JupiterResearch’s analysis is correct and “nearly 70% of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006” a lot of Fortune 500s (not to mention other large companies) are are going to be pretty busy building blogs during the next six month.

Even though I admit to a drink of that kool-aid every now and again, this sounded strange. I shot an email off to Peter Arnold Associates (PR agency) explaining that I was working in the social media space, was a blogger and wanted to post their client’s findings. I explained I found the analysis odd and asked for clarification on the methodolgy, how JupiterResearch defined “corporations” and “large companies” and how they came to their conclusions.

I received two lovely responses. The first: “Let me check in with someone on the research team at JupiterResearch to find answers to your questions. I’ll be back in touch as soon as I hear.”

The second: “Information about JupiterResearch reports are available to accredited members of the press for free and clients.

After looking at your blog link JupiterResearch has decided not to fulfill your request for more information since the blog* is closely tied with your company that serves as a consultancy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, I didn’t realize that your company and blog were so closely affiliated.

If you’d like more information about becoming a client or purchasing a report, please let me know.”

Bloggers have gotten called on the carpet for jumping the gun and posting without fact checking. While we’re not journalists, the majority of business bloggers do feel an obligation to their readers to present accurate information.

BBC readers, I tried to find out the story behind the numbers for you before I posted that I thought these findings were .. shall we say out of the ball park optimistic. Based on the information presented in their media release, I caution you to look at JupiterResearch’s conclusions with with a few grains of salt.

If anyone has read the report and can explain how “nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006” please drop a comment. I sure would like to know.

Good news on the blog awards front.

Blogs produced by John Jantsch and Andy Wibbels, contributors to Business Blog Consulting, have made it into MarketingSherpa’s Top 10 Blogs and Best Podcast for 2006.

MarketingSherpa, Inc. is a research firm publishing case studies, benchmark data, and how-to information for marketing, advertising, and public relations professionals. The Blog and Podcast Awards listing is based on a readers’ choice poll, following an email broadcast by MarketingSherpa to 237,000 readers, described as primarily marketing professionals in corporate America.

Voters were asked to rate blogs on the basis of personality, usefulness, design & readability, and the question ‘would you revisit?’ For each of these the quality choices were: excellent, not bad, blah.

The Best Blog on Small Business Marketing award went to John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing weblog, started in August 2003. This is the third year in a row that this award has gone to John’s blog. I’m not surprised.

I’ve always been amazed at the amount and frequency of quality information and observation by John on Duct Tape Marketing.

And I see that now, as posted here last week, John has upped the ante, transforming his one man blog into a blog channel, with twenty two contributors on various aspects of small business marketing. Now that’s leverage! And judging by a bit of a tour I’ve just done of sites within the channel, this is already a great resource for small business, with articles on all sorts of topics, from managing people, to PR, to how small businesses can sell to big businesses – you name it, I’m fairly sure it’s there.

Andy Wibbels, the ‘Original Blogging Evangelist’ and from my personal experience a great blogging coach and mentor, took out the award Best Blog on Marketing to a Specific Consumer Demographic for his Andy Wibbels site. The citation says: Andy’s blog tells marketers and blog-writers how to attract the blog-reading public. Andy is also author of best-selling ‘Blogwild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging’ and was an award winner in last year’s MarketingSherpa awards as well.

Congratulations John and Andy!

Debbie Weil has also posted about the MarketingSherpa awards on her BlogWrite for CEOs -  highlighting a few of her favorites among the winners and listing a few more blogs she recommends.

 

 

The Web and the blogosphere can be incredible tools to connect with customers and prospects. Unfortunately, if you’re not doing a good job your customers can use these same tools to let the world know.

AOL found this out recently when one of their customers tried to cancel his account. Vincent Ferrari had heard horrible stories about AOL’s “customer support” so he decided to record his conversation.

After 15 minutes he finally got through to a human being. The call resulted in something that’s a cross between Dante’s 9th ring of hell and Orwell’s 1984. The king from Monty Python’s Holy Grail had an easier time explaining to the palace guards to keep his son locked in his room than Ferrari had explaining that he just wanted to cancel the account. “I don’t know how I can make this any clearer, just cancel my account,” he says time and again.

Ferrari put the recording on his blog, but was overwhelmed by the social bookmarking traffic. You can now listen to the whole painful affair at Putfile.com. When something’s this painful or funny, it’s very likely to go viral.

That virus got Ferrari on a number of talk shows and got him an official apology from AOL.

The lesson here: treat your customers with respect, because they just might be blogging.

By the way, if you think Ferrari is just a crank about customer service, read this recent post on his experience with Audible.

A nascent blog directory, iBlogBusiness, has recently launched to serve people looking specifically for business blogs.

The concept isn’t revolutionary, but it could become a good resource for those looking for other business blogs.
Since adding your own blog is free, it’s probably worth the two minutes it takes to submit your URL to iBlogBusiness.

Getting quality incomings is essential to good search engine ranking; since iBlogBusiness hasn’t been around long enough to provide good PageRank, you should also submit to the blog directories listed in Robin Good’s Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites page.

Today the Duct Tape Marketing Blog Channel added 14 new blogs on specific small business topics bringing the total to 22. The collective brainpower coming from this blog network will make it the place to go for small business information.

Some of the blogs on the channel are authored by well known small business folks, some are written by people you may not be familiar with, but have much to say.

And now the list of blogs:
• Duct Tape Marketing
• Business Life
• Dan Janal’s PR Leads
• The Idea Department
• Customers Count
• Word Wealth
• Selling To Big Companies
• Design Matters
• Business Blogging Confidential
• The Buzz Saw
• In Your Own Backyard
• Help People Choose You
• Ethics in Business
• People Management
• The Small Biz Wiz
• Referrals for Life
• Internet Innovations
• Nailing Customers (with CRM)
• Your Trusted Selling Brand
• MEDIA 2.0
• Personal Fame Blog
• Small Biz Reads

Marketing Sherpa is at it again with their third annual blog awards and this year they’ve added more categories including one for podcasting. Here are this year’s categories:

B-to-B marketing, Search marketing, Affiliate marketing, Email marketing, PR, Advertising, Marketing to a specific, consumer demographic (ie. women, kids), Blogging or podcasting as a marketing tactic, Viral, word of mouth, buzz, social marketing, Small business marketing, Non-English language blogs on marketing, General (multiple topic) marketing, Other specific niche topic related to marketing.Nominations were taken last week and this week there is voting until this Friday. Voting criteria include: Personality, Usefulness & content value, Usability & design and Would you revisit?. For some reason, and I’m not sure why, there are quite a few well known blogs that were not included.

Of course several Business Blog Consulting contributors have been nominated including:

• B.L. Ochman for best PR blog
• John Jantsch for best small business marketing blog
• Dana Vanden Heuvel for best btob marketing blog
• Toby Bloomberg for best blog on general marketing
• Wayne Hurlbert for best blog on general marketing
• Top Rank for best blog on search marketing.

You can vote for all or some of the blogs by rating them. Cast your vote today.

You can do search marketing for the good of mankind, so why not blogging for the good of mankind? There are issues-focused blogs like the environmental blog TreeHugger. Now there’s a network of blogs for good, founded by Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing Group. Way to go, Paul! It’s a brilliant idea; I hope it really turns into something big. Doug Kaye (founder of IT Conversations) is another blogger/podcaster with a social conscience… he’s started the podcast channel Social Innovation Conversations.

I too am inspired to blog for the benefit of mankind and the planet. The way I have decided to make a difference is by starting a blog to give visibility to ideas that I and other bloggers have that will make the world a better place in some way. It could be an idea to improve the environment, to help out a charity, to advance human rights, etc. I’ve just launched this blog, which I am calling Changes for Good. I would love to get some of you bloggers as contributors. Please contact me if you are interested. And of course, any and all links would be greatly appreciated. 🙂

Bacardi Canada has joined the blogosphere, but in a somewhat unorthodox manner. They have hired Dave, in a move that is similar to other campaigns such as the Captain Morgan Blog (now visiting Davy Jones’ locker). I have heard the term coined as character bloggers by my partner and colleague Tris Hussey in describing this type of blogger. Dave is not a representative of the company, in fact they are apparently paying him partially in product to be their blogger.

Rick Bruner, our fearless leader here at BBC states:

“If you think of blogs outside of the marketing context — just your ordinary person writing a journal online — they tend to be nothing more than honest and transparent, individual and personal.

“And when companies try to fake that for marketing purposes and try to, in a sense, hoodwink readers into thinking it’s something it’s not, in many cases bloggers tend to react very badly.

In fact a contributor here Dave Taylor boils it down to:

“I think it’s a little naïve to think that … every blog has to be real and genuine from a real person that you could meet on the street or go have lunch with,” notes Taylor.

“A blog is just a tool. There’s nothing special about it. There’s nothing magic. It doesn’t re- invent corporations. It doesn’t fundamentally change anything.

“It’s up to people and up to companies to come up with interesting and creative ways to utilize the tool.”

Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion and Senior VP at Edelman says the right way to use the tool as referred to by Taylor is to have some executive in the company be the blogger:

“Corporate blogs, whether they come from the executives or employees or customers, are tremendous.”

This wouldn’t be the first time I disagreed with Steve, but I think that hiring a blogger when you don’t have the ability is a smart move. Some companies don’t have the manpower or someone in the organization that is equipped to handle the duties of a blogger. Blogger are at the moment a rare breed. They are a mixture of writer, public relation specialist, advertiser and IT person. Not every company has this in their arsenal of employees.

I agree completely with Rick’s thoughts:

“If you’re doing something trying to be funny, then be really funny, not just kind of mild funny that the marketing department and the legal department and the HR department are going to sign off on as funny,” he says. “That’s not funny.”

Give this blogger a little time to perform, but as a character blogger goes, I find him to be amateurish towards his approach and the quality of the conversation lacking. Perhaps when he is in a drunken stupor from the client’s product or it is wages, he might actually submit something that is his own and not just another blog that is trying to act like a myspace.com knock off.

Tags: Rick Bruner, Dave Taylor, Steve Rubel, Bacardi Mixx, character blogs

Maybe I’m tilting at windmills with this particular discussion, but when usability guru Jakob Nielsen comes out with his list of Eight Problems That Remain, an excerpt of his newly published book Prioritizing Web Usability I can’t help but yawn and marvel at how he’s so out of touch with the reality of the modern Web and blogosphere.

For example, he believes that sites that don’t have visited links a different color to unvisited links are committing a critical, three skull-and-crossbone error, yet I can’t think of a site I visit with any frequency that doesn’t violate this “guideline”.

I admit that some of what he highlights remains a genuine problem with Web usability and in particular with blog usability, but so much of his criticism seems to be basically irrelevant and I have to wonder what sites he visits on a daily basis. They’re undoubtedly different to my own bookmark list…

I dig into his eight problems in considerable detail on my own blog, actually, so please check out my much longer commentary: Jakob Nielsen on Web Usability

Way to go, Brian! It’s exciting when a fellow author hits publication day and can announce the official release of his book: Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0071458972, $24.95).

2.0: the new way to publicize your book release

• press release
• podcast
• blog
• Amazon blog (or is it a “plog”?)
• email blast to colleagues

Just got an email from Brian with a link to today’s press release about the launch. (He uses PRWeb which I’ve also used and recommend highly. Inexpensive and reliable; your release gets picked up by Google and other news sources.)

Cleverly, he’s also released a matching podcast through PRWeb Podcast. [Note: Brian’s PRWeb podcast is 7:41 mins and links directly to an MP3 file that is 7.1 MB. Wish there were an interim download page for this.]

Notice that Brian also has a big-name publisher, McGraw-Hill. These days, that isn’t enough. You’ve got to market your book as imaginatively and aggressively as if you were self-published. In fact, proving that you can do that is one key piece in getting a book deal.

About the book

Brian sent me a preview copy. It’s a handsome hardcover that packs in everything you could possibly want to know about creating and sustaining a lead generation program. If you’re in big-time sales with long lead times — or managing anyone who is — you gotta have Brian’s book on your desk. Order on Amazon.

More about the book and other ways to order.

TypePad must really like the blogger line-up at Business Blog Consulting. We hit the jackpot this week. Rich Brook’s Flyte is the featured blog today.

Congrats! Rich. By the way, if you miss the write-up on the home page (6/8), catch it on the archives.

A quick (unsolicited) kudo to our own Toby Bloomberg; her Diva Marketing Blog is TypePad’s Featured Blog of the Day today (6/5/08.)

Great job, Toby!