Naked Conversations - Chapters 3+4 notes

Chapter 3 notes

Word of Mouth on Steroids
-friends impact us the most
-businesses need to reach mass audiences
-use broadcast marketing to reach a huge audience
-at TV ad needs to only get a 2% response to be adventurous
-interruption marketing
-people have installed mental and technology filters to avoid exposure to marketing noise
-traditional market has become less effective
-new technology has allowed conversational marketing to become prevalent
-they listen to customers and engage them
-nothing more powerful than customer evangelists


-four high school students had invented a buddy system to chat online ICQ
-it was purchased by AOL for 287 million
-1998 AOL IM had 20 million downloads
-What ICQ has done for one to one conversations

Talk is Cheap
-Skype is the most popular Internet telephone service
-used IM and blogs to market their product
-their low cost marketing strategy has been lethal against Vonage
-Skype intends to unseat traditional phone carriers by adding a low-priced paid service
-Skype add new customers for about a penny, wireless carriers get new customers for about $125
-can Skype do without traditional phone company? Not yet because there are still people who don't have computers, so there would need to be a way to connect the phone to the computer
-CPU to CPU

Blazing Foxes
-FireFox an Internet browser reached 25 million downloads in 99 days
-FireFox is more secure than Internet
-Blake Ross was still in high school when he joined the FireFox development team
-he started a blog as an outlet
-each week he announced a new community marketing campaign
-all he had to do was announce it, customers would do the rest
-more websites were linking to the FireFox page than to the Internet explorer site
-people start something new, motivated more by sharing with friends than making money
-viral works best when its home brewed rather than a part of marketing ploy

Passion, Not Echo
-Howard Dean's presidential campaign instead of blogging and reaching a wide audience they were only reaching each other
-other start up are beginning to emulate the antics of FireFox

Remarkable or Invisible
-if a business creates something remarkable then it will most likely be talked about
-the best way is to make something worth talking about
-if the marketplaces doesn't think your product isn't remarkable its not

From Free to Billions
-Google started out with a page with less then 30 words
-used word of mouth to bring customers

The "Awesome-Sucks" factor
-movies spend about 2 million dollars for opening night
-if people who see it and text it sucks people will blog about before
-humans hard wired to want to collaborate and that it can release more levels of dopamine into the human system

Blogging's Key Advantages
-Blogging is a huge word of mouth engine
-blogging can be considered a 2 way street
-find and join the conversation
-feed the network with information

Chapter 4

Direct Access
-allows a more direct access to the customers and can allow a CEO to get the words out
-allows CEO to hear back from customers with greater ability

GM in the Fast Lane
-can be good or bad for companies
-gives direct feedback
-customers could also give false facts
-the Blogosphere can also acts as its own policing agency

Moving the Whole Damned Compass
-blogosphere is a good place to meet people
-1000 out of 32000 of his employees are blogging
-Sun's Microsystems encourage people to cut their own paths

Participation Age
-blogs are a part of the participation age
-been on the net since e-mail
-way to bypass journalists
-provides transparency and authenticity
-gives outsiders inside views
-legal team never doubted blogging at Sun
-Pr teams though it was a great idea as well


Maverick Blogger
-Mark Cuban
-co-founded broadcast.com
-sold his website and bought the Dallas Mavericks
-started blogging about his team
-his blogs offset about him and his team
-only interviews through e-mail

Bypassing Media Mythology
-Dave Winer head of the software company UserLand
-press reports mythology, not facts he says
-Spam has hurt e-mail
-RSS feeds (really simple syndication)
-Netscape made the same thing at the same time

Doing in in Private
-internal blogging, behind a firewall, to 86000 Intel employees
-Intel CEO Paul Otellini
-confidential information is sometimes intentionally leaked
-Intel didn't leak on purpose but people thought it did
-IBM also has internal blogs-over 3000 of them