Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

A Super Bowl Pool to Feel Good About

This one comes from the nextNY group of NYC entrepreneurs, digital media execs, and others.

Charlie O'Donnell set up the best Super Bowl pool I've ever seen: "Get 100 different bloggers to sponsor 100 different Superbowl boxes, with the winnings going to their charities of choice."

It costs just over $10 to buy in; I've got box 33 and am rooting for City Harvest (with the Giants and Jets out of the picture, it's the next best team to root for). I'm also perfectly happy losing this one.

Kudos to Charlie. Care to join the challenge?

Building a Better Water Cooler

I've been hanging out on Facebook a lot lately, which is somewhat unusual for someone who graduated before Facebook was born, but I can't help it. Ever since, on a whim, I set my status to "I am engaged" (you can put anything you want after that "I am" to let people know how you feel, what you're doing, or where you are), I've been caught up adding friends, writing on people's walls, and just doing the Facebook thing.

Compared to MySpace, Facebook is much better at facilitating communication. It's easier to talk about what you're doing, show who you've recently befriended, read others' conversations, label people in photos, and, in most ways, simply communicate. It's especially useful for public communication, and for its base of college and high school users, everything's public.

MySpace is good for communication to some degree, but it doesn't feel far removed from writing on people's Geocities guestbooks in the 90s. It takes more effort, even if that's just a click or two. You can't share as much about how you know people or how you feel. Its success as a social network stems more from how users can add more personality in terms of featuring videos, music, wallpaper, icons, and other types of content.

Ultimately, Facebook is a better water cooler, while MySpace is a better dorm room. Both of course have their place, but after opening myself to the experience, Facebook grabs me as the much more interesting, compelling social destination.

OMMA Hollywood Speakers Wanted

I'm helping organize MediaPost's OMMA Hollywood event March 19-20 and am now planning the sessions for the search marketing track. If you have any proposals, however formal or informal, please let me know (even if you don't have a proposal and want to be considered as a speaker, just send a bit of your background/expertise if I'm not familiar with it already).

The best way to send them: email dberkowitz -at- 360i.com.

Please get this in this week for the best chance of being considered. Thanks!

Meanwhile, if you're at all on the fence about going, just check out this testimonial from my old friends at eMarketer:

"OMMA has become an important event for eMarketer. We exhibit every year to meet new entrants in the interactive world, and also catch up with proven industry leaders we already work with." David Iankelevich, VP Sales, eMarketer

There you go. Now send your best pitch - again, dberkowitz -at - 360i.com.

 

Best Books of 2006: Complete List

Here's a complete rundown of all the books recommended on the blog this month.

Business
9) The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
8) The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: King Solomon's Secrets to Success, Wealth, and Happiness by Steven K. Scott
7) 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden
6) Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out by Douglass Rushkoff (with an honorable mention for his comic, Testament: Akedah
5) Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
4) Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
3) The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do by Clotaire Rapaille
2) Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
1) Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change by Clayton M. Christensen

Food
* The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
* Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink, PhD

History/Autobiography
* Primo Levi's Survival In Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Periodic Table
* Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
* Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag by Harry Wu
* Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
* The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost

Current Events
* The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
* The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

Religion
* The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong

Fiction
* Marvel Comics' Civil War series

Best Fiction of 2006: Marvel's Civil War

Here's one you won't find on many best of lists: the Marvel Comics Civil War series

I haven’t read a lot of fiction in the past year. I’ve been too swept up in making sense of what’s really going on around us that I keep putting off novels and literature. Even some of the fiction this year that looked more interesting, like Absurdistan and The Emperor's Children, didn’t grab me quite enough (though I’m looking forward to reading The Road and Suite Française sometime soon).

The biggest exception to my non-fiction binge was the Civil War series from Marvel. Yes, these are comic books, and they’re some of the best literature I’ve come across, replete with political allusions, personal moral crises, tragedy, comedy, romance, family drama, and all the great Shakespearean plots.

I’ve never been much of a comic book reader, though I’ve enjoyed the movie versions and, as a kid, the cartoons. Yet from the characterizations to the artwork, I’ve been hooked on this series. The gist is that during filming of a reality show, some young superheroes get into a fight and trigger a massive explosion in a Connecticut suburb, killing 600 people and dozens of children. This leads to Congress passing a Superhero Registration Act, where all heroes must register and put their identities on file. Thanks to the goading of Tony Stark/Iron Man, Spider-Man registers and unmasks himself as Peter Parker. Meanwhile, Captain America leads a band of heroes that go underground to escape registration and risk arrest. Yet it soon surfaces that some proponents of the Act might be acting in their self-interests, securing lucrative Halliburton-style contracts (allusions to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are easily recognizable), and as the death toll rises, some of the major players switch sides.

There’s the main seven issue Civil War series if you just want an overview. Then each character or group of characters are chronicled in breakout stories, leading to scores of comics (I’ve read probably about 30% to 40% of the whole series). My personal favorite: Punisher’s War Journal, which is even better after reading his appearance in the Spider-Man breakouts.

You can find some of the comics in this Amazon link; for the rest, I’d find a local comic book store (in Manhattan, I’ve been frequenting the one on 23rd between Madison and 5th) or check eBay.

Engaged

While I normally keep this blog related to business, I can't help announcing now that I'm back from a week off in Puerto Morelos (with a pit stop in Dallas) that my inspiration for way too many of these blog posts, columns, and everything else I've done for business and pleasure over the last year and change is now my fiancee. If you do enjoy reading this blog at all, it is in ways great and small influenced by Cara's brilliance, warmth, curiosity, and sensitivity, and I had to share my excitement with you.

I'll had a few pictures from Flickr once I sort through them. If you're on Flickr and want to connect there, here's the link to my account.

Best Books of 2006: Autobiographical Humor

Okay, so I'm making up categories as I go along, but some of these books are hard to place. The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost.

“Maarten and Sylvia, bored with their daily struggles, follow her job lead and head to Tarawa, island of Kiribati, a scorching, dirt poor strip ruined just enough by global wars and capitalism to screw them royally. It’s an often achingly entertaining read, sometimes painful when following the struggles [of the protagonists], and provides a Western point of view on life very unlike as we know it.

It’s one of the funniest books I’ve read in awhile (thanks to Cara for the recommendation).

Best Books of 2006: Religion and Spirituality/World History

The last book I read in 2006 was one of the best, and it deserves its own category: The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong. She explores the Axial Age of religion (800-200 BCE) moreso of four regions than traditions: Greece, China, India, and Judea. She clearly has her favorite heroes: Socrates, Confucius, Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), and Ezekiel, though there are quite a few others as well. What her heroes have in common is that they all, somehow or another, came to passionately preach and espouse the Golden Rule.

Armstrong has an agenda, but it's a blameless one: that religion's at its best when it's inclusive, peaceful, and empathic. She also shows how fundamentalism and indoctrination are anathema to the purest religious teachings of all the world's great traditions. This is a history book on its surface, but one with a moral, and a moral that most true believers of just about any following should be able to get behind.

A New Favorite Read: Word of Mouth Marketing

I'm still rolling out my favorite reads from last year, but I can't resist posting a more current one to add to the mix: Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking by Andy Sernovitz, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Here's a review I posted on Amazon:

Andy Sernovitz crams in more real world examples per page than I can ever recall reading anywhere. He keeps the focus practical. The book is subtitled "How Smart Companies Get People Talking," and the reader will feel like he or she can help make their own company smarter.

The book reads much like the clear, concise tomes from Seth Godin, who not-so-coincidentally penned this book's forward. While much of the focus of the book is online marketing, given the low barriers for spreading worth of mouth through the internet, Sernovitz's guidance applies to any channel, as well as any industry.

Within hours of putting this book down, I've been citing the book to my own colleagues and drawing examples for client presentations. It's one I'll keep on my shelf for reference and will recommend to others (I'll sooner buy colleagues the book rather than loan it, as I'll want to keep my own marked up copy close at hand).

MySpace for Cults

Ever have this problem?

You're a cult proselytizer, indoctrinating your minions, and while you're picking up a lot of steam, you don't have a great way for your disparate worshipers to connect with each other.

Along comes CultSpace, the social network builder just for you.

You can see my very own cult here: Cult Profile: Holy Brotherhood of EneMan.

Two notes:
1. Cults are bad. Satire is good. This falls into the latter camp.
2. Thanks to Mashable.com for the link.