Riley McArdle

Seth Godin just posted a great article where he talks about his upcoming book on New Marketing called Meatball Sundae and explains what exactly a Meatball Sundae is.

People treat the New Marketing like a kid with a twenty-dollar bill at an ice cream parlor. They keep wanting to add more stuff—more candy bits and sprinkles and cream and cherries.

I think his points are right on the money. Its so easy to get caught up in the technology sprinkles, that you can lose sight of the bigger picture of how and why New Marketing works.

He also brings up the fact that for New Marketing to really work, the entire company has to get behind it and change the way they think and work.

New Marketing—whipped cream and a cherry on top—isn’t magical. What’s magical is what happens when an organization uses the New Marketing to become something it didn’t used to be—it’s not just the marketing that’s transformed, but the entire organization.

This article is just the first in a series that Seth will be posting each Monday about a topic from the book.

Meatball Mondae (#1) on Seth’s Blog

Doc Searls, one of the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto, asks good question – “Can marketing be conversational?” I think the answer depends on the company, and a lot of companies just take it for granted, but I definitely think its a good question for them to ask themselves.

Before a company leaps in and tries to join the conversation, they should take a step back and ask themselves if they truly can be conversational or are they just fooling themselves? In reality, I’m sure there are some companies that can be conversational. It’s just in their culture… their corporate DNA. In other companies, it would be impossible. Even if they tried, even with the best intentions, they would come off as disingenuous. Not being genuine in the blogosphere is much, much worse than being silent.

Can marketing be conversational? via Doc Searls Weblog

PSD Vote is a new social media site for sharing and rating Photoshop tutorials. It is set up similar to Digg and reddit where you can vote for or comment on posts that you like. It just launched and there are already some really good tutorials. Check it out.

A lot of people don’t quite get blogs and this whole “Web 2.0” thing. At Ergotron, we’re trying to start getting into the spirit of Web 2.0 and joining the conversations that are going on out there. It’s been rather slow going, though, trying to help people get to the point where they “get it”. Web 2.0 is such a nebulous concept that it takes quite a while to wrap your head around it and see all the potential that is out there – even for those of us with a technical background.

I think the best way to start learning about Web 2.0, is to just get into it and start reading blogs. Manually reading a bunch of blogs can get extremely tedious though, so you really need to use an aggregator. Finding and using an aggregator can be a pretty big hurdle for some people, so I searched around the net and found a nice, short, 3-minute tutorial on how to use the built in tools in Internet Explorer 7. Even though its not the best aggregator out there, its definitely the easiest to get, since pretty much everyone has IE7 by now anyway.

Here’s the tutorial:

http://timeatlas.com/tutorials/ie7rss.htm

Once you’ve learned how to subscribe to a blog, you’ll need to find some blogs that interest you. An easy way to find blogs is to just search Google. For example, to find blogs related to quilting, just search for “quilting blog”.

http://www.google.com/

You can also try browsing through Technorati Blog Finder:

http://technorati.com/blogs/

Or the EatonWeb Blog Directory:

http://portal.eatonweb.com/

You’re sure to find some blogs that interest you. Once you’ve found some, keep checking your feed list in Internet Explorer. If you see a post that you have an opinion on, post a comment… get into the conversation. This is the heart of blogging and its power… it’s two-way… it’s interactive… you don’t just read, you participate.

Speaking of participation, click the “Comment” link below and join the conversation right here.