Finally my blogs. Better late than never?

Day 1: What I liked from the first 5 chapters of the book, was the fact he really dove into why people talk. It is something that we all overlook, and something most of us did for a while. When he talked about the actors who were paid to go take pictures and talk about the camera and the fact that the results could have and probably would have been much better had they just let excited people talk about it, really struck me. I also thought the overexposure piece was great. Especially in the ski and snowboard industry you have to have the right amount of exposure but not be too mainstream. Burton is a good example of that, today everyone thinks their gear sucks, and they are the bandwagon that beginners hop on. However, with the more experienced people, they are not fans of it, this is because of overexposure. I really liked that the book had checklists and pages, and was easy to read. The word of Mouth Ethics Checklist is something that shouldn’t be so difficult, but clearly is for some people. The layout of the book including the big bolded boxes make it so easy a caveman could do it. I did think there were some contradictions in his writing about gifts. Specifically the part where if people feel like they are being paid to say something, or doing it as a favor, they get sketched out about it. However, later in the book he talks about sending customers out the doors with small gifts and cards that say, don’t forget to talk about this place on Facebook. Finally, from the first five chapters what I specifically did was use sticky notes to attack the book. Pink were big picture things to take to the workplace, checklists, and key ideas. My blue sticky notes were things or ideas that I can contribute to my group or team project, or for my job (hopefully that is coming soon). My book looks like a rainbow attacked it, then threw up on random pages, but there were a lot of things that I took away from the book and thought could help me down the line. Finally I marked other pages with green notes, these were things that were interesting to me, whether they were facts, contradictions, or things that brought up more questions. Day 2: From the second half of the book I liked how he started off with a bang; “anything that catches attention is a topic”. It is so simple, yet something that I feel like many people would have a hard problem with. I can just see an intern, or an old PR pro wondering what people would find interesting, or what they should tweet about for their company. I liked the Three must use Word of Mouth Marketing tools (they got all three colors of sticky notes!!) It is once again so simple, yet something that gets so overlooked. Asking people to spread the word is great because well, people love to talk about themselves and their experiences. I also made notes for me personally about the Honeymoon kit. I know for me personally, I am the most excited about something when it is fresh, and I just found it. I want to be the one to spread the word, and tell people because it was fun for ME. The power of Swag also got notes. At K2 I would get loaded up with literally thousands of stickers to give out. The same with catalogs which also double as posters, they do the shop no good sitting in the warehouse, but people love stickers. You could say there was going to be a sticker giveaway at Stevens Pass for the first 100 riders, and you would have kids lined up down the block hours before the thing even started because for some reason, skiers and snowboarders love stickers! What I wish the book would have done more was go into further depth about the tools to do these things, specifically on Facebook and Twitter. Though I understand the technologies are constantly being updated with these, I think that it was something that could have been addressed. However, the down side to that is that it would have been a lot more meticulous reading, and a step by step instruction book, which I think the book was not designed to be that way at all.