Book Review – UnMarketing

Scott Stratten was one of the first people I started following on Twitter. He signed up in April 2008; I got on in December 2008. One of the first posts I saw was a friendly reminder to engage with people on Twitter and to not just use it as a place to promote yourself.

Then I watched his involvement (and others) with #12for12K, an online community-building and fundraising event and I thought, “cool, I found a guy who does good work and does good for the community.”

His book is called UnMarketing-Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. The book challenges us to think a little differently about our traditional marketing efforts. There are so many tools at our disposal now that we can’t just keep doing it the same old way.

The book is about using social media and how to incorporate it into your traditional marketing efforts. If you are new to social or aren’t yet sure how to use it, this is a great book for that. He spends a lot of time talking about the tools and gives some great examples of successful and some not-so successful organizations using social.

And when you read it, be sure to read the footnotes, too. These little bonus gems give you a sneak peak into Scott’s personality – a little witty, a little sarcastic, but some great insight. (I’ve not met Scott, I’m only assuming witty and sarcastic!)

For those of us who are pretty active in the space and are already engaging, a lot of the content will be familiar to you. And even though I didn’t necessarily learn anything new, I did find some nuggets that apply generally to business that really resonated with me.

• Business is built on relationships so make the time to build those relationships.
• Because customers buy first from people they know, trust and like, take the time to build that trust.
• Get to the point where you are recognized as an expert in your field. You may not be the expert, but you can be an expert. And that applies to everyone – whether you fix televisions or do brain surgery, you can be an expert.
• “Unmarketing” is all about engagement. Internal, external and online.

Bottom line? It can’t be business as usual. The marketplace is more demanding, customers need more and we need to be able to deliver at all levels with our customers.

The book will take about three hours (give or take) to read through it. And if you’re like me, you’ll be jotting notes in the margin and dog-earring some of the pages.