So I was going through Seth Godins’ blog (author of business books and a popular speaker.) and I came across this post (what do you know) of his where he writes about a bunch of things every good marketer should know. Thought it would be a good idea to share it on here.

1. Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
2. Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
3. Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
4. Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
5. Marketing begins before the product is created.
6. Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
7. Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
8. Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
9. Products that are remarkable get talked about.
10. Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
11. You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
12. If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
13. People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
14. You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
15. What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
16. Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
17. Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
18. People all over the world and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
19. Good marketers tell a story.
20. People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
21. Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
22. Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
23. Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
24. A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
25. Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
26. Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
27. Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
28. Good marketer’s measure.
29. Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
30. One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.
31. In the Google world, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
32. Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
33. There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
34. Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.
35. You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
36. You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
37. Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.

Having read all of this what struck me is that it’s all so simple! and yet alot of these facts get overlooked only too easily. There is always room to learn more and more each day, but learning matters only when you put what you have learned to use.This is but a chip of the iceberg, feel free to add on.

Jason Hiner, Executive Editor, Tech Republic, shares this interesting insight on Twitter – something you heard a lot about at the Digitas Bootcamp:

For those who have never used Twitter, my biggest challenge here might be giving you a concise definition. Here are some of the common ones that you’ll hear:

• It’s micro-blogging
• It’s a 140-character note about what you’re doing
• It’s an up-to-the-minute status update for all your friends
• It’s a great way to keep up with what your colleagues are working on
• It’s a very timely source for news and links
• It’s like being part of the Borg but you choose your own Collective

Here’s how I explained Twitter to my mom a couple weeks ago:

“It’s like a text message or an instant message —
limited to 140 characters — that you send to everyone on your buddy
list. You use it when you’re doing something interesting, you have some
news to share, or you have a Web link that you want to bring to
people’s attention.”

If you don’t think that sounds very exciting or useful, you’re not
alone. A lot of the most active Twitterers I know didn’t take to it
right away. There’s
an interesting phenomenon with Twitter where a user gives it a first
try and then sort of abandons it, while still occasionly checking on
the messages posted by the people on their contact list. Then, the user
eventually starts doing and seeing stuff and thinking, “I should post
that Twitter.” Pretty soon they actually start remembering to post that
stuff, either from a Web browser or a cell phone, and before long they
are hooked.

Five reasons why Twitter matters

1. Twitter provides a method for tapping into the brainwaves of people whose thoughts and opinions are valuable to you.
2. It can help you catch breaking news very quickly. It’s the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth.
3. It can allow you to communicate and network with people that you’ve wanted to meet.
4. Twitter lets you keep track of colleagues, see what they’re working on, and better understand what they do.
5. It can serve as a messaging tool to quickly communicate with multiple contacts.

Twitter for IT

I primarily use Twitter for three things:

1. Posting a lot of the stuff that doesn’t make it into my blog. That
   includes links, breaking news, thoughts on current events in the tech
   world, and occasionally a few off-topic notes about digital living and
   civilization as we know it.
2. Keeping up with current and former co-workers and other friends and
   colleagues — mostly people in the IT industry or the media business.
   I’ve learned more about some of my co-workers from Twitter than I did
   by working with them in the same office for years.
3. Responding to thoughts and notes from my network of contacts and get to know some of my contacts better in the process.

You can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jasonhiner.

Because so many of the early adopters of Twitter are techies, it can
be a valuable tool for IT leaders, who can not only follow pundits like
me but can also follow like-minded IT experts. In this way, they can
build their own custom community of people of interest for IT. That’s
the greatest strength of Twitter, and that’s why it will end up being
the most important development on the Web in 2008 — the year it really
started to gain critical mass.

There’s another reason why IT pros may be interested in Twitter, and
it has nothing to do with its use for communication. As an online
application built on RubyOnRails,
Twitter has run into scaling problems that have recently led to several
outages of the service and repeatedly dogged the IT department. In
fact, the outages have become so common that they are — dangerously —
becoming one of the distinguishing characteristics of Twitter. Check
out the TechCrunch article Twitter At Scale: Will It Work? and this blog post form the Twitter staff to get up to speed on the issues involved.