Ronin Marketeer » Swipe File

I was passed a copy of an old Malcolm Gladwell article and that made me wonder if any of his stuff was online. On The M Show I’ve talked about his books The Tipping Point and Blink, which are both very interesting, but I’ve found his New Yorker articles the most fascinating.

Lo and behold, his has all of them (or at least a bunch of them) posted on his website!

He also has a blog up there that hasn’t been updated in a while, including this very interesting post on Freakonomics.

It’s interesting to note that all of the posts have tons of comments – it makes me wonder – once you are being paid professionally to write is there any reason to blog other than to promote your current book, or test ideas for the next one?

VirtualResponse Channels Dre

john — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:12:32 +0000

This is the best marketing I have ever seen for an email company. The only downside to this is that if you don’t know Salesforce.com you won’t get all the jokes, otherwise, brilliant!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Great Marketing

john — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:00:52 +0000

Whenever I see some brilliant marketing I’m compelled to make a note and post it here.

I was getting my car washed yesterday and before you pull around to the entry there’s a self service kiosk where you can grab a trashbag or a heavy duty paper towel. There’s also a sort of gumball machine that has peanuts in it with a dopey slogan “We’re nuts about our customers!”. Don’t be fooled by the idiotic tagline. Easy marks (aka suckers) like myself grab some, soccer moms with kids in the minivan probably do the same to keep the kids quiet.

But what happens next? You start cracking open and peeling the peanuts. So unless you are compulsive like I am, eating right over your new free trashbag, you finish the carwash and look around the inside of your car, filled with peanut shells, and say “Damn, we should vacuum this mess out!”

And, lo and behold, there’s the vacuum right next to the exit.

Have a good weekend.