Some Marketing Wonders

Marketing Wonder 1: I was fortunate to attend the quarterly meeting of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) this weekend.  I wrote about some of the profound changes at this organization (and genealogy in general) in July 2008—changes occurring at the very intersection of scholarship, preservation, information and technology.

You might recall that the NEHGS is a century-old organization that just happens to feature one of the finest genealogical collections on the face of the earth, accompanied by world class genealogists and a superb leadership team and staff. 

(Disclaimer: I am the current Chairman of NEHGS, but these things did not happen because I am Chairman; they are the reason I wanted to become Chairman.)

Now comes the wonder. This last summer, in the midst of its 164^th year, NEHGS had the single greatest month of membership growth ever.  Ever.

The reason?   Facebook.

Yep, that surprised the board, too.  (You can become an NEHGS “fan” on Facebook—please do.)

It seems highly likely, in the coming years, that NEHGS will become as expert at assembling your living relatives as it has always been at assembling your ancestors.

Think of it as one big family reunion.

Marketing Wonder 2: If you want to truly understand what modern high-tech marketing can do, articulated much more elegantly than I ever could, make sure you read Ellis Weiner’s Subject: Our Marketing Plan in the “Shouts and Murmurs” column in the current New Yorker (with a tip of the hat to good friend Jerry).  To give you a sense, here’s a piece of helpful advice contained therein:

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

It’s laugh-out-loud funny.

Marketing Wonder 3: If you are up for some additional entertaining reading, make sure you see Rob Walker’s piece, The Song Decoders, about Pandora Internet radio in the Sunday New York Times.  I knew I loved Pandora but now know why: “Pandora’s approach more of less ignores the crowd.  It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit.  The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like.”

No more fibbing to a market researcher about how much sleep you get, how many hours you work each week, and how many classic Greek plays you read last month.  No mob, no social interest groups, no market segmentation, no Madison Avenue manipulation of “most liked” lists and no damn crowdsourcing. 

A market of one.  Me.

Another marketing wonder.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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