A Literary Recipe for New Media Success

It’s the holiday gift giving season, and time to be thinking of gifts for your friends, colleagues and clients.

Of course, the gift of knowledge is timeless, and in that spirit, Fusionspark’s New Media Insights blog offers this list of recommended Content Marketing and Social Media related books. These are titles that we own, have studied, and frequently recommend to clients, new and existing.

We’ve titled this post “A Literary Recipe for New Media Success” because, much like the way a finished dish is made of individual ingredients, contemporary New Media marketing is the sum of many ideas, concepts and practices. In order to succeed, you need a dash of content marketing, a pinch of social media, a spoonful of trust, and a few other tasty ingredients.

So here, for the first time anywhere, is a Literary Recipe for Success in New Media marketing.

Bon appetit!

Begin by Assembling the Following Ingredients:

The Cluetrain Manifesto; Levine, Locke, Searls, Weinberger

Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?; Seth Godin

Now Is Gone; Geoff Livingston, with Brian Solis

The New Rules of Marketing and PR; David Meerman Scott

Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends; Tim Sanders

Purple Cow; Seth Godin

Made to Stick; Chip & Dan Heath

The Experience Economy; Gilmore & Pine

Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want; Gilmore and Pine

Trust Agents; Chris Brogan

World Wide Rave; David Meerman Scott

Groundswell; Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff

Get Content, Get Customers; Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day; Avinash Kaushik

Prepare ahead:

This recipe calls for a change in how you’ve normally cooked things up. So, in a large mixing bowl, blend The Cluetrain Manifesto (a fundamental ingredient that’s only improved with age) with Meatball Sundae.

The essence of this pairing is that you cannot combine  “old ways of doing business” with “new media marketing & PR practices” and expect something to come out the other end that’s fulfilling and satisfying. In other words, recognize that your “same as always” marketing and PR ingredients need to be replaced with a whole new set of approaches.

Toss in a little Now Is Gone and The New Rules of Marketing and PR. These are two important ingredients that bind the previous two ingredients with real world case studies to help you learn New Media marketing practices.

In a separate container:

Blend one part Love Is the Killer App with equal amounts of Purple Cow and Made to Stick and apply to your product, service or cause. For good measure, sprinkle in a little of The Experience Economy.

The resulting concoction demonstrates how giving freely of your knowledge and experience will reward you with new business, especially when done exceptionally well, and in ways that create lasting, memorable experiences.

Throw in a generous helping of Authenticity, mixed with Trust Agents, to add a “humanizing” zest to the blend. Without authenticity and trust, the other ingredients simply won’t bind as well, and, in fact, may separate.

Bring all of the above to a boil, then simmer and reduce by a 1/3.

The result will be a condensed, flavorful reduction sauce reflecting who you are and what you’re about, cleverly and memorably conveyed as much by your audience as yourself, therefore serving as an important accompaniment to your Content Marketing main course.

Set aside, but don’t allow to cool!

Prepare the main course:

Prepare a content strategy based upon Get Content, Get Customers.

This is the main dish to which all the other  ingredients and accompaniments will be added. It is the substance. And without the substance provided by the Content Marketing course, all the other ingredients, such as social media, will likely not live up to expectations. It’d be like offering frosting, but no cake.

Plate all of the above, and then add:

Generous helpings  of World Wide Rave and Groundswell. These are essential ingredients for getting your customers and clients to not only talk with you about how much they enjoyed your offering, but also to share how much they liked it with others in their social networks, online and off.

Finally, finish it all off with:

An analytics course.

How are you going to know what to offer your customers and clients the next time they visit if you don’t accurately learn what they enjoyed the most the first time around?

The answer, of course, is with a precise serving of Web Analytics to help all your future New Media marketing planning.

And that’s all there is to it!

If you buy the books listed here, we hope you enjoy them, and that they help you succeed even more in 2010.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!