David Meerman Scott and The New Rules

A friend recently recommended a book to me: The New Rules of Marketing & PR, by David Meerman Scott. It's one heck of a readable read. There's an enthusiastic style here, with straightforward comments and insights on how the web has altered how businesses reach customers.

There's the old way and there's right now. Get on board with your blogs, podcasts, and other means of communicating. The book is rich with case studies and pointers on strategy for the new paradigm. Good stuff. In print. What a concept.

RadioHead, MP3's, Music Is Dead

At the top left in my IGoogle is the SEOBook blog. Search Engine Optimization interests me. How we are in this electronic jungle, and the primates have to come up with the tool to end all tools, to gain some form of dominance.

It entertains, it frustrates, it challenges. What can we do technically to build the advantage and keep it?

So in my looking at this top blog, I discover these potent comments on our musical world: Aaron Wall spoke of RadioHead's offering of a free download--it looks like the entire album. I also saw a great take on it in the Lefsetz letter. Not sure why it has to be news, but it is. Members vying for attention, position. TIME writes, people react, servers get overloaded, and the name gets memed. Stickiness achieved.

Round here, it seems like music is dead, or dying, or just flat out being victimized. But what's new? I hope my own music will be listened to at some point without my having to pay people to listen to it. All this woogydeedoo is inspiring me.

Get Your Keyword Feet Wet Now

What a difference keywords make in the songs we write, in our conversations and stories, and in our efforts to discover and be discovered on the web.

Here's a pretty easy way to get your keyword feet wet: go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. This is a "lite" version of a subscription-based keyword suggestion tool (there are many of them), but in just seconds you can catch some insight on what people are searching for on the web. Results are sorted from most popular search on down ("nashville music" showed some healthy results). Focus on where you fit in. What do you do? How are you known? How do you want to be known? Have at it and see how many searches are done daily on what you do. Use these numbers as a springboard to clarifying your marketing message. If you have Internet Explorer 7 or FireFox, you can also click http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/plugin/freekeywords.xml to get the keyword search tool added right to your browser। Have Big Fun!