Thursday, December 07, 2006

Great ideas take on a life of their own...

As the gang at Brains on Fire would say, "Warning: Potential horn tootin' ahead."

As most of you no doubt know, the Marketing Profs Book Club, Hosted by CK, was unveiled on Tuesday at Daily Fix. What MP and CK have teamed up to do is bring leading business/marketing authors, and their community of fans, together. For anyone that signs up, they will be able to discuss the book with the authors and fellow readers, and post questions about the book for the community and authors to answer. In addition, the first 30 people that sign up will be given an autographed copy of the book, with the first one being Citizen Marketers, which I reviewed earlier this week.

Who benefits from this program? Everyone.

The community gets great books for free. The community gets to DISCUSS those great books not only with each other, but with the authors. Knowledge is gained and shared, everyone ends up smarter. The authors win because they not only get invaluable attention drawn to their books, and of course sales, but they too get to learn from their communities, and get the type of hands-on feedback companies pay HUGE amounts of money for. Gold for everyone!

And as happens with most good ideas, this one is growing into a monster. CK said the number of people that had signed up as of last night was over 400, including readers from every continent and she's waiting on confirmation from a particularly bookwormy penguin in Antartica. I'm sure the total is approaching or has passed 500 by now. That number could easily reach a thousand by the time the program goes live in January.

Another reason why I take great pride in writing for Daily Fix. Not only am I surrounded by wonderful marketers such as CK that truly want to use marketing as an empowerment tool, but our fearless leader, Ann, shares in that vision, and is smart enough to recognize a smart idea such as CK's Book Club, and run with it.

A great idea, and while CK and Ann are working with leading authors to help spread knowledge, we can all learn plenty from these savvy marketers about embracing and empowering your community.




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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the kind words and the plug Mack. Being an "outed" bookworm (or, "Bookstress", as Paul coined - ha!), this program is near and dear to me. But the best aspect is that it's everyone's Book Club. Especially since all members will have the opportunity to lead their own discussion threads...as well as hop to other discussion threads. It's democratic and based on share like that.

And a BIG benefit that I couldn't promote until I knew where membership rates would be is that members not only share knowledge, they get to meet colleagues from all over the world. That's pretty profound when you think about it.

We're nearing 500 members after 48 hours, not sure if we'll hit 1000 this go 'round but people can sign-up all the way until Group Review in January.

Thanks again...and Mack, I'm looking forward to your sharing your insights when Group Review opens since you had such a terrific review of the book :-).

Anonymous said...

I am ecstatic about this. A lot of us are reading the same type books, anyway, so I love to get the opportunity to share and dig deeper with you guys. Should be fun!

Anonymous said...

Mack -- What a nice post, bro! Thanks!

CK is the real brain here...as I've said in the past, my great talent in is recognizing smart, not actually BEING smart. ; )

Huge thanks goes out to CK for conceiving of the idea and (most importantly) running with it. As a wise college professor of mine used to say...lots of people have great idea. Far fewer can execute on them. I had no concept of how wise he was, exactly, at the time!

This is the kind of program that, done right, can really catch fire. Thanks to all of you for your support, enthusiam, and flat-out friendship. And once again, CK, you rock....!

Tim Jackson said...

Ann, everybody in this room rocks! That's the beauty of this community... I feel another hug coming on.

This idea of CK's is huge. Ann was smart enough to run with it. The rest of us were smart enough to jump on board and embrace it.

It's pretty cool.