Ogilvy PR Guru and blogger Rohit Bhargava just published his first book, "Personality Not Included."
Instead of resorting to cheap stunts to artificially raise awareness (and impose on his network), he’s rolled up his sleeves and is conducting 55 blogger interviews.
1) You've been immersed in your book and now have to tell the world about it. What's your elevator speech?
Great question, and something I've been thinking about. Here's the pitch:
Faceless companies don't work anymore. In the social media era, personality matters. This book is about how to find and use your organizations personality to delight your customers.
In case that's not short enough for you, my core pitch is just two words: personality matters. That's the core concept for my marketing campaign, and will also be the name of my book blog I'll be launching this week.
2) There are lots of business books out there. Complete this sentence. "You should read my book over other business books because:"
Personality Not Included brings together some of the hottest trends in business right now (social media, WOM and authenticity) and offers more than 100 case studies, as well as a unique action guide to put all the theories of the book into action immediately.
3) Some very smart, pragmatic folks suspect the economy will bring a social media wake up call and the conversation will revert to more conventional marketing efforts. What do you think the recession will do to the conversation?
The recession will make personality even more important because the premise of the book is that it can help your brand become more than just something people buy from. Brands that have not connected with their customers will be the first to suffer in a recession. The ones that have built strong relationships will continue to find new customers, enjoy word of mouth, be shared between people.
4) The industry is filled with passionate evangelists and skeptics alike. But the majority of marketers are not "conversing in transparent bliss." Some might be playing wait and see and others might be overwhelmed by all if it. But what are some ways you recommend people get involved to understand the benefits of social media?
The first natural step is to find a way to listen. That's pretty obvious. What people don't realize is that there are now two stages of listening. The first is listening as in monitoring. The second is active listening where you are acting on the listening by tagging information, saving it, posting a comment, or other interaction. Once you focus on that, you can determine the right way to proceed.
The answer for everyone is not to create a blog or slap together a Facebook group. Listening enables you to choose the right thing, instead of starting lots of social media efforts that sound great but ultimately fail.
5) This is your first book. What are the biggest things you learned in this process and are you cooking an idea for a second book?
The main thing I learned was just how much of everything you need to do yourself. I went with a big publisher (McGraw-Hill), but rapidly realized that you need to kickstart all the efforts and essentially serve the role of project manager for all the moving marketing pieces.
The other surprising thing I learned was that I was not able to reuse much blog content. I thought I would be able to do more than that and probably used a max of 2 paragraphs I had already written. The rest was written for the book from scratch. In terms of an idea for a second book, I have a few. I shared in a previous interview that I think it would be great to write a dating book all about how the concepts of marketing can help you find your soul mate. Basically, something a bit more mainstream and less business focused so I can head out to a wider readership.
Congratulations Rohit on the book and on a fresh approach to book promotion.
tags | public relations | PR | social media | marketing | Rohit Bhargava | Personality Not Included
Excellent interview! I really enjoyed reading it.
Posted by: Mariana Sarceda | Sunday, March 30, 2008 at 02:38 PM