Meatball Sundae

Posted on January 3, 2008
Filed Under Social Media Marketing | Leave a Comment | Written by Gary Reid

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Today I got an email from Amazon offering a pre-order discount on Seth Godins new book Meatball Sundae.

What is a meatball sundae? It’s something messy, disgusting and ineffective, the result of combining two perfectly good things that don’t go together. Meatballs are the basic staples, the things people need, the stuff that used to be marketed quite well with TV and other mass market techniques. The topping is new marketing: MySpace, websites, YouTube, and all of the magic that CEOs wish would shine atop their companies. The problem? New marketing is lousy at selling meatballs.

Seth has a Squidoo page that goes into a bit more detail here.

This does seem like Seth’s homage to Web 2.0, an easy to swallow guide for people who’s job title starts with a C. Like all Seth’s books I’m guessing it will be a good read, but not sure if the timing is quite right, I’ll grab a copy and update.

Meatball Sundae

Shady tactics

Posted on January 2, 2008
Filed Under Black Hat Marketing | Leave a Comment | Written by Gary Reid

Digg your own story, spam comments on well known blogs, pay for stumbles all becoming more widespread.

Mike A (Techcrunch) has just been writing about WebGuild who have been spamming his comments to get some free publicity for their copycat conferences. Let’s be honest it takes some to feel sorry for Tim Web 2.0′Reilly with the $2000 ticket price, but i do, he’s worked hard to build a business around what was pretty much nothing - Web 2.0.

The biggest problem is that this WebGuild guy has gotten what he wanted, a mention on TechCrunch and if there’s no such thing as bad publicity then he’s come out of this ok.

Black hat marketing will always go on but as we complain we (including me by writing this) make it worth their while to spam comments, infringe trademarks…