Come discuss “Meatball Sundae” with me, Andy Wibbels, Tim Sanders and Seth Godin 1/29

I have been enjoying my copy of Seth Godin’s latest book, Meatball Sundae.

It discusses fourteen marketing trends that we all face this year, in  thought and action-provoking signature Seth style.

The Meatball Sundae metaphor refers to boring company brands (meatballs) throwing whiz-bang new marketing strategies (ice cream sundae toppings) on top of their business, and expecting "magic" results.  The intro to the book says:

"Maybe this is familiar.  It is to me anyway:

    You go to a marketing meeting.  There’s a presentation from the new Internet-marketing guy.  He’s brought a fancy (and expensive) blogging consultant with him.  She starts talking about how blogs and the "Web 2.0 social media infrastructure" are just waiting for your company to dive in.  "Try this stuff," she seems to be saying, "And the rest of your competitive/structural/profit issues will disappear."

The same could be said for the brand new entrepreneur.  There is a stunning array of marketing tools to choose from, many of them free, but all time-consuming. What should you implement, in which order?

And sometimes, new entrepreneurs, groomed by "meatball" culture, think they have to create complex operational structures in order to be a "real" business. Examples like:

• A former Deloitte consultant believes he has to create obtuse 150-slide "decks" to impress his new clients (we should sic Garr on him)
• Former HR bigwigs, setting up shop as independent consultants, spend 6 months and $30,000 for a website that gets them zero clients.  (Meanwhile, a colleague setting up the same business uses LinkedIn one evening and gets 10)
• Talented and sincere bloggers spend endless hours creating wonderful content that no one reads

Last year, I tried to dip my hand in every New Marketing, social media, Web 2.0 bucket I could find, including  Facebook, LinkedIn, Podcasting, Internet Radio, YouTube, Blogging, Vlogging,(ok, I did one poorly recorded video greeting) and Squidoo .  I put a lot of effort into it and learned a lot, but didn’t do anything besides blogging justice, creating a rather stretched and anemic web presence.  It is also not sustainable … at least the way I have been doing it.

This year, I want to be more deliberate and effective in the tactics I use to reach out to my "peeps," frustrated corporate employees who want to break out of their cubes.  I would love to do fewer of the right things that serve my core objective:  bring people to this blog. For here is where my heart lies, and what I will continue to do regardless of any other distractions. {edit 1/22:  by "fewer of the right things" I mean fewer things, and the right things.  When I re-read this in the morning light, it sounded like I didn’t want to do the right things. 🙂

So next Tuesday, January 29 at 1pm Eastern I am delighted to participate in a call about Meatball Sundae with Seth and the following cool cats:

* Tim Sanders, author of Love is the Killer App and The Likeability Factor
* Andy Wibbels, expert blogger and author of Blogwild!

I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Tim yet, but Andy and I are buddies.  I harass him every few days on Skype with a whole bunch of Meatball Sundae-esqe, Web 2.0 questions, on everything from writing a book to technical blogging questions.  One of these days, he is going to realize that our friendship is just a thinly disguised way for me to get free consulting, and will stop returning my calls. 

If you haven’t yet grabbed your copy of the book, go to your local bookstore and buy it, get it from 800CEORead, or Amazon.  (The last time I reviewed a book, a kind reader who owns an independent bookstore reminded me that I should encourage people to "buy independent."  It was a good point, given the topic of my blog, but also a good question for the call, since I am not totally convinced that Amazon is the evil empire.  To prove it, I used an affiliate link.  What can I say, diapers ain’t cheap! Byron, if you want to weigh in, please do!)

Do you have any specific questions or topics that you want me to cover on the call? I can’t promise to get to all of them, but I would like to come prepared with a good synopsis of what my blog readers worry about when marketing their emerging businesses this year.

Drop your comments here, or send me an email.

If you can’t attend the live call, sign up anyway because it will be recorded.

Hope you can make it!  Sign up at www.sethgodinbooktour.com.