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Paulo Coelho, one of the most popular writers around, has been very active in many of the social websites I hang around. Today I decided to take a look at Paulo’s blog after Loïc blogged that Paulo has started using Seesmic to show video comments in his blog.

What a surprise I had waiting. Paulo Coelho is currently active in 17 social media websites, how about that for a 60-year old?

You can’t really say that social media has helped him sell millions of books, then again it probably doesn’t hurt all that much either.

I finally managed to read through Joseph Jaffe’s Join The Conversation during the Easter holidays. The book is yet another solid show of Joseph Jaffe’s understanding of the internet and how it changes companies’ business models and marketing. Numerous examples of excellent ways of marketing and at least equally bad examples enable the reader to understand the small important issues in working online.

However, I really would have wanted to see slightly more academic writing from the author, because “Join the Conversation” is another “life after the 30-second spot” from the online world. There are a lot of examples that prove the points Jaffe is trying to make, but they usually are very light in context and could ultimately, in some cases, be used to prove the point from another point of view. My favorite learning I received from the book was the combination of the Long Tail theory together with Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations graphs. I’m sure there is more there to explore and write about.

Despite all this I enjoyed the book, it’s a solid good read. With slightly more depth it would have been a 5/5-star goodie. Then again, this could be me to whom most of the examples were relatively familiar. To the the regular marketing person in a large multinational, this is definitely and eye-opener.

I wrote an article on social media to HETKY’s (Helsingin tietojenkäsittely-yhdistys) magazine. The article in itself is quite light and doesn’t dig that much into the possibilities, but shines light on some possibilities and ways how companies have used internet in creating competitive advantage. The image is available in real size scan over here.

“A fundamentalist is a person, who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith, before they explore it - as opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ratifications.”

By one of my favorite authors, Seth Godin.

The image above is a great example how to communicate to your customers when you have to ask the customer to do something that’s not in their interest. You position the message so that it’s actually a compliment instead of apologising for the task. Don’t concentrate on yourself and what you’re doing - focus on the customer, they’re giving you their attention. Give something back to them.

The message is from twitter, when they were going through my Gmail contacts whether any of them had an account with twitter.

That’s Hans Rosling going on about how we destroy our planet. He’s one of my new heroes :) The other two are definitely Kevin Rose and Evan Williams - two guys who have done incredible things online in terms of social web.

It’s 3.19 am, been awake for almost 24 hours, it’s time to get a few hours sleep and go conferencing again tomorrow. Like my friend said, or almost accused me of - I do actually do feel being here a bit like being in a candy store.

We’ve met with quite a lot of companies in the last two months and it always amazes me when companies tell us that “Oh, we’ve had that feature/option available for a long time, but we haven’t found it very useful”. The feature in this case can be replaced with almost any sort of marketing activity, user feature or anything of that sort.

The problem with internet is that it doesn’t usually count how well you have hogged all possible marketing activities or features available to mankind, but how well they work together and how they are given to the user. Half of good planning is well thought out execution. Many executives still fail to see the difference in the way things are executed or shown to the user.

However, it still makes us smile when we’re told in a client meeting, “but we already have that!”.

Seth Godin has a good blog post on how monks sell their beer in Belgium. The monks sell this beer that has no branding nor any labels on the bottles. And this is when it gets interesting.

There are two interesting aspects to how they create demand and increase their brand value without any logos or names. First, they strongly limit supply - you can only buy the beer through appointments with a monk. Second, there is a very secret, religious process behind the brewing of the beer. These combined have given them quite a cult following in many parts of the world.

Read more at the Church of the Customer Blog.

(via TechCrunch)

I’ve looking through some laptop bags tonight and found several good websites that review them. The best definitely has been Squidoo’s lens on laptop bags. There I came across Waterfield’s RacerX, with which I fell in love with instantly. It’s a little bit business and a little bit rock n’ roll, not falling into the traditional way of doing stuff, just the way I like it.

Now, has anybody ever seen or heard anything about these bags? They praise the bags on their website (with customer reviews), but it never hurts to ask a third opinion. And no, this is not a paid advertisement :)

Update:: So I went ahead and ordered a blue, 15″, mountain bike grip - RacerX. thanks to everyone for the comments! :)