The event is the New Marketing Summit, and if you sign up with code PAULVIP, you get a $200 discount off the $795 registration. This is special discount for Paul’s guests because, as a co-designer of the program, he gets special treatment!

In addition to keynotes by Paul, David and Don Peppers of 1to1Media, here are a few topics from the program:

• Niches, Microniches, and Social Networks
• Videoblogs, Podcasts, New Media, and the Impact on Marketing
• Search Engine Secrets
• Brands and Reputation in an All Media World
• Unlocking the Puzzle of Marketing Within Games
• Interactive Digital: Beyond Flashy-Shiny-Fast

There are dozens of speakers, many of them successful practitioners who will tell what’s working for them and how you can benefit from their experience.

It’s Oct. 14 and 15 in Foxboro, Mass., about 25 miles south of Boston. If you attend, please look up Paul and say hello!

Michael Goldberg

Do CIOs use the Internet?  Perhaps not the same way mere mortals do, but IT executives have intense information needs of demand a unique focus in perspective.  As managing editor of CIO.com, the online wing of the venerable technology magazine, Michael Goldberg is charged with keeping close to the needs of this highly coveted audience.

Don’t approach Michael with technology pitches.  His audience is focused on solving business problems, and there areas of concern go far beyond the newest iPhone.  Successful PR professionals should define their pitches around a solid business context, with customer citations a plus.

And in the true Web 2.0 spirit, CIO.com is now enabling conversations. Its new new Advice & Opinion section enables experts to contribute their wisdom directly, without having to go through a pitch-and-submit process.

Here are Michael’s guidelines for submitting to Advice & Opinion:

We encourage experts to post their pieces directly at CIO.com’s Advice & Opinion section. Simply register at advice.cio.com and post your piece to our website. We strongly encourage you to register under your name.
Our online community for IT leaders is most interested in best practices and problem-solving information for their work, so please join the conversation. Also please know that we reserve the right to delete pieces
that read like sales and marketing materials. At our discretion, we may also take the best submissions and promote them in our newsletters and/or on the home page of our site.

Here’s a quick rundown.

• Go to cio.com.
• Click on Advice and Opinion section.
• Read the articles we have there by staff and contributors.
• Consider what you want to write. Does it add something to ongoing discussions about something important in IT, management, leadership, careers, technology implementations, value, business. What value do theyadd to the ongoing conversation and why
• Write your article. Make the outline clear, stick to the specific points you want to make. Take out sales and marketing language –we delete such pieces.
• Register at cio.com. Please use your real name to add credibility to your post.
• Post your article. Include the author’s company affiliation at the top.
• See who comments.
• Repeat later.

Below are some recent examples of submitted content:

Data Leakage: How to Avoid Security Risks When Sending Large Files

http://advice.cio.com/yorgen/data_leakage_how_to_avoid_security_risks_when_sending_large_files

Zero Contact Resolution: A Proactive Approach to Improving the Customer Experience

http://advice.cio.com/steve_daines/zero_contact_resolution_a_proactive_approach_to_improving_the_customer_experience

Download the podcast (14:47)

Download and listen to the podcast here.

Eric Schwartzman

If you’re a PR professional, you can’t afford not to listen to On the Record…Online. For the past three years, this podcast has offered a steady stream insight on how journalists, marketers and new media innovators use the Internet to report the news and promote their businesses. Host Eric Schwartzman has anchored all 120 programs and in the process become a media influencer in his own right.

Paul came across On the Record…Online when he was writing The New Influencers and devoured program after program. He later devoted a couple of pages of the book to describing how the show had evolved from a conference promotion to become a staple of Schwartzman’s iPressroom service.

In this interview, Schwartzman talks about how On the Record…Online came into being, the impact it’s had on his business and how public relations is evolving in a world of fragmented media.

Download the podcast (27:39)

This interview was conducted at the New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, Calif. shortly before Paul’s keynote interview with Nick.

Download the podcast (11:24)

This week, Paul and David talk about how to promote your blogs and other Web content. You have to be more grassroots and deliberate about it, and use a variety of techniques such as mailing lists, keywords, inbound links, and just paying attention to the details of your content. The days of Flash-y pages are over: the way to Google’s search algorithms lies with simple and well-designed textual pages. Google has become our universal home page, and understanding how they will index your site is important in driving traffic to your site.

We also discuss the Times article about how the Tibetan protesters have used new media to coordinate their activities.

You can download the podcast here.

When my copy of Duncan Brown’s and Nick Hayes’ Influencer Marketing arrived in the mail, I looked at it a little bit like a trip to the dentist. I knew it was going to be good for me, but I didn’t expect to enjoy it.

What a pleasure, then, to find that this engaging and provocative book not only challenged many of my assumptions about markets and influence, but did so in a readable and persuasive manner.

The authors are co-managers of Influencer50, a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies identify the key influencers in their markets. Like many authors of their kind, they think a lot of marketing today is badly broken. Unlike many authors, though, they have concrete advice on how to fix it.

The central premise of this book is that the people who influence markets are largely unknown to most marketers. In fact, the authors’ firm offer clients a 50% discount if they can name even 20 of the top 50 influencers in their sphere. They’ve never had to pay up. Most marketers, they assert, consider influencers to be mainly press and analysts. In fact, they suggest that the list is far larger and more diverse than that, encompassing more than 20 categories ranging from channel players to venture capitalist to government agencies and systems integrators. They argue that many of these influencers are far more important than the media because they speak directly to a company’s customers. They pay particular attention, for example to second-tier consultancies, systems integrators and buyers groups. These people are whispering in the year of customers every day, yet most marketers aren’t even aware that they’re talking, the authors assert.

This book defends its case pretty well, using logic and ample case studies. It’s also written in a disarmingly down-to-earth and at times tongue-in-cheek style. Hayes and Brown aren’t stingy with their opinions. Bloggers, for example, get far more attention than they deserve, they suggest, and many bloggers are simply people who are awkward in social situations. Referencing Twitter, they say simply, “How anyone can maintain a proper job and use Twitter is beyond us.” You may not agree with their opinions, but you have to respect them for the directness with which they are stated.

They hate awards programs, believing them to be valuable only to the organizations bestowing the awards. Partnerships are meaningless in most cases because companies have far too many partners to manage effectively. They believe that brand equity is overstated and that celebrity endorsers play mostly to the egos of the marketers who recruit them. That’s just a sampling of the often counterintuitive assertions in his book.

I did have some nits to pick with Influencer Marketing. The case studies lack much in the way of hard ROI and are limited mostly to Influencer50 clients. I thought the rather critical chapter on bloggers underestimated the influence that those influencers have on mainstream media. The authors are also big fans of using consultants to identify influencers, a position that obviously favors their company.

Nevertheless, if the greatest value of a business book is to challenge assumptions, as I believe it is, then Influencer Marketing succeeds admirably. It’s one of the best marketing books I’ve read in a long time. For a commitment of five or six hours, it is well worth the time spent reading it.