The Next Big Thing? Lot's of Little Things.

Cross-posted on The Engaged Conumer

If you haven't met our VP of strategy here at Powered, Greg Verdino, you should try and remedy that soon. He's a smart guy who brings a healthy dose of wit and snide to any channel you connect with him in. He's also just written a book. A really good book I might add. One that is made better by NOT being about social media. Well, it includes many references to social media tools and examples... but the book itself is about marketing. MicroMarketing. If you're wondering what that is, you came to the right place to find out.

microMarketing FTW!

Before I talk about what microMarketing is, I want to go back and provide a little context for this post. In helping my friend and colleague, Greg, get the word out about his new book, Mr. Verdino and I decided that rather than just send the book out to a bunch of influential folks and ask them to write about it, we'd ask them to cover a single chapter. I'm not in any way criticizing the traditional approach but in the spirit of "micro" we realized that shorter might be better. The roster of people that have agreed to speak is pretty awesome. I've included the names/dates/chapters they are covering and a link to their blogs below. As their write ups go live, I'll swap out the generic blog links to those that point at the actual chapter posts:

Monday Sept. 20 - Chapter 1

• Aaron Strout (yup, that's me)

Tuesday Sept. 21 - Chapter 2

• Lucretia Pruitt
• Mitch Joel

Wednesday Sept. 22 - Chapter 3

• Jason Falls
• Toby Bloomberg

Thursday Sept. 23 - Chapter 4

• Katya Andreson
• Murray Newlands

Friday Sept. 24 - Chapter 5

• Marc Meyer
• Chris Abraham

Monday Sept. 27 - Chapter 6

• Ari Herzog
• TJ McCue

Tuesday Sept. 28 - Chapter 7

• Danny Brown
• Jay Baer
• Adam Cohen
• Becky Caroll

Wednesday Sept. 29 - Chapter 8

• C.C. Chapman
• Elmer Boutin

Thursday Sept. 30 - Chapter 9

• John Moore
• David Armano
• Justin Levy
• Beth Harte

Getting back to "what is microMarketing," the title of the initial chapter of the book, "The Next Big Thing is Lots and Lots of Small Things," does a nice job as summarizing the entire book. To that end, chapter one does a nice job setting the stage for the rest of the book by offering up examples of how the world is shifting from a mass to micro focus. With examples like "Sasquatch Dancing Man," the Iranian election coverage by citizen journalists and Ashton Kutcher's unlikely victory over CNN in a race to one million Twitter followers, the book demonstrates the loss of control by the mainstream media and in some cases, the government, over we, the consumer's, time and attention.

If one were to summarize the entire book into it's bare essence, this illustrative chart on page 21 pretty much says it all:

Chart: Seven Shifts from Mass to micro (p. 21 of microMarketing)

As a marketer or someone running a business big or small, it's these types of prescriptive recommendations that make microMarketing so useful. When you take a quick look at the success of a site like Facebook with it's 500 million members who share over 30 billion pieces of content each month, it's not hard to understand that there is a new sheriff in town and his name is NOT "mainstream media".

I promise that I won't ruin the rest of the book for you. And while the reviews that you'll get from my fellow bloggers over the next two weeks will be useful aids in understanding the new phenomena that Verdino writes about, it's certainly no substitute for all of the useful examples and suggestions in the book itself. In fact, if you're in the New York City area on September 27th, there's a great seminar (I'll be leading a panel with some of the folks mentioned in the book). You can also meet Greg and get your own signed copy of the book which comes with the price of admission.

If you've already read the book and have thoughts on Chapter 1 that I haven't covered here (I've yadda yadda-ed over a lot), feel free to include them in the comments.