Having read and enjoyed The Long Tail I decided to pick up Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.  I didn’t really pick it up I downloaded it, for free, from Audible.  I was not disappointed.  I thought it  was quite interesting that I could get a book about “free” for free.  That’s putting your money where your mouth is.

It me be that I agree with Mr. Anderson’s thesis that the Internet has me it easy to create pricing models that include free and still make money.  Businesses have been doing this since there was such a thing as businesses.  Free samples readily comes to mind.  In FREE Anderson explores other ways that the Internet is making it easier such as the freemium model where large portions of a service offering are free for everyone, a kind of free sample, and a small number of users pay a premium for some advanced features.  Unlike a typical free sample that tends to have limited utility the freemium model offers good value for free.

I enjoyed the book.  My clearest take away from the book was that we need to start managing abundance and not scarcity.  If it’s online someone is bound to give it away for free.  Like it or not that’s going to happen.  You can fight against the tide or you can go with the flow.  Find a way to make money out of abundance rather than the limits of scarcity.

I’ve read a number of books on the rise of Google.  This book was interesting in that it discusses not just the rise of Google but the Google Way.  Much like HP was known for the HP Way, Google will become known, or is known, for how they do business.

Google loves free.  They love to give the user stuff for free.  Free applications, free data, free services, lots of stuff for free.  But why?  Google makes money from ads.  The more ads they display the more money they make.   The more services we consume the more ads Google can show us.

This was a good read.  A must read for anyone in publishing.  Use the Google examples presented in the book to change your business.

Once again Seth Godin captures a point of view and presents it in a clear way that just about anyone can understand. In fact the points made in this book are articulated in such a way that I will be forwarding the book to some people I know that could benefit from understanding the 14 trends that are changing advertising.

A big part of this new book – Meatball Sundae – discusses the impact the Internet has had on Advertising and Marketing. As Godin’s describes it however it’s not the Internet per se that has changed advertising it’s more about how people use the Internet to communicate.

It is all kind of Web 2.0 but his point is that new communications have to be engaging. It’s about stories, not messages. So what is your story?

If you write any kind of newsletter online then you need to read this book.

The key take -away from this book is:

turn strangers into friends and friends into customers

The Long Tail took form over nearly two years as an “open-source research project” on Chris Anderson’s blog at www.longtail.com. This experiment in book development, where he shared data and ideas in progress and many smart readers helped improve them, fleshed out the theory and stress-tested the analysis, which made the book far better than it would have been if he had worked on it in isolation. It also suggested applications in industries he never expected, from beer to fashion, which has hugely expanded the scope the research.

We are going to try a new thing here on the Thought Sponsor blog. I will be creating posts about a book I have read and then inviting feedback on the book. I’ll be posting two books in rapid succession and then one every few weeks. Think of this as a virtual book club of sorts.

This weeks book is – Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?

Good marketers know that customer-centered marketing is mandatory. However, we are not the customer. What the customer perceives as relevant is the thing successful marketers must anticipate, plan, and deliver on. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing offers Persuasion Architecture, a proven Persona-based methodology. Persuasion Architecture enables marketers to anticipate different angles from which customers frame their questions and then coordinate messaging across multiple channels so that marketers can create predictive models of customer behavior.