From the category archives:

Book Reviews

The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand by Lee LeFever (Book Review of the Week-ish)

by Tim on March 22, 2013

Lee LeFever underscores his excellent new book, The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand, by suggesting it’s, “Your guide to becoming an explanation specialist.” As you might expect from a book about becoming “an explanation specialist,” it’s also a perfect explanation of what you can expect.

Let’s be real. For a world so heavily dependent on communication, it’s amazing how frequently we fail to get our message across. Content marketing depends on clear communication, yet we often struggle to deliver our meaning and intent to our audience, right?

Happily, LeFever offers a wonderful guide to closing the communication gap all too common in business and in life. The book walks you through the steps necessary to improve your explanations, regardless of the form those explanations take (though, obviously, the material is particularly well-suited to presentations, video, email, and similar forms). LeFever’s day job at Common Craft revolves around taking complicated material and translating it for audiences of all kinds (their YouTube videos are legendary). The experience LeFever has gained over the years shows clearly throughout the book, which is filled with many examples from Common Craft’s library.

While the book covers some of the same ground as other excellent titles like Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen, Nancy Duarte’s slide:ology, or Dan Roam’s amazing The Back of the Napkin and Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work (and in fact, LeFever highlights and recaps Roam’s “6×6 Rule” in chapter 16), The Art of Explanation earns its own place on your business bookshelf by focusing first on communication and only then on your selected medium. It complements these other titles; it neither replaces them, nor vice versa.

If your business success depends on the skill with which you communicate (here’s a hint: it does), you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand, today.

Interested in more? Sign up for our free newsletter and get more information on how to build your social, local, mobile marketing strategy. And, if you’ve got a minute, you might enjoy some past reviews from our Book Review of the Week-ish series:

Tagged as: book review, book review of the week, books, content, content creation, content curation, content marketing, presentation

{ 1 comment }

The Desert Island Library: 6 Essential Modern Marketing Books

by Tim on October 15, 2012

in Book Reviews,Marketing,Search,social strategy,Strategy

I read lots (and lots and lots) of books each year. But a client recently asked me a challenging question: If I were marooned on a “desert island,” with no access to another marketing book again, what 5 or 6 books couldn’t I live without?

5 or 6?!? I thought. Impossible! There are so many that have influenced my thinking over the years (and so many great new books every year), there’s no way to trim the list down to such a small number.

And yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized there are only a handful of books I reference again and again.

Now, this list is by no means designed to be comprehensive. It simply represents the books I’d recommend to anyone getting started in marketing (especially online marketing). Ironically, most focus on marketing generally, rather than specific tools. You’ll find little discussion of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or Foursquare on this list. Instead of “how to market,” the list focuses on how to think about marketing.

So here’s my collection of outstanding thinking about how to understand and communicate with customers, how to grow and build a business, and how to think about marketing overall:

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. The definitive guide to positioning your products, what it is and why it matters. Ought to be required reading for anyone in business.
Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin. You can’t have a marketing book list these days without including something by Seth. For me, it’s this seminal classic (though I thought seriously about All Marketers are Liars instead). Both are light, easy reads, heavy on inspiration with just enough detail to point you in the right direction. Definitely worth the read.
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. While it’s technically a usability book, Krug highlights how your customers act online overall and directs you to think clearly about how they’re going to interact with your messages online. Also, one of the funniest business books I’ve ever read. There’s a good reason this book (along with Positioning and The Long Tail) made both this list and my list of the “12 Essential Business Books of the Last 10 Years.” It’s that useful.
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business andTransformed Our Culture by John Battelle. While its view of Google is a little dated, having been written in 2006, no book explains why search has become the default online advertising medium as effectively as Battelle’s The Search. Absolutely essential reading if you want to understand not only why search remains critical to consumer behavior, but why its continued dominance remains inevitable.
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. Another classic, Anderson’s The Long Tail introduced a critical concept to online marketing (and to business generally). Arguably, the single most influential and important book about how the Internet has changed business in the last decade. Indispensable.
Groundswell, Expanded and Revised Edition: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Li and Bernoff answer the critical questions about social media such as why people participate (or not), whether a particular social network seems likely to catch on, and why specific social channels may work (or not) for your business. Fantastic book.

What do you think? Does this list capture the best thinking about marketing today? Or did I miss something obvious? Let me know in the comments if there’s something you can’t live without. I’d love to hear what it is.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Tim Peter & Associates helps companies from startups to the Fortune 500 use the web to reach more customers, more effectively every day. Take a look and see how we can help you.

Tagged as: book review, books, Marketing, marketing 101, marketing strategy

{ 1 comment }

Running Lean by Ash Maurya (Book Review of the Week-ish)

by Tim on July 26, 2012

in Book Reviews,Strategy

Running a business, quite frankly, can be a bitch. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s fun. It’s thrilling. It’s incredibly rewarding. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also frustrating sometimes, too. Every business owner and manager has had the experience of pouring your heart and soul and time and energy into your product or service, only to find that:

Your product doesn’t do what you wanted it to, or, worse…
Your customers don’t want it.

Well, that’s super fun, right? Right. Not so much.

Wouldn’t it be great instead if there was a way to run your business that helped you anticipate your customers needs more effectively? That helped you build products and services your customers actually wanted? That helped you allocate resources more efficiently and drive greater business results?

Of course, this would be a much shorter post if the answer was, “No.”

Happily, a methodology does exist that helps answer these questions (unless, of course, you were looking for a shorter post). It’s called “The Lean Startup Movement” (or just “Lean Startup”). Originally developed by Eric Ries on his “Startup Lessons Learned” blog, lean startups eventually became codified in Ries’ amazing book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. If you don’t have a copy, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Just go buy one.

The only issue with Ries’ book (and this is a minor quibble), is that it’s more “big picture,” focused on why Lean Startup method works as well as it does, while offering a framework most businesses can adapt to their specific needs. (FYI… anyone who’s been reading this blog for any amount of time will recognize I advocate similar ideas — Ries was “preaching to the choir” on this one). While it features many case studies and real-world examples, The Lean Startup lacks the sorts of templates and tools that a small business owner or team manager can immediately apply.

And that’s where Ash Maurya’s Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works excels.

Starting from the standpoint of “Practice trumps theory,” Maurya outlines a clear, step-by-step plan that almost everyone can immediately adapt to his or her business situation. Not sure how to prioritize your efforts? See Chapter 4 (One example of “preaching to the choir”: Maurya recommends reading Douglas Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything, which I reviewed when it came out). Want to know how to measure what’s working? See Stage 3 (especially Chapter 10). You’re a fan of the “minimum viable product (MVP)” concept but not sure exactly how to get from idea to execution? Check out Maurya’s “MVP Interview” in Chapter 11. Thinking about adding new features? See Chapter 13. And so on. It’s a book loaded with practical, real-world tools, techniques, and tips you can use today — and tomorrow, too. And don’t get me started on how much I like his implementation of Kanban boards. Way, way cool.

It bears pointing out that Maurya is a software developer as well as a business manager (as is Ries). And, there’s no question that the book frequently presents the Lean Startup process through the lens of creating web software. However, remember that software exists to automate processes. If your business relies on process at all (and, for your sake, I sure hope it does), you can apply the same techniques easily.

Ash Maurya has written an invaluable addition to any business library. Page after page, I found myself thinking, “Wow. I wish I’d had this book years ago.”

Now, don’t get me wrong; running a business isn’t going to be easy just because you read a book or two. It’s still going to require some heavy lifting and hard work. But, whether you read Running Lean in hardcover or the Kindle edition, I’m pretty confident you’ll find you’re spending less time cleaning up after yourself and more time building things your customers actually want.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Tim Peter & Associates helps companies from startups to the Fortune 500 use the web to reach more customers, more effectively every day. Take a look and see how we can help you.

Technorati Tags: book review, book reviews, books, Running Lean by Ash Maurya, Running Lean, Ash Maurya