Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers is the first book by Seth Godin I read. It’s quite good, although the principle of subscription based services is very simple so it got rather redundant near the end.

Unleashing the Ideavirus had some really fantastic ideas about how to promote a business, not through interruption marketing, but through viral idea marketing that will spread organically. While it provides suggestions on how to spread your own “ideavirus”, ultimately, chance is involved, and you can only do your best to help it grow with no guarantees of success. While I was reading, the first thing that came to mind was how Apple was already doing many of the things mentioned in the books to promote their viral ideas, and most all of their products are hugely successful today. Apple seems to know this book front and back, as all of their products are essentially viral already. Microsoft’s products on the other hand, not so much.

Apple uses simple product naming such as iPhoto. Microsoft, not so much. Long names like Windows Live Photo Gallery are commonplace. Apple holds iOrgies like MacWorld to advertise to their biggest advocates, while Microsoft launches massive interruption ad campaigns.

Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants and Remarkable Business Ideas is basically 183 ideas that popped into the author’s head, and it’s pretty ineffective to read more than five at a time because unlike the other books, few of the ideas are connected so it becomes necessary to think about each one separately.

Now I’m reading, All Marketers Are Liars, which explains how people cough up big bucks for “the finest natural artesian water made from the finest rain water percolated through volcanic soil extracted from the islands of Fiji”.