ryanholiday

Hey there, to the people recommending good books to "introduce you to stoicism" I would say: Um, the originals are probably the easiest and most straight forward philosophy ever written. Just read those.

If marketing = driving new business/customers, there is no different between "marketers" and "growth hackers."

They use different tools to accomplish the same task. It's time that marketers realize there is more at their disposal.

Apologies on my end sir! I hate that as much as anyone

To be fair (as the guy who did the article), I didn't choose the headline. The article isn't really about growth hacking, it's about a better way of thinking about marketing--which growth hackers are one example of.

But headline/article disagreement is just a reality of web journalism I suppose we have to get used to.

He definitely goes more into that in the book. Robert tells the stories of the masters from a couple different angles, I think this is just one of the more interesting ones.

The product itself can at times be news--especially if it is a major technological advancement. What is NOT news is the "event," the perfectly choreographed dance between the corporation and the media, where the company manufactures fanfare and urgency and theater around the launch and the media turns it into reality by writing about it.

Many news staples fall into this category from movie premieres to press releases to anniversaries to deliberate "leaks."

This is a preposterously naive understanding of how the news business works. Customers dictate what gets produced--no question--but so do a variety of other market factors. Namely, what is cheap and easy to produce for publishers. In the case of Apple news, these factors create a wicked cycle. Users click on shiny gadget stories and the news doubles down on such content because it's a lot easier and a hell of a lot cheaper to send a reporter to Cupertino than it is to send them to Baghdad.

ALL news can be made to be interesting and exciting. The problem is that the pay-per-pageview model heavily incentivizes blogs to grab low hanging fruit instead of doing the real (and often expensive) work of making the important news readable.

It's not hate. If I ran Apple, I'd be doing the same thing. But JOURNALISTS are not supposed to carry water for business--let alone a multi-billion dollar corporation that could more than afford to get these messages out another way. What is Apple announcing at these events? New products they are selling. That's "news" under only the saddest of definitions.*

There are some great books written about this, namely Daniel Boorstin's The Image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_event

I think that only proves my point more: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/apple-the-ot...

I've known Joseph for a while--I wanted to make sure he got credit for being right about this over a YEAR ago. Meaning GM could have saved $10M if they'd read his blog.

What do you sell?

That's true EXCEPT the unit doesn't lend itself to that style of advertising. The biggest ad unit you can by on Facebook is 110x90 pixels. Try selling a car in that space well.

Or Scam? Or Hustle?

Jonkee is right. Intent to purchase is the difference

I agree with Perla and have found the same to be true in my experience. I would agree with him implication though, that the reason those ads work is because they themselves have sketchy business models. Think about what you see a lot of on FB: paid higher education, ebook/seminar stuff, gimmicks, apps, t-shirts. In other words: high margin crap. It works because they can play the hot potato game, passing the loss on to the buyer (just as FB did to them). GM didn't have success and neither did American Apparel or most other brands because they make and sell real things with real business models.

Have you seen the CPM's on Facebook? They have dropped. They're about as close to zero as they come...for a reason.

He briefly mentions the next book in the speech (quoted below) and I'm sure more will come, but the concept of mastery which is a theme in all Robert's books is the common thread between the people he interviewed

In the book that I'm writing now, I can talk about it later, if you'd like, I'm interviewing eight of the most eminent people in the world today in different fields -- In neuroscience, in architecture, in music. All of them are inherently non-conformists. All of them are inherently bucking the trend and taking their field in a completely novel direction by bringing out more of that uniqueness that I was talking about."

Rob Walker's stuff is very good.

Headline bait...

I hate when tech people do this. The source that the coolness is paying off is an Owen Thomas article about ONE quarter of profitability (5.1M) in 2009? I'd say the verdict is more than still out.

That being said, Virgin is interesting in that they are attempting to compete on brand instead of on price. Part of the problem with all the other airlines is that everybody flies whichever is cheaper, leading them all to race to the bottom.

There is more than enough meat in the concept above to have a discussion. We don't need to hold it up as PROOF OF CONCEPT with flimsy evidence just yet.

Yeah, law firms do this all the time. They sniff that they MAY be the slightest hint of a lawsuit and then they put out press releases and run Google ads trolling for clients. It's also sort of a litmus test to see if they can get some media attention (even though the lawsuit barely exists) which in turn generates more clients, and negotiating power.

Remember, in America you can sue anyone for anything so for a lawfirm to not even file, only be retained, says a lot.

"If you think you're an entrepreneur, most likely, you are one and nobody can tell you differently." ...which is exactly why people like it so much. It's an unassailable self-description. I think it's best to steer clear of anything that puts you in that position because its pretty easy to spin off the planet.

Entrepreneur is a great example of a word, to quote George Trow, that is an "abandoned shell." It used to have great meaning as being an entrepreneur was incredibly difficult and rare and then technological changes came along and made it mean something totally different. The reason people are so attracted to [self-descriptively] using it is because they get the status of the old meaning with the lower barrier to entry of the new changes. You can't really fault other people for wanting the best of both worlds...but you can resist the temptation to delude yourself with it. At least that's my opinion.

Is it a legitimate goal of a blogger? What do we, as the audience, get out of it other than a hazy pseudo-reality? I see what MA gets out of it...

This looks at the wrong metric. It’s not whether his sources are typically accurate but whether he is generally good at correctly inferring from vague or uncertain evidence. In my experience, analysis is unquestionably the weakest part of TechCrunch. They aren’t bad at getting the facts but when it comes to telling us what those facts mean the wheels come off.

If you’re looking to confirm that the people were all in a room together than I guess the little breakdown works. If you’re looking to to see if it adds up to collusion or some Valley equivalent to The Council there are some other factors to weigh.