What’s the one thing companies care about? Conversion. Getting potential customers to convert into real, actual, customers. But how do you do that in a world of Facebook, Google, YouTube, blogs, and Flickr? Mike Moran shows you how—by trying lots of little things, studying the results, learning quickly from your failures, and doing it all over again. He gives you a framework for getting over your fears of talking with your customers without a committee to protect your behind. Great book.

–Robert Scoble
Video blogger of the Scoble Show and Co-author of the top-selling corporate blogging book, Naked Conversations

Start Fast, Fix Fast, and Fix Again: Marketing for Breakthrough Results

For decades, marketers have been taught to carefully plan ahead because “you must get it right–it’s too expensive to change.” But, in the age of the Web, you can know in hours whether your strategy’s working. Today, winners don’t get it right the first time: they start fast, change fast, and relentlessly optimize their way to success. They do it wrong quickly…then fix it, just as quickly!

In this book, Internet marketing pioneer Mike Moran shows you how to do that–step-by-step and in detail. Drawing on his experience building ibm.com into one of the world’s most successful sites, Moran shows how to quickly transition from “plan then execute” to a non-stop cycle of refinement.

You’ll master specific techniques for making the Web’s “two-way marketing conversation” work successfully, productively, and profitably. Next, Moran shows how to choose the right new marketing tools, craft them into an integrated strategy, and execute it…achieving unprecedented efficiency, accountability, speed, and results.

• The indispensable online marketing guide for every CMO, brand marketer, direct marketer, online marketing specialist, strategist, and entrepreneur
• Learn more from your customers–and learn it faster
• Systematically measure online marketing results–and improve them
• Create deeper relationships with your customers on the Web
• Leverage podcasting, social networks, wikis, virtual worlds, search, viral marketing, blogs, and other new tools
• Build a lean, mean conversion machine
• Preview new innovations you’ll be implementing next year and the year after
• Overcome the organizational, political, and personal obstacles that keep marketers doing things the “old-fashioned” way

Foreward xv

Preface xvii

Acknowledgements xxiii

About the Author xxvii

Part 1: That Newfangled Marketing 1

Chapter 1: They’re Doing Wonderful Things with Computers 3

Chapter 2: New Wine in Old Bottles 21

Chapter 3: Marketing Is a Conversation 55

Part 2: That Newfangled Direct Marketing 103

Chapter 4: Going Over to the Dark Side 105

Chapter 5: The New Customer Relations 149

Chapter 6: Customers Vote with Their Mice 211          

Part 3: That Newfangled You 253

Chapter 7: This Doesn’t Work for Me 255

Chapter 8: This Won’t Work Where I Work 275

Chapter 9: This Stuff Changes Too Fast 315

Glossary 335
Index 365