A Mostly Good Holiday Read from Mitch Joel

A Review of Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends On It.

I think I might like this book, but I may need to read it a few more times before I can be sure just what it’s about. It’s supposed to be about rebooting business and life and has that urgent subtitle that suggests a nasty outcome if I don’t read it.

Now the first section is pretty straight forward stuff, setting us straight on how this digital thing is really here to stay and we oughta get on that. In that sense, it’s a sequel to Six Pixels of Separation.
Unlike others of this genre, it stops short of the Ritual Shaming of those late to the digital game, but it shares the shrill call to marketers to get social, get customer-centric, stop thinking digital is separate from traditional, tell stories and be just like Apple.

If you were hoping this might be a marketing book that doesn’t put Apple on an altar and light a bunch of candles, you will be disappointed: it’s only four pages before Steve Jobs makes his first of eight appearances and just ten pages before the first section dedicated to the company. Indeed, Apple, or its brands are mentioned 118 times by my count (I may have missed a few). Amazon, Google, Zappos and the usual cast of brands-who-are-way-better-than-you are also on hand but with many fewer mentions.

Back to the book. Joel’s thesis is that we’re in a “media purgatory” just now. Brands that have spent decades broadcasting their goodness to the world, either in traditional or social media are realizing that all the shouting just doesn’t cut it. Neither do weepy Superbowl ads. Traditional marketers know what doesn’t work, but not really what does or what will.  The warning is clear – if you are hanging about at the back of the room waiting to see what to do next, you will be in big trouble by the time you figure it out. In fact, we’re all in pretty big trouble if we muck this up:

What with web, mobile, touch, social media and how all this integrates into traditional marketing and communications, there could not be a more fascinating time to be in business. But if we botch this, lose the trust of consumers and do stupid things…we’ll end up in a deep, dark and evil place that we – as an industry – may not be able to get out of.

I’m pretty sure he is not talking about the parking lot at the mall.

Joel reminds us that narrative is more important than shouting and that random acts of digital are just as bad as random acts of traditional marketing, though lately the pointlessness has migrated from bad email and adwords to YouTube hubris and silly apps: “Brands have to get over themselves. Most apps are failing because they add no value to the smartphone user. True utility happens in the moment of need. Not the brand’s moment of need, but the consumer’s moment of need”

If you read nothing else in this book, go to Chapter 4- Sex With Data. This is a call-to-arms for any marketer who does not yet have their act together when it comes to data. It isn’t enough to know how to measure things and chase people around with cookies. We will need to understand at a very technical level how to engage, how to extract insights and how to use those insights to ignite our brands. Now is a perfect time to brush our teeth and jump in the sack with our big data.  There is a good set of ideas at the end of the chapter if you aren’t sure where to start.

The rest of the first half of the book has lots of meaty stuff about mobile websites, e-commerce and convergence to the single screen.  Make sure you read it, probably at least twice.

The second half of the book feels like a totally different thing. It’s part self-help for laggards and part cheerleading for everything digital, especially if it’s made by Apple. If you are feeling left behind, it may make you feel better, but you can also skip ahead to Chapter 12 which is a terrific round up in the form of six trends to watch.

In case you’re too full of eggnog to read, here they are: Hacker culture will see marketers and businesses messing around with stuff to see how it works, how it can work differently, how to break it and how to transform it (about time, in my view). Marketing needs to stop making digital sit at the children’s table.Indie Brands will be coming out of nowhere and moving our cheese before we’ve even peeled the little foil wrapper off it. We’ll start paying the piper for all that terrible content we’ve been making at the expense of actually serving our customers and defining a nice user experience. Apparently we will figure out he difference between things on iPhones (not real) and things in front of us (could be real; better ask Siri) and, most provocative of all, our notion of what to own and what not to own may shift.

I hope that’s his next book; it’ll be a great read for sure.

Related Links:

You Better Dance With Them What Brung Ya
Finally, A Marketing Book That Helps
Twitter Truth #1: It’s Not About You

BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
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