Amacon, AMACOM, or Amazon: What’s in a Name?

Are you looking for a Canadian real estate developer, a business book publisher, a river in South America, or an online retailer?

We’ve all hit a wrong key on the keyboard or been mistaken in our hearing, but the real test of ingenuity comes in Google search—not for the seeker, but for the sought.

We know from our analytics programs that people who search for AMACOM Books, the business book publishing division of American Management Association, are often using the word “amacon.” It’s an easy enough mistake with the two letters next to each other on the keyboard. Many think they’ve spelled our name correctly, hearing an “n” instead of the correct “m” when it’s spoken. Even some of our authors and members of the media are susceptible to this confusion. (And in case you were wondering, AMACOM is short for American Management Association Communications when we did books, journals, and other materials.)

But does Google know that?

A search for “amacon” brings up information on the real estate developer (plus an ad by Amazon—they know people mistype their name).

A search for “amacon books” brings up information from Amazon and a number of e-booksellers who’ve misspelled our name (we recognize our book titles, and another ad for Amazon).

A search for “publish a book with amacon” brings up information on publishing with Amazon and various outlets misspelling our name in publication citations (and a ton of ads for self-publishers).

And of course, your personal results could change depending on your search history.

So how do we make sure the people who are looking for us, actually find us?

Well, strangely enough, since many people have been misspelling our name and linking to us with that anchor text, we’re slowly building up an association of “amacon” and our homepage.

We’ve written this blog post using the two words together, which will hopefully gain traction and begin appearing on searches for “amacon.”

Finally, we can start an AdWords campaign to make sure the people seeking us, definitely see us on page one of the search results page.

Do you have any ideas or examples on how we or anyone can use misspellings to their advantage in Google search? Check out the spelling typo generator from SEO Book to figure out your own common misspellings.

Steve Jobs’ Favorite Poem: Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas

Our President and Publisher Hank Kennedy shared this poem with everyone at AMACOM and we’d like to share it with you. Even in the book industry, we sometimes underestimate the value and impact of words in capturing the ideas and spirits of others. We think this fits Steve Jobs of Apple, innovator and inspiration, who died of pancreatic cancer yesterday, perfectly.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thank you for sharing this poem with us Hank!

Webinar: How to Write a Darn Good Email

Our American Management Association New Media Team will be doing a webinar with Philip Vassallo, Ph.D author of How to Write Fast Under Pressure, next month. He will be providing a fast-paced, hands-on lesson to strengthen your e-writing skills.

How to Write a Darn Good Email
December 3, 2010, 1:00 – 2:30 PM EST
Price: $149
REGISTER HERE.

E-mail demands clear and efficient writing, but “oops” is an all-too-common occurrence. We’ve all seen how easily misunderstandings in e-mail messages can compromise clear communication. Attend this helpful Webinar to get a fast-paced, hands-on lesson to strengthen your e-writing skills.

Through examples and exercises, you will learn how to target your audience, get to the point, and develop and maintain a professional e-mail style.

How Will You Benefit:
-Write clear, concise mail that gets readers’ attention and results
-Convey a professional image through the e-mail you send
-Identify tone problems before pressing “send”
-Gain e-mail pointers to help you project communication savvy

What Will be Covered:
-Understanding challenges of email communication
-Getting started quickly: idea lists, the three As (aim, audience, area)
-Getting to the point: strong subject lines, openings and closings
-Structuring your message clearly
-Helpful guidelines for structuring your message
-Maintaining a professional tone by recognizing what is and is not appropriate for e-communications
-Polishing your e-mail for a professional style for yourself and your organization

Because so many of your communications are via email, this is a great chance for you to spend a short time learning how to do it better.

Click HERE to sign up for the webinar.

For more information on How to Write Fast Under Pressure click HERE.

Philip Vassallo, Ph.D., has developed, delivered and supervised communication training programs and coached a wide range of administrative and technical professionals in corporate, government and academic environments. For 19 years, Dr. Vassallo was the marketing director of Lifespire, a New York City human services organization. He has taught writing at Cornell University, Rutgers University, Kean University, Centenary College, and Middlesex County College. Dr. Vassallo is the author and coauthor of many books including The Art of On-the-Job Writing and The Art of E-Mail Writing. He is also a columnist on effective writing and education issues for the Educational Testing Service and EducationNews.org.

Coolhunting and Coolfarming the Next Big Thing on Twitter and Facebook

The following is a guest post from Peter Gloor, author of Coolfarming: Turn Your Great Idea into the Next Big Thing. He shares some ways to leverage coolhunting and coolfarming for Twitter and Facebook.

In the last two years, usage of Twitter and Facebook exploded. According to Techcrunch Twitter has now over 190 million active users tweeting 65 million times a day. Analyzing this huge information stream open up a new treasure trove to discover the next big thing. Facebook on the other hand recently took the 500 million user mark, thus providing a huge testbed to foster diffusion of innovative new ideas through viral marketing on friendship networks of global reach.

In my Coolhunting and Coolfarming books I described how to coolhunt – look for new trends, and coolfarm – develop new trends, by finding the most innovative people and what they are talking about on the Web. Coolhunting means looking for Collaborative Innovation Networks or COINs, small groups of intrinsically motivated people who get together to create the next big thing, coolfarming means developing and growing the COINs. People in COINs communicate in a close-knit group, leaving behind digital traces in e-mail archives, online forums, Web sites, and Blogs. With our software tools we look for those clusters of close collaborators, and try to predict what they are up to. In this post I describe how to apply Coolhunting and Coolfarming to Twitter and Facebook.

For example, in our own work Coolhunting on Twitter we are able to predict stock market indicators such as Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S&P 500 one to three days ahead by analyzing Twitter posts. How we did it? We collected the twitter feeds for six months and got a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volume of all tweets. We measured collective hope and fear on each day and analyzed the correlation between these indices and the stock market indicators by counting the number of times words like “hope”, “fear” and “worry” occurred in the tweets. We found that the number of positive tweets is much higher than that of negative ones, more than double on average, which might suggest that people prefer optimistic to pessimistic words.

We initially expected that the correlation between optimistic mood and stock market indicators would be positive, while the pessimistic mood would negatively correlate with stock indices. Surprisingly, we found negative correlation with Dow, NASDAQ and S&P500 for both positive mood words like “hope” and negative mood words like “fear” and “worry”. This implies that people start using more emotional words such as hope, fear and worry in times of economic uncertainty, independent of whether they have a positive or negative context.

To put it in simple words, when the emotions on Twitter fly high, that is when people express a lot of hope, fear, and worry, the Dow goes down the next day. When people have less hope, fear, and worry, the Dow goes up. It therefore seems that just checking on Twitter for emotional outbursts of any kind gives a predictor of how the stock market will be doing the next day.

We also studied the friendship networks of Facebook fan pages. We collected – as far a publicly accessible – the friendship network of the people who clicked on the “like” button on a fan page of 15 Facebook fan pages.
We ranked groups by emotionality from 1 (product brands) to 5 (medical causes). We found positive correlation between the network density and emotionality. This means that the more connected the friends of a cause or brand are, the more emotional they are about their cause. Even more interestingly, we found negative correlation between the clustering coefficient and emotionality. This means that the more the friends of fans are split up in subgroups, the less emotional they are. The conclusions would be that the causes with the most emotional supporters have a dense, but evenly spread out network, with no recognizable subgroups.

This leads to two recommendations for coolfarmers who want to spread their idea: First – broker connections between thy supporters, and two – fight fragmentation of thy supporters by connecting subgroups. In short – it pays to help build one large happy family!

Peter Gloor, has enjoyed a 20-year career as an executive for UBS, PwC, and Deloitte. He divides his time between the MIT Sloan School of Management, Helsinki University of Technology, and the University of Cologne, and has been growing his startup company, Galaxy Advisors. He is the author of Coolfarming: Turn Your Great Idea into the Next Big Thing and the co-author of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing.

Spotlight On… The On-Demand Brand by Rick Mathieson

One of our titles has received a good response from the online community, so this week we thought we’d put our spotlight on The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success in an Anytime, Everywhere World by Rick Mathieson.

Publishers Weekly wrote in its review:

Through persuasive arguments and q&a’s with the major players in advertising, Mathieson makes an excellent case for greater creativity and outside-the-box thinking backed up with solid ideas.

New Age Retailer had this to say in its review:

Whether you’ve taken your business digital or are still overwhelmed by the sudden wave of new technology, this book will help you understand how to engage customers profitably in the electronic world.

Ad Pulp wrote this in its review:

The On-Demand Brand is a great compendium of non-traditional marketing methods–which may quickly come to be seen as traditional ones.

Mind Connection said in its review:

So, this book isn’t some rubber chicken circuit person’s “book me for your next event” promo fluff piece. It’s really an advertising industry expert providing insights of various experts who are getting results in the real world.

Suite 101 had this to say in its review:

Mathieson’s book is a good entry point to learning best practices to implementing on-demand. It is a quick read filled with start to finish tips and techniques.

Blog Business World said in its review:

The book opens the marketer to the endless possibilities of on-demand branding, going beyond the tools, and presenting a new vision of a radical new approach to experiential marketing.

About.com had this to say in its review:

The On-Demand Brand thoroughly covers digital marketing and social media for business. Chock-full of case studies and interviews, this comprehensive book gives a solid foundation in establishing social media objectives.

Basil and Spice said this on its blog:

The author, Rick Mathieson succeeds at turning the traditional advertising and marketing concepts on their respective heads in The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules For Digital Marketing Success

And finally, Suite101/ Advertising Influence said this in its review:

Rick Mathieson’s latest book is a great how-to tool for learning, creating and applying digital marketing techniques. It’s an On-Demand world now.

Rick Mathieson is a leading voice on marketing in the digital age. Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge calls him “a strategic marketing expert.” His insights have been featured in ADWEEK, Advertising Age, Wired, Broadcasting & Cable and on MSNBC, CBS Radio and NPR. A regularly featured speaker at industry events, Mathieson also serves as vice president and creative director for Creative i Advertising & Interactive Media, and is the author of Branding Unbound.