Boston, Massachusetts, United States
I was fired. Sacked. My ideas were a little too radical for my new bosses. So I started writing books, speaking at events, and advising emerging companies on how to align marketing with the ways that people buy. That was back in 2002 and since then my 12 books have sold over a million copies in 30 languages. Many new forms of communications have burst onto the scene over the years, including blogs, podcasts, video, virtual communities, Generative AI, social networking, Newsjacking, and many others. But what’s the same about all the new Web tools and techniques is that together they are the best way to communicate directly with your marketplace. My experience delivering marketing and business growth presentations in over 40 countries on all 7 continents have taught me that audiences want practical advice to grow their business and they need takeaways they can implement right away. They want to be entertained too! I serve as an independent advisor and investor in emerging companies that are transforming their industries by delivering disruptive products and services. I'm also a Go-to-Market LP at Stage 2 Capital, helping software companies scale sustainable revenue. My book "The New Rules of Marketing & PR", originally published in 2007, opened people's eyes to the new realities of marketing and public relations on the Web. "New Rules" was six months on the "BusinessWeek" bestseller list and is now in an 9th edition. With some 500,000 copies sold in more than 29 languages from Albanian to Vietnamese. "New Rules" is a modern business classic. I wrote a "Wall Street Journal" bestselling book "Fanocracy: Turning Fans into Customers and Customers into Fans" published by Portfolio / Penguin Random House in 2020 with my daughter Reiko. The book is about Fandom culture and how any business can grow by cultivating fans. Other international bestsellers I've written include "Real-Time Marketing & PR" ( a "WSJ" bestseller) and "Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead", written with HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan, and NBA Hall-of-Famer Bill Walton. As sales and marketing are now highly integrated on the Web, I wrote "The New Rules of Sales & Service" to explore how to sell effectively in this new reality. My book "Marketing the Moon", written with Richard Jurek and with a foreword from Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon, was the inspiration for a 3-part PBS American Experience miniseries titled "Chasing the Moon" and the film "Fly Me to the Moon" starring Scarlett Johansson & Channing Tatum .
I speak at conferences and events at companies and association worldwide and to date have presented in 41 countries and on all 7 continents. My presentations combine three essential qualities: entertainment, information, and motivation. As a speaker, my high energy presentations are a treat for the senses. My keynotes and masterclasses are an urgent call to action. Scale and media buying power are no longer a decisive advantage; what counts today is speed and agility. Real-Time is the mindset for the future – and content rules! My groundbreaking strategies don’t just slap social media onto dusty old strategies – they reinvent the way business engages the marketplace. Audiences walk away knowing how to use blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Big Data and the newest tools like Newsjacking and to engage the media, crowd-source product development, increase sales, exert influence, disseminate ideas, build awareness and command premium prices by using speed as a strategic weapon. Top firms and organizations have engaged me to present at conferences, expos and meetings, among them: Cisco, HP, PwC, GenRe, SAP, Google, Microsoft, McCormick, Nestle Purina, Amdocs, Jackson Healthcare, Ford Motor Company, Century 21, The New York Islanders, Self Storage Association, Vocus, Mosaic, Direct Marketing Association, South-by-Southwest, National Healthcare Marketing Summit, Kronos, Public Relations Society of America, National Geographic, Ingram Micro, Abbott Medical Devices, NASDAQ Stock Market, the Government of Ontario, McKesson, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, Digital River, Hill & Knowlton, Dow Jones, SAS, National Investor Relations Institute, The Milken Institute, Entrepreneurs Organization, International Health Forum, Credit Union National Association, Giant Screen Theater Association, Realtors® Conference, National Agri-Marketing Association, Belize Tourism Industry Association and many, many more.
I was the part-time VP Marketing of Fair Disclosure Financial Network, Inc., the pioneer in real-time earnings call transcripts. The company was acquired by CCBN, Inc. in July 2003.
At the height of the dot-com boom, I was vice president of marketing at NewsEdge Corporation, a NASDAQ-traded online news distributor with $70 million in revenue. My multi-million dollar marketing budget included tens of thousands of dollars a month for a public relations agency, hundreds of thousands a year for print advertising and glossy collateral materials, and expensive participation at a dozen trade shows a year. My team put these things on our marketing to-do list, worked like hell to execute, and paid the big bucks because, well, that’s what one did as marketing and PR people. At the same time, drawing on publishing experience I had gained in my prior position as Asia marketing director for the online division of Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the largest newspaper companies in the world, I quietly created content-rich marketing and PR programs on the Web. Against the advice of the PR agency professionals we had on retainer (who insisted that news releases were only for journalists), we wrote and sent dozens of releases ourselves. Each time we sent a release, it appeared on dozens of online services such as Yahoo!, resulting in hundreds of sales leads. Even though our advertising agency told us not to put the valuable information “somewhere where competitors could steal it,” we created a monthly online newsletter called TheEdge, with articles about the exploding world of digital news. We made it freely available on the home page of our Web site because it generated interest from qualified buyers. Way back in the 1990s when Web marketing and PR was in its infancy, I ignored the old rules. Guess what? The homegrown, do-it-yourself programs we created at virtually no cost consistently generated more interest from qualified buyers than the big bucks programs that the “professionals” were running for us—and resulted in millions of dollars in sales. People we never heard of were finding us through search engines.
Knight-Ridder Financial was the real-time financial information division of what was at the time a Fortune 200 company. I managed a team of marketing professionals based in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney. We launched Asia-specific electronic content products and established marketing and communications programs that grew Asia revenue from USD $10 million to USD $50 million from 1989 to 1995.
In Japan's go-go years, I was one of the first twenty-something gaijin male models in Tokyo to specialize in the young businessman look. With Japan’s stock and property markets the envy of the world, I exploited one of the only times in history where a mere mortal could moonlight through a few wacky years of over-the-top TV commercials, exotic location shoots, spotlights with beautiful women and encounters with the famous. I enjoyed a wild ride courtesy of Japan’s financial hysteria and my luck at being there at the right time with the right look. I did television commercials for products such as Panasonic office equipment, Nippon Life Insurance, Mitsubishi cars, and... get this... Wacaol Women's Underwear. I was in television shows, a movie (Tokyo Pop), and some print advertisements. And to top off my "career" as an impostor model / actor, I was in Teatro alla Scala' production of Puccini’s Turandot directed by Franco Zeffirelli with James Levine conducting. No, I didn't sing. But I did carry a star down some steps in a sedan chair.