Propel

Well life is starting to return to normal but there are still huge issues in Long Island.  100,000 houses were destroyed (out of 1.2 million).  For those people, life is not back to normal.  171,000 people still have no electricity (14%) which is still a huge number.    I watch the outage numbers on the LIPA website like the stock market.

And lines to get gas are still a problem.   A short line is 40 minutes and some people have lined up for hours.  At times like this, I love my Prius even more.

And now we have another snow storm coming in. 

These pictures of Long Island help show some of what happened.

All this weather and damage are simply "conditions".  I worked with a guy who would point out business conditions (essentially those things that you can do little to change).  With conditions, the key is adaptation and how you cope with them.  In business they are often used as excuses but they should not be.  They are what they are - figure out how to deal with them.

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I am way behind in my reading but I did read a book - Propel - Five Ways to Amp Up Your Marketing and Accelerate Your Business.  Of course I am intrigued by marketing so I liked the book.

I could tell you the 5 principles (Strategy, Story, Strength, Simplicity, Speed) but that would not tell you the story.

The first chapters are fairly basic marketing primers.  Good information that reinforces what most marketers know (like have goals and measure).

The chapter I liked was "Amplify Through Media and Opinion Influencers".   Once the message is determined, get it out.  If done properly, this can magnify results.

Social Media has changed who and what media is.  Opinion influencers are no longer just traditional media like TV, radio and newspapers but can be anyone like me - blogging.  Different people are influential on different things.  Different people have different reach. 

For example, if I tweet to my 3,000 followers about a business book and they think I am important in that, it may have as much impact as a celebrity tweeting the same thing even though the celebrities reach is much larger than mine.  Impact is a combination of reach and specific influence.

Social media itself often gets amplified.  If I read a tweet and retweet it or mention it in my blog (like the pictures earlier in this post), the message is amplified.

In marketing, the marketer has some influence and can help get this amplification.

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And for the Josh followers: