Seth calls OpenSocial a game changer.

Quoted: Consider the sandwich/burger shop/deli on a street crowded with choices. What to do? Why not get rid of all the meat and become a vegetarian/kosher sandwich/burger shop/deli? Now, it's five competitors and you. Anyone with a friend who eats carefully will bring her to your shop, the one and only one of its kind.

Quoted: And yet marketers still start every meeting and every memo with ideas about how to reach the unreachable. It's not in our nature to do what actually works: start making products, services and stories that appeal to the reachable. Then do your best to build that group ever larger. Not by yelling at them, but by serving them.

Quoted: If my previous post confused you, it's because of the difference between tactics and innovation. Try these 10 ideas to get you started down the path of scientific marketing tactics:

Quoted: The second kind we can call, "game changers." These are the remarkable innovations that make not switching painful. The sort of free prize inside that reminds the unswitched that not having switched yet is painful. It doesn't have to be a totally recasting of all that a product stands for. Interesting for me to note that Time Machine might be Apple's latest game changer.

Quoted: Which brings us back to subscription. The only win I see in the long run is for the winner of today's attention lottery to earn a subscription (an RSS feed or an email sign up or a podcast subscription) that gives them a chance to be noticed tomorrow as well. Depending on the magic of shuffle for your success is too painful and too unpredictable.

good story.

Quoted: The Saturday Journal writes about Michelle Nimmons, who runs the Denmark-Olar Teen Life Center in Denmark, SC. She and her staff (using nothing but marketing techniques like billboards, classroom sessions, free dinners and condom distribution) have cut the teen pregnancy rate by more than 60%. It's now, by far, the lowest in the state, a fraction of the rate in the next county.

Yet another great point by Seth...

Quoted: When I type your brand or your name into youtube, what do I find? What about technorati? or flickr? You can fix all three of these things today.

Very relevant to a conversation I had last night.

Quoted: If you want to please everyone, it helps to be clear, obvious and direct. And safe and predictable as well. Of course, if you try to make it clear to everyone, the chances of having your story spread in the long run go down. Because direct is often not so interesting, especially to sneezers. And doesn't always involve the joy of discovery.

Quoted: There are more than 50,000 restaurants in New York City. Perhaps 200 of them are marketing success stories. Yet at the other 49,800 restaurants, the owners spend very little time working on their breakout idea, and tons of time doing stuff that feels a lot more important.