The influence of Guy Kawasaki has been apparent through these pages for a long time. Alongside Seth, Tom Peters and intermittent bursts of Malcolm McLaren pretty much all of the notes in this blog have been touched by the output of those minds in some way.
This week I've been fortunate enough to receive, from Guy, the working manuscript of his forthcoming book, Enchantment, to both read and fiddle with.
That's newsworthy in itself, I can't reveal any of the content at the moment but suffice to say it's dynamite, and his legend status has only increased for me.
In other news, Guy's first book, The Macintosh Way is now available online for free, some 20 years after it was first published.
On perusal I was struck by two nuggets in the early chapters.
Remember, this is 1990, as Guy describes the Macintosh way with regard to marketing.
Evangelism is sales done right. It is the sharing of your
dream with the marketplace and the making of history with
your customer. Evangelism is the purest form of sales. A
Macintosh Way company doesn't sell; it evangelizes.
Giving information and support to [fans] is word-of-mouth
advertising done right. [fans] are a medium
like print or television, but you can't buy them. You have to
earn them.
As every planning deck in recent months seems to include the obligatory paid-owned-earned slide and every tom, dick and social media expert illuminates us with the notion of co-creating with customers as the way forward, it's worth noting that these are not new ideas - or social media ideas - but plain and simple business sense ideas, that have been around, if you knew where to look, for longer than you might first imagine.
