Linktopia

Linktopia Monday (with the help of Judge Page) with stops on new thoughts about banner ads, thinking about real time use for marketing and making choices.

Sometimes you look at the same thing day in and day out and never realize what you’ve been missing. Seth Godin just opened our eyes.

The guidance office at the high school has a big poster for Wellesley College hanging by the door. It's just a picture of a building, no features, no benefits, no text at all.

Kids apply to schools (a quarter of a million dollar investment) for crazy reasons. A big one: "Well, I've heard of it."

It's completely irrational and it's also what your customers do every day.

What does this have to do with banner ads and your brand as an author?

Keep reading here.

With more of the web dabbling in real time (think Twitter) what does that mean for publishing and taking advantage of books coming to market?

Marketers "are built like battleships for long, sustained warfare, [but] this is guerrilla warfare," said Lisa Bradner, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

One of the most intense challenges is the new speed with which messages need to be crafted. Think of display advertising, which is in the doldrums thanks to a nearly limitless supply of space outstripping ad demand. With a large chunk of the market transitioning to a marketplace-driven dynamic where advertisers, networks and agencies bid on ad placements based on people, not pages, a message -- and its permutations -- increasingly needs to be made on the fly. And this, in turn, means extra work up front.

The story on how some companies are addressing real time is here.

Finally, it’s the little things that make a difference. 

My wife and I live equidistantly between two grocery stores that are owned by the same company, and we shop at one particular location 95% of the time. The other day we decided to spice it up a bit and go to the other store.

It was awful.

Make you think about your local bookstore be it independent or chain? Keep reading  Drew Schiller's thoughts here.