Book Review: The Sell: The Secrets of Selling Anything to Anyone by Fredrik Eklund

Let me first admit that I am a fan of Fredrik Eklund of Bravo tv's Million Dollar Listing: New York fame. Knowing his adorable Swedish accent made reading The Sell even more entertaining.

The history of Fredrik's life helps illustrate how his foundation helped set him up for his future successes. He does discuss his tactics for negotiating and keeping the upper hand; something extremely important in your professional and personal life.

The discussion of personal brand and how to maximize your time for PR items (social media mainly) was a great reinforcement of other business books I've read. It's hard to implement advice sometimes, no matter how much sense it makes, but it was great to see the effect with a personal example. This example is also seen in Million Dollar Listing: New York.

Read this book for a different perspective on negotiating and selling yourself. If you buy it for your Kindle, get the "deluxe" version so you can watch videos of the endearing Fredrik.

Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek

This book has been sitting on the Etap Communications library shelf for a long time. The title has

always been very intriguing to me, but for some reason I hadn't read it. I wish I had read this book first when I was ready to start my professional career. Author Timothy Ferriss doesn't just focus on the professional aspect of how to work more efficiently, but really encourages you to re-evaluate your lifestyle, your wants, needs and desires and how to focus your energy on achieving the things you want to do in life.

I share my love of traveling with the author, which is why I could instantly relate to the ideas in this book. Your dream may be to do something that does not include travel, but the fact of the matter is, nearly everyone has to work. We need money in order to live, however, Timothy argues you don't need as much money as you may think. He also gives examples about how these ideas can apply to couples and families, not just a single guy or gal wanting to "live the dream."

Here are some highlights of what you'll take away from this book:

• Focus on being productive instead of being busy
• Ask yourself if you're inventing things to do to avoid doing the important
• Maintain a low information diet
• Split your dreams into Having, Being and Doing - the Having category should have the least amount of things

Even if you don't own your own business, or enjoying working 40+ hours a week, reading this book will give you a good perspective on your dreams.

Book Review: Blue Ocean Strategy

If you feel like your business is stuck in a rut or things are stagnant, you need to make time to read this book. Blue Ocean Strategy's tagline is "how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant" - and it goes through just that and more.

Thinking about things from a different perspective can be a good thing, but this concept (embodied by the likes of Southwest Airlines, Callaway Golf and the NYPD) really brings people out of their comfort zone. To this effect the book also outlines a process to get employee buy-in. Let's face it, people can be afraid of change sometimes, especially if they think their job is at stake. 

Even if you don't own or manage a business, read the last part about getting employees on board. It can really help you with tactics in situations where you are leading people or trying to implement a new idea or process. 

The authors are currently updating this book, which will be published in 2015. You can pre-order this expanded edition on Amazon.com. 

Book Review: The Fun Minute Manager

At a seminar during EXHIBITOR 2012, I won the book titled "The Fun Minute Manager" by Bob Pike, Robert Ford and John Newstrom. Six months later, I finally had a chance to read it! This book was a very quick read and described ways to be a "Fun Minute Manager" through an actual story. The main character Bob is not having fun at work and this book goes through his journey (by talking to a mentor and some converted "fun" managers).

Going through the steps of making work more fun, while still placing work responsibilities at the forefront, can be done. The book goes through ideas of what to do in various types of work places (places where clients come into the office vs. places where clients don't come into the office often); it goes through how to talk to your manager about implementing ideas; and working with hesitant co-workers.

The main things that this book can teach you right off the bat is that consistency with whatever you implement is really important. Read this book if you're looking for ideas to implement to make your workplace a more fun and enjoyable place to be. If you go to work enjoy being there everyday, then it's not work!

Book Review: How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less

I just finished reading "How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less" by Milo O. Frank. This was a good, quick read to demonstrate how to get your point across in a very short amount of time. Not only does he discuss how to do it, but the author makes a really good point to mention one thing that people overlook: anticipating the point of view of the person receiving your message. Although this book was written in 1986, it made mention of how important people's time is because they feel they don't have enough. I think the same is even more true now with the vast amount of technology and efficiency at our fingertips. This book would also be a good starting point for someone that is writing their 30 second elevator speech.

Book Review: Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson and Michael McLaughlin

Jay and Michael did a good job of introducing marketing (of the guerrilla sort) through this book. Although this is geared towards people working on their own as a consultant, many of the principles can be translated to your job even if you work for someone else. They have six principles that cover the majority of topics in this book:

• Insight-based marketing wins
• Guerrilla marketing is cohesive and coordinated
• Consulting is a contact sport
• High tech is high touch
• Focus on profits not fees
• One size fits none

This is a good addition to the Guerrilla array of books already provided by Jay Conrad Levinson.

Book Review: Viral Marketing by Russell Goldsmith

Although this book is nine years old, it still gives a good introduction to what viral marketing is and examples of how it's been used. Goldsmith is a UK native and therefore the statistics and survey results that he analyzes in his book are specific to the UK. That said, it's still interesting to read how many people (out of the 800 surveyed) said they would pass along an email to a colleague and what type of information they would be most likely to pass along.

I would bet that most people today would think that they've never been part of a viral marketing campaign or even viral marketing itself, but most likely they have. What do you do when your friend forwards you an email with a joke about the workplace? You send it to colleagues that you think would find it funny. That's viral marketing!

One good point that Goldsmith pointed out during this quick read, is that marketers need to keep in mind the saturation point of a viral marketing campaign. How many times will someone receive the same message from multiple friends before they start to perceive the brand, product or service negatively?

Read this book if you're new to marketing, viral marketing or just want to hear about some clever viral marketing ideas.