Kogan Page couldn’t squeeze our full author biographies onto the cover of “Understanding Digital Marketing”. Since we spent so long pondering what to put into them I thought I’d post the full, uncut versions here for everyone to read 
….
DAMIAN RYAN is regional partner for Results International Group, the world’s leading specialist M&A firm for the marketing, communications and digital media sectors. Here he helps business leaders grow and realise the value of their organisations.
He was previously chief executive officer and founder of ICAN, Ireland’s most successful online advertising agency and the creator of several other media businesses. His achievements include:
- The launch of over 50 magazine titles in a publishing career spanning 21 years
- The development of several award programmes for the emerging digital media sector
- Learning to play guitar to a “reasonably annoying” standard!
CALVIN JONES is a freelance writer, journalist, blogger, online marketer and author who helps organisations of all sizes to communicate more effectively both on- and off-line. With a broad foundation of experience with large public utilities, SMEs and technology start-ups, over the years Calvin has refined his talent for taking complex ideas and making them accessible to a mainstream audience.
Some of the highlights of Calvin’s chequered career include:
* Working as a marine biologist on Sherkin Island, West Cork, Ireland.
* Running a taco-vending business on the streets of San Luis Potosi, Mexico with Irish and Californian partners.
* Walking away from a promising corporate management career to travel the world.
* Listening to the morning traffic report while contemplating his 20 second commute (10 seconds flat-out) to the office.
* Giving his children the gift of time, while they still want it.
You can contact Calvin through his blog.
Update — “Understanding Digital Marketing” is now available for pre-order on amazon
Our new book somehow seems very real this morning. I opened an e-mail from our publishers, Kogan Page, to find a link to the “Understanding Digital Marketing” page on their website.
It’s an exciting time.
Apparently:
Details of your book have already already been circulated to the book trade and to key online booksellers such as amazon. Your book will also feature in our ‘new books and bestsellers’ catalogue which is circulated by our Sales Agents to the international book trade
So, all good stuff then.
We’re planning to launch an accompanying website in the near future to support and build on Understanding Digital Marketing. This is still in the very early planning stages, but the vision is to build a dynamic and constantly evolving, community driven online marketing resource.
Stay tuned for updates by subscribing to our RSS feed or check back regularly to see what’s new. It’s going to be fun!
When you’re starting a new business one of the key things you need to do is market research. Who are your potential customers, and what are their wants and needs? What sort of demand is there for your products or services? Who are your main competitors, what are they offering, and how can you differentiate your business from theirs?
So many questions… when all you really want are answers. You obviously need to know all of these things and more to help you define a viable business plan and create an effective marketing strategy for your new business. But where do you start? Things like surveys and focus groups are often prohibitively expensive, and more often than not out of the financial reach of new businesses. You could make informed guesses, of course, but you’re really looking for something a bit more tangible.
Enter the Internet – that huge and ever growing ethereal melting pot of consumers and business. According to the latest figures there are some 1.3 billion people online, and they span the demographic gamut. There’s a pretty good chance that a healthy portion of your target market, and most of your competition is already online.
So what, you might think. Well, on today’s interactive web people are doing much more than simply looking for and absorbing information; they’re engaging in a two way discourse with their peers, a constantly evolving discussion about anything and everything that interests them – from how to grow runner beans to the relative merits of the Lisbon Treaty to what brand of hair-colouring they prefer. The web offers you a window into their world… a window of opportunity that could give your fledgling business that elusive competitive edge.
Web 2.0 maven Vanessa Fox, one of the guest speakers on social media at this year’s Search Marketing World conference in Dublin, believes that access to social media is levelling the playing field when it comes to market research. “Particularly for small businesses, who perhaps before didn’t have access to things like market research, focus groups and all those things that cost a lot of money, I think it’s very easy now for them to tap into the [online] conversation and see what’s going on,” she said.
Vanessa points out that there are all sorts of conversations going on online – not just about your business, but about key competitors, and about your industry in general – from which small businesses can glean real insight. “Even just the ability to hear what’s going on and take feedback from that I think is really valuable,” she said.
From conducting a simple keyword search to see who your main competitors are; to browsing through online groups, forums and blogs to identify the key influencers in your space; to setting up automated alerts and feeds that flag the conversations you want to track, and much more besides… there are a raft of tools out there to help you find out more about your customers, your competition, your industry and ultimately your business.
In the next article we’ll take a closer look at a few of them.
Image Credit: Explain market research by mafleen on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
We’re in the final furlong now. After six months of hard work the body of the book is written, and we’ll be getting the final bits and pieces (figures, diagrams, glossary, case studies, etc.) out to the publisher over the next week or so.
Phew! It’s been a marathon… but worth it.
Estimated publication date in the UK and Ireland is very early 2009 with international markets following later next year.
Very exciting stuff!
Why write this book?
Understanding Digital Marketing is a book for anyone who want’s to take their marketing to the next level by making the leap to digital as it moves into the mainstream. It’s for small business owners, traditional marketers, entrepreneurs and business executives who want a comprehensive overview of online marketing that will help them to hit the ground running to promote their business on the Internet.
It will:
- Help people with little knowledge of digital marketing to get up-to-speed quickly
- Deliver the the basic know-how people need to work effectively with online marketing professionals
- Provide a solid foundation for business owners and entrepreneurs looking to implement their own Internet marketing campaigns
More news on publication dates and availability nearer the time – meanwhile, subscribe to the Digital Marketing Success RSS Feed or check back regularly for extracts, insight and news from the online marketing world. And don’t forget to let us have your feedback in the post comments.
Calvin & Damian!
Just had to fire in a quick post about the twitter story competition being run by @copyblogger — write a story in EXACTLY 140 characters, post it on twitter, add a link to your tweet in the comments on the original blog post, and be in with the chance of winning an 8GB iPod Touch and lots of other goodies.
Outstanding!
I love the way twitter makes you condense your writing, squeezing the maximum out of every character. Here’s my swiftly penned missive:
Think you can do better — get tweeting, there’s not much time left.
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