Marketing has loosened up. Controlling the customer experience was once considered a virtue. Funny how this was the discipline when media was relatively limited. Today’s brand guardians (the term is a bit of an oxymoron, now) yearn for a somewhat anarchic distribution of the message, hoping it would create its own momentum across all networks. Buzz marketing, for one, is the art of getting it started. Monitor, yes. Control, no. In fact, the more you lose control, the better it could spread.

Notice how easy it is to stumble on a book once the ‘search inside this book’ feature is turned on at Amazon. The portion of the Amazon site encouraging authors to participate in this program says it uses actual words from inside the book (not those keywords supplied by the publisher.) This gives people a chance of finding the book in search results when they use words that may not even be directly related to the title or author.

I bring this up just to illustrate how an author could get tremendous marketing lift by giving up control and allowing his book to be available this way. We often talk of marketing communications from Big Company company perspective. In this digital era, it’s amazing how we could too.