Emanuel Rosen is a voice many consider the father of buzz marketing and word of mouth for his work way back in 2000 to delve into the trend with his ground breaking book The Anatomy Of Buzz. Listen in as he shares stories of entrepreneurs and business people who manage to use their personalities to get people talking and create buzz with their products and companies. Along the way you’ll get a sense from Emanuel of the techniques for creating buzz that actually work. I’m thrilled he agreed to be part of the project and share some of his thoughts on video!

“You are such an asshole, I can’t believe you did that,” was the response we received after we decided to create a JDate profile for Richard Nouveau and set up 100 simultaneous dates for him (100 Jewish women arrived at the same place at the same time all looking to date Richard Nouveau, a man who doesn’t even exist, though some might argue otherwise).

Richard hasn’t always been friendly and loved, but he has always been our voice.  Pocket Change is an e-publication that reports on the most expensive items in New York and Los Angeles and Richard Nouveau (derivative of Nouveau Riche), our fictitious editor at large, is the captain of our ship.

Online, success is measured by metrics of interaction (clicks, conversions, etc).  Richard has given our audience someone to respond to; someone to hate, someone to blame, someone to love and someone to laugh with.  To some, Richard is a hero, to others a villain, but we have seen that people emotionally respond better to personalities than they respond to institutions, companies, personality-less brands etc.  We quickly saw that the response we received was to Richard the person rather than to Pocket Change, the company.
Read On

Gary Vaynerchuk is the founder of WineLibrary TV and an internationally recognized personality. He has been on the Conan O’Brien show, has over 34,000 followers on Twitter and has succeeded with passion and authenticity. In this interview, Gary shares how he manages his personal brand, the importance of having a personality, why most CEOs don’t give a “rat’s *ss” about their company performance long term, and why people who get social media are at the edge of the future of business while the rest of the world starts to finally catch up:

In the world of marketing, it sometimes seems that there are lots of proclaimed “experts” blowing advice like a hurricane and actually impacting the business world more like a small thunderstorm … with lots of visibility but little actual impact. Standing out in this world of limitless free advice is one site that may be the most useful source of advice for marketers online today: MarketingProfs.  For proof of the value of their content, just look at their business model.  More than 300,000 marketers all pay a subscription fee to access their content.  And behind this content is Ann Handley, the Chief Content Officer of the site.  She brings together marketing voices from the business and academic worlds, and actively uses social media to build her community.  In this interview, she shares what it has taken to grow MarketingProfs, continually offer great content, and some lessons on running a successful marketing campaign and business.

In this interview taped at Blogworld Expo 2008, Steve Hall talks about building one of the most popular blogs on marketing and advertising in the world.  Adrants is an irreverent look at the world of marketing that has built a distinctive voice and a unique place among industry publications such as AdAge as a must-read resource for people working in marketing and advertising today.  Listen as Steve shares some of his tips on how he’s built his blog with personality and created a huge and loyal following.

Shashi Bellamkonda has a unique title in his role evangelizing social media as a tool to better connect with customers at one of the oldest web businesses still around today. Many people may remember Network Solutions as the first company that they purchased a domain from many years ago. Shashi’s challenge is to help bring this long standing Internet business into the “2.0″ world and take on newer competitors. Check out the video below to see how he’s using personality to help Network Solutions get there:

In this post, Frank Gruber - the creator of the wildly popular Somewhat Frank video blog and series of Tech Cocktail events around the US - talks about how he has built his personal brand while working as a product manager for AOL. His story shows how having a personality as an individual while keeping your day job can be a great career move, as well as good for the business that you work for.

I had a chance to sit down with my very good friend Tim Ferriss and talk about his amazing rise to fame with his best selling first book, The Four Hour Workweek. In this interview, Tim reveals a lot about his process for creating and promoting the book, what he has learned about time management and uncomplicating his life, and how to do an on screen interview despite distractions from Shakira … check it out!

Frank Eliason has an amazing story to tell. As a customer service manager at Comcast - he was used to dealing with customers on a daily basis in a way that most marketers have never been. His knowledge of their problems and what it takes to solve them was the sort that many people within an organization have, but rarely does this knowledge get connected with a marketing or PR effort. So Frank started communicating with customers through Twitter … and his @comcastcares Twitter account is now one of the most legendary on that site for how he has managed to communicate directly with customers and do it in an open and authentic way. This interview is his story of how he made that happen at a huge brand that had an uphill battle to fight in terms of finding and using its personality to better connect with their customers.

Meeting Mike Shinoda is not like meeting another rapper or Hip-Hop artist. For one thing, he’s half Japanese and half American. For another, he’s actually a really down to earth guy who publishes his lyrics and artwork for fans to see, writes his own blog and even recently sent out a plea directly to his fans to ask them for help in updating his Wikipedia page and correcting a few errors. In this interview, before his keynote appearance at the Blogworld Expo, Mike talks a little about how important keeping it real and having a personality have been to his success, and the rise of Linkin Park to the top of the music charts. Along the way, he tackles some of the biggest issues in music today - including the revenue model, the mashup culture of music and where the entire music industry should be headed: