The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture, by Denise Shiffman

Marketing is hugely impacted by how the web landscape has changed: the static web has become a real-time, interactive web that's social and user-powered. Marketers must distribute messages but then let go, allowing others to manipulate, add to, and pass them along. To engage, we must fundamentally change our messaging: it's more than merely adding blogs, podcasts, and social networking. Age of Engage covers both marketing and product planning.

Advice from her presentation:

• Build street credibility at all costs: write whitepapers and e-books that have very useful content, and make them free and easy to download, so they can spread virally.

• Create free quizzes and on-line tools to motivate users to find themselves wanting and seek change (yours).

• Create a living datasource, community-built, that will keep them coming back.

• Offer your users a visionary voice; give them genuine peeks into what's coming next.

• Capture hearts with style as well as emotions (think Apple).

• Consider how controversy can generate buzz (http://comcastmustdie.com/).

• Use tools such as http://www.hubspot.com/ to evaluate your site (enter your URL as well as a competitor's, to grade your site).

• Viral spread seems to work best for content that is very new, very funny, or very relevant.