Citizen Marketers

We're really excited about this month's TypePad Book, Citizen Marketers by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. We've already featured their excellent TypePad blog, Church of the Customer, where the Chicago duo dispense marketing wisdom to thousands of savvy subscribers and casual readers. That's why we were expecting a solid hit from the team's second book, following up on 2002’s Creating Customer Evangelists. That said, we think Citizen Marketers, a narrative look at how social media is changing the way individuals and companies interact, is pretty much a home run.

That's why we decided to not only make Marketers the January Book of the Month, but offer a 10% discount and a free copy of the book to new TypePad Pro-level annual subscribers. If you know someone who is ready to move from having a web site to having an influence, point them to this promotion where they'll get the tools they need to make an impact, and also learn about the motivation and methods of the online influencers that McConnell and Huba discovered during their research.

If you want to get a taste of the duo's deep knowledge about the intersection of networked media and marketing strategy, just listen to the TypePad Books podcast, which features McConnell and Huba in conversation with our own evangelist, Anil Dash. We think you'll find some great takeaways, no matter where along the business blogging spectrum you fall.

We particularly enjoyed the authors' take on blogging software: "Whenever we talk to people about blogging, we always point them to TypePad because it has the best systems, we think, for the different levels of engagement that people need for blogging. Whether they're a beginner or they need industrial-strength tools for working towards a large crowd."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.