World Wide Web Marketing: Integrating the Web into Your Marketing Strategy [Paperback]

Based on his 15 years of marketing research and consulting, Sterne practices what he preaches and gives you his best stuff up front. Using real-world examples he illustrates various principles you can use to improve your Web site, and then raise your profile.

Like any good Web citizen Sterne is generous with his outbound referrals, and uses expert quotes and cutting-edge companies liberally to illustrate his points. The book has so many useful examples and Web sites it would take you weeks to try them all. I can usually summarize a book with a list or two, but not this one. So I'll just list the chapter headings to give you an idea of its scope:

* Using the World Wide Web for Marketing - What Are You Trying to Accomplish?

* Customer Service First

* The Usable Web - Be Kind to Your Users

* Interactivity Goes with the Flow

* Selling Services

* Feedback

* Value-Added Marketing - It's Personal (Fun, interesting, & useful)

* Personalization - Getting to Know You

* Professional Personalization - Extranets and Customer Relationship Management

* Partner Relationship Management

* Attracting Attention

* Measure for Measure

* Managing Your Site and Your Sanity

* Looking toward the Future

If you've seen him speak, then you have an idea of how he writes. No bull, pragmatic prose based on real world examples, sprinkled with his trademark humor. This book is about what actually works when selling products and services on the Web.

I especially enjoyed the personalization chapter, which had some innovative products/URLs I hadn't seen before (and that's hard to do). For a mere 30 bucks, how can you beat it? If you follow his advice, you can have a dramatic effect on your bottom line. Highly recommended. From WebReference.com.

Sterne starts the book talking about the basic questions in marketing: What are you trying to sell? Who are you trying to sell it to? And, what do they really want? He gives some good advice on working through the process of answering these questions and relates these issues well to Web related marketing. Chapter 3 is a great chapter on usability issues. It's refreshing to see a marketing guy like Sterne give so much attention to usability. There are ample references to Jakob Nielsen's research into usability issues, mixed with Sterne's own good thinking on the subject.

In the middle chapters of the book, Sterne talks about the different ways to effectively use the unique aspects of the Web --interactivity and personalization -- to market to your customers. I particularly liked his discussion of interactivity and flow in Chapter 4. He then goes on to discuss the use of the Web to do customer management and dedicates a whole chapter to partner relationship management. These are probably my least favorite sections of the book. He does give some good examples of companies effectively using the Web for this purpose, but I don't think the chapters on CRM and PRM where very thorough or insightful.

The last few chapters are dedicated to measuring the effectiveness of your Web marketing effort, managing your site, and what the future holds. In the chapter on measuring effectiveness, Sterne talks about the cost to reach and ultimately acquire a customer through your marketing efforts. The following information on Web log analysis was kind of thin, but Sterne does do a pretty good job discussing "The Softer Side of Assessment" like measuring customer satisfaction and reputation management. The chapter on managing your site was thin at best. For site management, I'd recommend Jessica Burdman's book, "Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams."

Overall, I'd give Sterne an A on this book effort. The first half of the book is very, very good. The last few chapters felt somewhat rushed. Granted, Sterne picked some chapter topics that should be book topics, but even the summarized information didn't seem well put together. Maybe Jim was getting tired, or maybe I was getting tired. I finished reading this book on a red-eye flight home.