I was at the Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead By David Meerman Scott, Book Signing and Tweetup! at Roger Smith Hotel tonight.   I would not have known about the book signing had it not been for a Radian6 alert I have on the Roger Smith Hotel that tells me most of what happens there (that’s tweeted or blogged about, etc).

Never been a DeadHead but everyone knows how famous The Grateful Dead are, and when I saw the book signing was going to happen I made a point to be there and got to speak with David Meerman Scott, who introduced me to his publishers at Wiley (hopefully this will be the beginning of the book I want write on Social Monitoring   – at least I can see the path to it is a detailed book proposal, a proposal I feel ready to write).

By the way, I bought a copy of Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead tonight – thought that was the least I could do after getting the personal introduction to Wiley from David (that was very nice of him, if I do say so, myself! – true, I did ask him – and he was very nice and personally made the introduction as the editors where there in the room)

Join us in our Follow the Band Book Tour (hashtag #GDbook) as we conduct book signings, host virtual events, and follow Furthur (Bob Weir and Phil Lesh) and Rhythm Devils (Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann) this summer! Brian and I are out to have some fun, meet fellow marketers and Deadheads, and boogie at some shows. We hope to see you at one of these events.

The Grateful Dead book is good – I really like what I’ve read so far

“…. Because the concert tours themselves were the main source of revenue, the Grateful Dead ran their concerts in a very different way from the other bands.  For example, each show had a unique set of songs,  and each song was played in a unique way, giving fans a strong incentive to see the show for several nights in a row (or weeks, months, or years), because every night you were treated to a different musical experience.  This is the exact opposite approach ot that taken by other bands.

Since the concert tour was at the heart of their business model, the Grateful Dead didn’t tour periodically to promote an album; with few exceptions, they were permanently on tour.  The Grateful Dead invested heavily in their light show and sound systems, both of which were the best in the industry, and in doing so made the musical experience much more powerful for their fans.”

Page 4, Marketing Lessons of The Grateful Dead.

I had a nice 5-10 minute talk with David Meerman Scott where I asked him how he got started writing a book – we talked Davos and he mentioned his first book he self published – then eventually, he got a popular book and that got him asked to speak much more often (a request a day, on average) – he started asking 5K an appearance and got it.    Well, I would not mind replicating part of that.

Like most of my life these days, the opportunities seem to come to me (but I’ve talked to publishers before and it takes more than talk to make something happen).   Anyway, I put myself at Roger Smith Hotel – and things happened.

I also spoke with Brian Simpson who runs hospitality at Roger Smith – and ran into the guy he works for – the owner – whose paintings are on second floor and in various parts of the hotel.   Anyway, I asked Brian Simpson about the book he’s writing and what it will be on – he said it’s going to be Social Media for small businesses (but don’t quote me on it).

It occurred to me the success of Roger Smith Hotel in Social Media might not be something he’d necessarily want to write a formula for – but Brian was relaxed about that – he said that even if they could copy his method and approach – there’s so much that is unique about Roger Smith and his own experience in hospitality (30 years) that he doesn’t believe it would be possible to exactly copy what he’s doing in the same exact way he’s doing it at Roger Smith.

Brian Simpson thinks of himself as a hospitality manager that uses Social Media – much as he used Social Media to deal with Cancer – and then from that evolved an approach that he uses now at the hotel.  Then Brian mentioned that he has many restrictions on him that a restaurant like Havana Central (that I work with) do not have such as Unions – as result of hotel workers union they can’t ask workers to tweet from work – or in fact to a lot of things that we could easily ask workers to do at restaurants without a problem.

Brian suggested that if it were up to him, he’d buy all his workers iPhones and ask them to tweet and respond to people who mention the business on their slow or off time.  He sees the success he’s having at Roger Smith as the result of actually being at the hotel most of the time - I mentioned the results of my Case Study published a few months ago that pegged buzz about Roger Smith Hotel to be about 12 times what Havana Central is today and he said … that’s because he and his workers are there all the time interacting, tweeting – and you’d have to live at the restaurant to do the same thing.

Of course, if this thing gets off the ground, guess who I’ll ask to write the intro – then again, maybe I can get a few intros.

That reminds me – I also met with a friend, Sam Phillips, that works at Glide Technologies in London and visiting the states for several weeks to see the prototype of their new Social Monitoring platform and it has some unique features.  It’s a little too early for me to talk about Glide Technologies new platform (at their request) but it does seem to have an ability to refine entity analysis – and run reports on tonality that I have not seen any where else.