If you’d like to see the slideshow of Tony Hsieh’s recent presentation to a group of Internet Marketers, you can view it below.  To reiterate, Tony is the brilliant CEO of the billion dollar company Zappos.com.

Last weekend I was at a conference and one of the speakers was Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com.  I expected to hear a presentation on Internet marketing.  It was after all an Internet marketing conference.  But what we all heard from Tony was how Zappos.com lives and dies on customer service and firm culture.  One of the really cool things he mentioned is that every year his company creates a “culture book.”  And, he told us how we could get a copy of it.   Requesting the copy was one of the first things I did when I returned to the office and today the book arrived.  It’s brilliant!  It is full of answers given by employees when asked about the firm culture and what it means to them.

If you’d like to get a closer look at the book, you can watch the video below.  I grabbed a little camcorder to provide some visuals.

I believe it was June 26, 2008 that our group of 20 attorneys from 13 states and 11 law firms decided to undertake the writing of a collaborative book on personal injury law. Today is Feb 5, 2009 – just slightly over 7 months later and we have our first physical proof. When it arrived today I grabbed a little video camcorder and shot some footage.

I happen to be from Philadelphia so there is a rather special fondness in my heart for the Wharton School of Business, which is located in our great city!  They recently posted an article and a 12 min audio discussion on the topic “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Don’t Skimp On Their Ad Budget.”  You can read and listen to it here:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2101

My colleague Mark Wahlstrom, over at the Legal Broadcast Network presents his own commentary on this article in the video below:

Here’s a great interview of Guy Kawasaki by Robert Scoble.  It caught my attention because another of my favorite guru’s Kevin O’Keefe highly recommended it.   Guy talks about his new book, Reality Check.  In the course of the interview he says something really astounding – “I am just so sold on Twitter…I think that Twitter is arguably the most powerful branding mechanism since television.” 

Happy New Year!  I don’t know about you but I am truly excited about 2009.    The New Year is a time that I generally focus on goals and priorities and that process tends to be invigorating.  One of the first new projects for our team in 2009 is the launch of Legal Marketing Cafe TV.  www.LegalMarketingCafe.com.  

As with most things we do at Speaker Media and Marketing, we anticipate that this project will evolve over a period of time.  Our philosophy is to kind of roll up our sleeves and test and measure as we go.  We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

I hope it doesn’t sound too cliche to say that this time of year is a time to reflect on all that we have to be thankful for.  I am truly thankful for the opportunity to work with attorneys, marketing directors and staff that have become more than clients – they have become friends. 

My designer created a beautiful Thanksgiving card for some of our attorneys to send to their clients.  I thought I’d share it with you.