Evangelism and the bestseller
Brian Erwin is an Internet grassroots marketing pioneer. He was the marketing brains behind Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog," a million-plus seller from O'Reilly & Associates. Arguably considered the first and best book about the Internet, "The Whole Internet" became a best seller because of a grassroots, evangelistic strategy.
Erwin's career began in book publishing, spending several years at Harper Collins in San Francisco and William Morrow in New York, marketing titles like Alvin Toffler's "The Third Wave" and Christina Crawford's "Mommie Dearest."
Erwin's career jumped from publishing to advocacy; he spent several years growing the Sierra Club's high-profile national media operation, and it had a profound effect on his ideas about marketing. After leaving the Sierra Club and joining O'Reilly & Associates, Erwin applied his knowledge of grassroots activism and creating a cause to help transform the company into what is considered today the pre-eminent technical publisher.
When we caught up with him in 2002, Erwin had since left O'Reilly and joined a startup company for healthcare professionals. We talked with him while researching our case study about O'Reilly & Associates for "Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force."
Q: Tell us about your history of advocacy. How did you get
started?
A: It's really in the roots of my family. We were always
taking in foster children, such as Peruvian refugees. It was
just the nature of how I was raised. It manifested itself most
strongly in college when I worked in the inner city in Hartford,
Connecticut consolidating the efforts of several non-profit
group homes there. Then I went into the work world in New York,
Los Angeles and San Francisco in book publishing.
Q: And then the Sierra Club. What did you learn then that
still rings with you today?
A: That the individual is incredibly powerful: that each of us
has within us the power to make a change, to change the world
basically and that it's not something that's foreordained.
Leadership isn't something you are blessed with; it's something
that you have within you if circumstances and your will combine
at the right time. It was an incredible experience, and I was
surrounded by the most inspiring group of people I've ever been
around in my life.
Q: What did it teach you about community?
A: If you have a community of powerful people, incredible
things can be done that at first blush don't look possible
because you are aligned against extremely powerful forces
either powerful militarily or politically or financially --
I mean, it just looks daunting. I've seen over, and over,
and over again, what happens when one person is joined by
two people, joined by four, joined by 16 and it builds. I've
seen them change the world.
Q: When you left the Sierra Club to join O'Reilly &
Associates, it was right around the time "The Whole Internet
User's Guide" was about to come out. You did some unique
things in marketing that book.
A: What I look for as a marketer is whether there is already
an aligned community formed behind a technology or product or
service. Are there people who are already using it but who
don't think of themselves as a community? When I joined
O'Reilly in the summer of '92, there was this book coming
down the pike which was "The Whole Internet Guide." I was
asking people, "How many people are on the Internet?" They
said a few million. Let me get this straight: there are a
few million people and there is no guide on how to use this
and so we're publishing the first guide? Well, yeah. It
resonated with my background which is: it's very hard getting
communities formed. But if a community is already formed and
it doesn't know it's a community, that's easy. That's where
the Internet was at that time.
I took a copy of the manuscript and printed up 500 copies of it a few months before it was going to be published. We shipped it out to all of the media contacts and put a kit around it explaining the wonder of this thing called the Internet and positioned our book as the first book [about the Internet.] We got gobs and gobs of press out of that.
I contacted the moderators of different online newsgroups, many of which were featured in the directory part of the book and said, "Guess what: your news group or mailing list is featured in our book. May I send you a copy?"
I sent another 500 manuscript copies of the book and finished copies to these moderators with a note saying, "We hope you enjoy this and we also hope you'll speak well of it to others who are visiting your news group or mailing list." Pretty soon we could see on the Internet people saying, "Hey, we were mentioned here." It spread exponentially. We were ethically able to use the Internet to spread the word about the existence of our book.
Q: How did that translate into first edition sales?
A: O'Reilly books at that time sold about a thousand copies
a month. At its peak, the "The Whole Internet Guide" was
selling 25,000 copies a month.
Q: Were you able to track the waves of buzz that emanated
through the on-line communities or was it too early then to
track that?
A: We couldn't track that directly, but there were others
which were more anecdotal. The company had its own mailing
list of customers who said yes, please let me know when you
have something new coming out. I saw this as a phenomenal
tool for communicating with those who were part of the
burgeoning O'Reilly community. In all of our marketing that
I organized thereafter, I always emphasized join our mailing
list, join our mailing list, join our mailing list.
So it all fit together -- again, I'm speaking now as a small company with a very small marketing budget -- how could we use free things, such as good media coverage, network the communications through the Internet itself, the mailing lists and the like to create a powerful and global system with the idea that if one person liked the book would they speak well of it to two people who would speak well of it to four who would speak well of it to 16. It was kind of the equivalent of setting three separate fires that then conversion to one big massive fire.
Q: You sent a copy of the manuscript to every member of
Congress?
A: We sent finished books. I arranged for Tim [O'Reilly]
to make one of the first briefings to House staff members on
the Internet when it was in its transition from being a
government-funded network to a commercially supported one.
We felt the Internet was being held back from reaching its
full potential at that time, for political reasons as much
as technological.
Q: What kind of effect did sending copies of the book to
each member of Congress have?
A: Well, it's hard to quantify other than it's all part of
this layering process -- looking at the different layers of
power and authority around the Internet and trying to alter
people's perception of it.
One of the things we did is -- and I can't say that this happened successfully but it planted the seed -- we started working with the financial community. Working with venture capitalists, investment bankers, those who covered the financial press and just sticking this idea in their heads that there was this new way of looking at global communications.
So it's all the different layers of power that are in our culture, political, financial, social, cultural, looking at each of layers and passing the message for them and using the book as the calling card to legitimize what we were talking about.
Q: Was the strategy to hit all of them simultaneously but
with customized messages for each group?
A: We blasted them all. We flooded it. I don't know how many
thousands of copies I sent out for free knowing that if we
hit this critical mass when these different layers of power
started to talk to and network with one another, that
something magical could happen. I've seen it happen in the
environmental movement -- we [at the Sierra Club] were able
to dislodge the Clean Air Act and get the California Desert
Protection Act and we were able to put Global Warming on the
map -- these are huge issues that we would work a variety
of different angles just trying to garner public support to
influence the political system. With the Internet we were
trying to influence everybody.
