Flipping the Funnel

I stumbled upon this ebook by Seth Godin entitled 'Flipping the Funnel'. The gist of the piece is that it explains how "Web 2.0" based technogies allow organizations to do the following:

Turn strangers into friends.
Turn friends into customers.
And then... do the most important job:
Turn your customers into salespeople.

What's interesting is that the piece had three versions targeted towards different audiences (i.e. Companies, Non-Profits and Politics). Without reading the piece in its entirety, I sent an email to someone who might find it useful for her line of work. I then went on to complete the piece, only to find this line towards the end:

I don’t think most marketers have a clue about how word of mouth can help them. They think they need to use word of mouth, to manipulate it, to pay for it and put it to work.

Then it dawned upon me. I was an active participant in his word of mouth campaign to promote his "Web 2.0" product: "Squidoo". Utterly and stunningly brilliant, now it's time to buy his book that has been in my Amazon wishlist for the longest time!