Triumph Over Toothpicks

A marketing consultant teaches the basics of navigating a business in the digital age in this debut volume.

Di Gregorio makes digital technology sound deceptively easy in this brief yet packed guide aimed primarily at small-business owners but useful for a far wider audience of the digitally challenged. For the latter group, it will be reassuring to read that this technology is actually primitive, and at its core is an edifice of nothing more than zillions upon zillions of ones and zeroes. Imagine the Empire State Building as a huge stack of toothpicks laid one atop another, the author writes, and you begin to get the picture. But primitive doesn’t mean simple and in fact becomes almost insufferably complex, so seeing toothpicks only takes business readers so far. Di Gregorio says executives must accept that all businesses are now dependent on the Internet, Web pages, and social media. And woe to those who are not masters of their own Web domains and rely too much on in-house techies and social media ingénues. What is now essential is comprehending how to extract from the digital stream the why, when, how, and where of customer-buying behavior and then responding appropriately. Di Gregorio explains succinctly how this measurement of key performance indicators is accomplished. In the process, the reader cannot help but notice the paramount position Google holds when it comes to gathering and providing the data that businesses need to analyze buying behavior. Di Gregorio’s quicksilver writing style propels the reader along at high speed. With alacrity, she reveals many tricks and quirks of the digital trade as it currently exists. Her skillful, whimsical use of pictures works admirably in supporting her spare text. What a shame that her whole effort is almost certain to become as outdated as the horse and buggy within a few years. As she herself notes with some overstatement, “Today the velocity of change is outdone only by the speed of light.”  

An illuminating business book with snap, punch, and graphic design that is both colorful and playful.