Nathan J. Solla

Wow - absolute “must read”! So much great information! The time to read it is right now!

Reviewed: 05-03-23

This book is well worth the time it takes to listen. It has so much relevant and timely information. It also has a lot of information to prepare you for web 3 and where things are headed with AI. If you are in the marketing or business world - at all - it will be of value to you.

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Helpful book for any digital marketing agency

Reviewed: 02-25-22

I’ve been a digital agency owner for 17 years. This book validated and confirms the direction I’ve already been moving towards with my agency. This book definitely had some solid takeaways and is worth a listen. I wish I had read it 17 years ago.
The only caveat I should mention, which is not the author's fault - but just a fact about technology - when you write a book about anything tech related it becomes obsolete the moment you publish it. As a result, some of the information about SEO in this book is already outdated. However, there are so many resources online to give you modern SEO strategies so don’t worry about it too much.
The author also mentioned a downloadable roadmap but I couldn't find the PDF on audible to accompany the audiobook. Minus one star for that!
Anyway - thanks for reading my review!

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Outdated thinking

Reviewed: 11-10-21

“Failure doesn’t benefit anybody.” This type of fear of failure mentality is more than a century old and has no place in the modern age of emotional intelligence. This book was very self-help” genre and “rah rah rah get off your butt and do more“ Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t always work. I’m not sure why people buy self-help books and rate them highly, but unless the review has a detailed account of how the book has directly resulted in measurable accomplishment for you personally, it was dishonest for you to post it, in my opinion.

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Articulation should be considered when choosing a narrator

Reviewed: 10-02-20

This audiobook is very hard to listen to. I was constantly distracted by the thought, “It sounds like she’s just reading empty words on the page.” Speeding up the playback helped somewhat, but most of the sentences are read aloud with the exact same monotonous cadence as the sentence before it. Section headings are not given the appropriate voice inflections so you think it’s just an incomplete sentence and it’s confusing for a second until you realize it was a performance issue. Articulation and enunciation were also an issue. It’s an audiobook about social media, but the narrator pronounces it “sosha media” about 90% of the time. “Why not enunciate that L?”, I found myself wondering. She also pronounces the word “especially” as “EXPECIALLY”. Yep. I could go on. It may seem really nit picky to bring up these things but all together they add up and it was enough to ruin the whole experience for me. I recommend you try the hard copy instead.

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5 people found this helpful

Narration style was a distraction

Reviewed: 02-14-20

Usually, I prefer it whenever the author is also the narrator, because they know when to use appropriate voice inflection to drive home important points. They can deliver certain lines with the same passion they felt when they originally wrote the words the first time. But in the case of This Is Marketing, I found the narration to be, and I’m choosing this next word with great intention to effectively communicate my meaning, BIZARRE. He is a gifted speaker and presenter, his podcasts are interesting and informative, but in this book he used a strange cadence, this rhythmic pulse in both the tone and inflection of his voice which is hard to explain, but I have never heard anything like it. I found it to be quite a distraction because I often found myself focusing on that, rather than the content of his speech.
Content wise, this book has a few decent takeaways that are valuable, but nothing groundbreaking for marketing veterans.

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Actionable insights based on real life experience.

Reviewed: 03-15-19

I'd recommend this book if you want to transform your company or are starting a new company. It offers a total solution for operational excellence that impacts every aspect of running a business. Some of the content may seem familiar if you tend to read a lot of business books. (In fact many of the main points are quoting other authors.) But there are several great insights in this book that are not available elsewhere, and they are quite helpful for any business owner or executive leader. This book does a good job of taking the key principles of business success and making them actionable. For example, before reading this book I would think, feel, and say that "I hated meetings". This book changed the way I look at meetings, but it didn't stop there. It then gave me a system on exactly how to conduct great meetings. Now, I can say that "I used to hate poorly planned meetings", but now I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of regular meetings, because they are efficient and effective, and necessary for team communication.
After you read this book you WILL have a SYSTEM that you can use to run your business. As it turns out, SYSTEMS are what business is all about.

I gave it 4/5 stars for "performance" because of a few minor enunciation errors made by the narrator which were quite distracting. Articulation matters! Overall - excellent book and definitely worth a listen!

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5 people found this helpful

Essential Reading for every branding professional.

Reviewed: 12-20-17

After reading this book you'll feel like you were handed the secret playbook of a guy who was the valedictorian of the most "prestigious branding university" on Earth, if such a thing existed, and then after spending 2 decades getting world-class experience and figuring it out, he journaled about all of the most important tools, secrets, and lessons he'd learned along the way and called it Building a StoryBrand.

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Terrible Quality and it's not even an Audiobook.

Reviewed: 12-10-14

Has The Personal MBA Masterclass turned you off from other books in this genre?

Yes

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Josh Kaufman?

N/A

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Any additional comments?

First off: This is not an "audiobook" - it's more of a webinar, a classroom recording. As such, you get a lot of the unfortunate drawbacks you'd receive from an actual classroom: pointless, irrelevant comments from others in the room; barely audible ad-libbing followed by awkward, gratuitous chuckling; lots of background noises like shuffling feet, bags, and coats; spoons banging on coffee cups; Canadian accents; and... was that the sound of a train passing by? The overall sound quality is extremely low. The voice of the speaker is echoed and distant sounding.After the first section (which to me sounded a lot like blogger who's maybe read a few books and now we get to listen to him trying to BS his way into a consultancy position as if he were some sort of expert) instead of listening to the next section you instead must hear a marketing message plugging the publisher, Nightingale-Conant. The ad also tells you to not quit, but to boldly go on to the rest of the book and that "if you get just one idea from this book, just one, then that is worth far more that the price you paid many times over." Really? The whole thing smacked of an infomercial selling self-help products and I found myself wondering if I had been duped by the author's description and by the quantity of other 5 star reviewers on audible. (Which are now missing?)The structure of the webinar is disorganized and repetitive. The sole "purpose of this book" was recounted 5 times or so and each time it was different than before.So, if I do finish listening, I'll update my review accordingly. But at this point, I'd say pass on this one.

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1 person found this helpful