One of the more interesting phenomena in the blog world is people’s willingness to send you review copies of new books. I’ve been sent a review copy of nearly every book on branding to be published in the past 18 months. I don’t ask for them, I rarely read them and I almost never review them. (That doesn’t mean you should stop sending them, whoever you are.)

The latest arrived yesterday from Cameo Publications. It’s called Brand Clout by Dennis C. Flynn. My modus operandi is to flip through the pages from back to front and see it anything catches my eye. My eye caught the word GIGGLE.

Page 111, last paragraph. In a chapter on Vision, Mission and Values (yawn, yawn and yawn). Here’s the paragraph that caused a Broca-inspired neural chain reaction (got my attention and caused me to stop flipping through pages.)

The Giggle Test

One way to validate the effectiveness and relevance of the vision and mission statements is to see if they pass the mustard of The Giggle Test. This means finding out the answer to how your employees are reacting to these statements when you’re not in the room. Are they laughing at them in the hallways or exchanging jokes about them in their e-mails? Have the statements created cynicism amongst the troops? Or are they nodding their heads in agreement and endorsing them in their conversations with fellow employees? Passing The Giggle Test is a critical gate in validating the effectiveness of your vision and mission statements. Again, if they don’t ring true, if they’re not believable and achievable to the employees, then they are useless.

I can’t tell you much about the rest of the book, but I like The Giggle Test.

In January of 2003, Roy Williams declared that it would be the year of the internet’s Bar Mitzvah.

Now, two years later, our friends from Brooklyn have proven that what’s only worked before with strong brick-and-mortar support is possible using ONLY word of mouth, blogs and a little help from your friends.

The first title from Wizard Academy Press to make it onto the best-seller lists of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA Today is also the first book in history to do so without store sales.

Most people would be thrilled to get on these lists and make it their goal to do so using any means possible. Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg made it their goal to go into the gunfight armed with only a pen-knife and they won!

Not only that, but the book is extremely valuable to anyone who wants to succeed on line.

Well, we finally ran out of the good wine and Seth took off to visit with Peter tomorrow. I’ll get things cleaned up and we’ll be back to normal (whatever that is).

I’d better call my friend over at Winerant and get some more of the good juice. You never know who’s going to drop in next.