Is “The Chaos Scenario” a best seller? Well, yes.

OK, it is no “Going Rogue,” that pack of lies offered up by noted ignoramus Sarah Palin. Truth be told, it’s also no “Outliers.” But since its publication it has been a top business book on Amazon.com in each of the advertising, marketing and media categories. It’s been especially strong as a Kindle edition, where at any given time it is in the top 1000, 3000, or 5000 Kindle selections — this out of a pool of about a half million titles.  At this writing, we’re at 2,869.

It’s hard to know our overall sales to actual book buyers, because we can’t track sales at retail in brick-and-mortar stores; we can only extrapolate from sales to stores.

Our best guess is that more than 5,000 actual books are in actual readers hands, increasing each month by about 750 copies. Not bad for a book published by a tiny little start-up without a penny spent in advertising.

Granted, 5,000 seems like a kind of pitiful total, until you consider this: the average U.S. book sells only 250 copies a year and less than 3000 in its lifetime. This according “Ten Awful Truths About Book Publishing” by Steve Piersanti, president of Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Don’t know what happened. Maybe one person just bought 16 books. But as I write this, TCS has its best Amazon rating since its publication. There are several million titles sold via Amazon, so this is a nice moment.

It’s something to savor, so I’m savoring my ass off.

Today, at a speech in San Diego to the Public Relations Society of America, I will attempt to foment a mob.

Not an unruly mob; more of a ruly one, which I expect to teem and throb and surge on November 18 to demonstrate their fearsome power. For the forces of e-good, not e-vil.

This will be a Virtuous Mob, a means to harness the utility of social media in order to harness the power of the crowd to make a difference. It is not the first such use of Twitter to foment good. Brian Solis and Chris Brogan have pioneered Twitter calls to action. But this will be an ongoing enterprise, taking on a new spontaneous act of do-gooding with every new mob, all recorded on the blog appended to VirtuousMob.com (which should be published by Wednesday morning. On Twitter I’ll use the hashtag #mobsters.

Because this is the debut of the Virtuous Mob, we’ll begin with something simple: a donation to a basic charitable foundation — albeit one with a heartbreaking and magnificent raison d’etre.

The foundation honors the memories of two young men, brothers whose lives were built around helping others, and whose causes were many: homelessness, lymphoma, the environment, and more. They were indefatigable in their energies on behalf of others, which they accomplished literally with their own blood, sweat and tears. This summer, they were killed when a tractor trailer rear-ended their compact car on a Virginia highway.

In subsequent posts, I will tell more about these extraordinary guys, and ultimately provide the link to the foundation dedicated to them. There I urge you to make a small donation. Small x thousands, after all, ceases to be small. Thank you for taking matters into your own hands and, meantime, I implore you:

SPREAD THE WORD. VirtuousMob.com

Thanks and stay tuned.
Bob

Keith Kelly in the New York Post:

Aiming to dramatically slash costs, Time Inc. will lay off roughly 540 employees starting next week, company insiders say.

The cuts will be staggered over two weeks and wrap up right before Thanksgiving so that the magazine publisher can take a charge against earnings in the fourth quarter.

Layoffs are expected to be 6 percent of the workforce, which is now estimated to have shrunk to 9,000 employees worldwide. But even that number is not finalized and could end up bigger.

Last year, the company cut 600 people (or 6 percent) from its 10,000 employees and took a charge against earnings of $176 million.

This from the Twittersphere:

@ogilvy If Bob Garfield’s ‘Chaos Theory’ got you thinking differently then see more http://tinyurl.com/yg6r2ks Frankly the bloke’s a genius.

A fellow from Sears Holdings in Chicago dropped into TCS Facebook fan page to ask about getting 30 copies of the book overnight for his boss, the CEO, who wished to distribute them at a meeting.  Alas, I failed to locate the post on time, and the poor guy drove all over Chicagoland purchasing a book or two at a time from every Barnes & Noble and Borders in the region.

Thanks to Adam Wollman, and to CEO Bruce Johnson, for helping spread the word.

Obviously, despite the rolling eyes of naysayers such as myself, as The NY Times’ Bill Carter reports, everything is going just splendidly.

Except that his rating are horrible. The affiliates’ local news ratings are horrible. Conan O’Brien’s ratings are horrible. And Jimmy Fallon’s ratings are horrible.

You are at this moment enjoying the 986,364the most visited website in the world.

According to Alexa, thechaosscenario.net has skyrocketed to the top million from 3,086,185th place in just a tad over three months. While we feel sad for the 2,099,821 pitiful losers we’ve left in our dust, we shall not rest.

Hey, baby, it’s 986,363 or bust.

And her sugar daddy Barry Diller, is too. In a q&a on her own website, the Daily Beast, she answers the question “Where’s the advertising?” thusly:

Hey, don’t be so impatient! We were lucky in a way to start in the deepest recession since 1929. Our business plan required us to focus on traffic first, then in the second half of the year on advertisers—which was a good thing because there weren’t any. Now we have started to reel ‘em in, led by our general manager and digital guru Caroline Marks. We have had glorious insertions from the luxury retail house Bottega Veneta, David Yurman, Ligne Roset, Le Tourment Vert, entertainment companies such as Fox and HBO, and blue chips like British Airways and Olympus. There’s lots more in the 2010 pipeline. Barry Diller, our owner, co-originator and one of the sharper minds in business, has challenged us to think beyond the troubled banner ad, and we are well on our way.

Oh, they’re well on the way, all right. They’re well on the way to learning that their CPMs will not sustain them once Barry himself becomes impatient about bankrolling Tina’s latest vanity fair.

If you are being compensated for a blog, Tweet, conversation on the subway or anywhere else — and you do not disclose your relationship with the client — you are not just a creepy mole, you are a whore. Doesn’t matter if you’re being paid in gold bricks on sample packs of Pringles. The only difference between a Park Avenue call girl and a $25 street hustler is the wardrobe.

So applause all around to the FTC for cracking down on word-of-mouthjobs.