NRMP Journal

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

This page is for summaries about and insights from “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” by David Meerman Scott.

Jan. 27, 2010 – Chapters 17 & 4

This definition from the author broadened my understanding of what social media is, where before I really only thought about social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn:

Social media provides the way people share ideas, content, thoughts and relationships online. Social media differ from so-called “mainstream media” in that anyone can create, comment on, and add to social media content. Social media can take the form of text, audio, video, images, and communities.

The ways in which Mr. Scott compares the Internet to a city with its Main Streets, shoe stores, etc. is compelling, especially with his likening social media to a cocktail party. Someone who is successful in marketing via social media is like someone who is popular or who has become a trusted friend from your many interactions with them at a party, rather than from the traditional style of marketing where salesmen scream out their offers and try to saturate the conversation with constant babble about their product or service. Effective interactions with customers and others in the industry via social media build relationships that last for years, not just the minutes (or hours or weeks) that it takes to make a sale.

Not only is it important to publish news releases the traditional way (sending them out to news release companies), but it’s vital that you publish them on your own web site as well. News release companies only keep them up for a few months, when the content of your news releases may be relevant for years. It’s also important for people to be able to see that your company has a history and be able to see the progress you’ve made, and this can be accomplished from good news releases which are archived in an easy-to-find place on your web site.

Feb. 3, 2010 – Chapters 1 & 5

In chapter 1, the author outlines what he calls the “old rules” of marketing and public relations and why these rules no longer apply. Traditionally, marketers used one-way interrupt messaging where they try to interrupt what you actually want to be doing with the marketing message they want you to hear. This has become so prevalent that consumers have begun to develop ad-blindness, where any time we see or hear an advertisement, our brain automatically shuts it out, the same way your brain learns to ignore the sensation of wearing socks after having them on for a while. Interestingly, outdoor ads such as billboards haven’t lost their effectiveness as much as other venues of advertising because we still don’t typically see ads floating in the sky. People are more likely to pay attention to an ad if it’s not in a place that’s already saturated with ads.

Chapter 5 is all about blogging. While some people have recently questioned the continued usefulness of blogs as marketing tools, Mr. Scott says that his blog is by far the most important online marketing tool he has. A blog can let people know what you’re working on or give a history of your company and its progress, and it stays searchable for months or years after anything has been posted to it, adding credibility to your web site and your online brand. However, it’s not all about posting entries on your own blog. In fact, the author recommends consistently posting comments on other people’s blogs that are related to your own company, product, or service long before even creating your own blog. This helps you establish yourself as a knowledgeable community member, and not just an advertiser for your own benefit. People learn to trust you when you comment about topics they’ve posted about instead of just focusing on selling yourself.

Feb. 8, 2010 – Chapters 2 & 8

In chapter 2, the author defines his “new rules” of marketing an public relations. He explains how the two are becoming more and more the same with regard to how they are handled using the Internet as a communication vehicle. Press releases are no longer simply to the press—they are also your content which helps with marketing. He also explains how the long tail of marketing is becoming more important, with a greater number of people seeking niche products or services that exactly fit their needs than the number of people who simply accept the status quo. The Internet allows much more precise searching, so a small company with a very specific target market can be easily found by that target market. Ultimately, the new rules of marketing and PR are that people want authenticity and interaction from a company, not spin and a one-way interruption message.

Without further ado, here are the new rules of marketing and PR as defined by Mr. Scott:

  • Marketing is more than just advertising.
  • PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.
  • You are what you publish.
  • People want authenticity, not spin.
  • People want participation, not propaganda.
  • Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
  • Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of under-served audiences via the Web.
  • PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the Web.
  • Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.
  • The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
  • Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
  • Blogs, online video, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate.
  • On the Web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred.

Viral messages are discussed in chapter 8. Messages, videos, or even ideas are called viral when people spread them quickly to each other. The Internet has been the biggest means of communication for viral messages, especially as rich, interactive content has become more prevalent. Viral messages generally originate from individuals rather than companies, though more recently organizations have tried to create viral campaigns. These usually aren’t as effective because consumers can see through the facade of the viral message into the company’s often blatant marketing.

Feb. 10, 2010 – Chapters 11 & 19

In the beginning of chapter 11, the author explains that in order to develop thought leadership around a certain topic, you need to create content that will be a solution to the problems of your customers without mentioning your company, products, or services. This is exactly what a white paper does, and hopefully after reading it, potential customers will be more likely to do business with you in particular because they trust that you understand their problems and have a solution to them. The author defines e-books as short, free electronic books with lighter copy and generally in landscape format. While I disagree with his definition of an e-book (an e-book is really just any book in electronic form), his point is that for an e-book to be effective in conveying your thought leadership, it should ideally have the qualities he mentioned. Email newsletters can be used to convey similar (though much more brief) information as white papers rather than the typical marketing-style email. The same is true for webinars, research and survey reports, images, graphs and charts, audio and video, and even blogs. Wikis are an additional way for a community to contribute to knowledge about a subject that will help people trust you if your wiki becomes a definitive source for information about that topic, even if you didn’t write it yourself. Ultimately though, you can’t become a thought leader if you really don’t know about the topic. So write what you know about and it’ll come much more naturally.

Chapter 19 discusses new rules for reaching the media. Since the Internet has become so popular, media professionals’ contact information has become extremely easy to find, and PR people have essentially begun indiscriminately spamming them with product announcements and news releases. While they don’t intend this to be spam, as long as the message they are sending is not targeted to the topic that a specific reporter generally writes about, it will be considered spam. So look for reporters who cover topics related to your company or product and put out content that fits what they will want to publish. They will find you, or you can let them know about it since it’s exactly the sort of things they’d like to cover anyway. Read the journalists’ blogs and comment on them, and if you write something about a topic they’ve talked about, post a link back to their blog and let them know you appreciated their article and have more to add to the conversation, and make sure to target just one reporter at a time.

Feb. 17, 2010 – Chapter 14

Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have quickly become some of the most popular sites on the Internet. In fact, Facebook recently passed up Yahoo as the second most visited site, after Google. The three most effective ways of marketing on Facebook are friend-to-friend communications, groups, and applications. There are also fan pages, which are like groups, but where groups require you to sign up for the group, anyone can view fan pages without becoming a fan. The author cautions, though, to be authentic and transparent, and never to try to fool a community into thinking the page is something it’s not. People are smart and figure it out very quickly and you lose trust that way.

Twitter is like an instant messaging away message limited to 140 characters. You can stay connected to Twitter via the website, Twitter applications, or even your phone. People on Twitter can “follow” each other, meaning their messages (tweets) show up in each others’ message feeds. Twitter is used for (hopefully) brief, but important updates about things that don’t need an entire blog posting. One of the biggest things about Twitter that can help your marketing is your Twitter page, which should be used to tell about yourself and show your branding.

Again, as a caution, Mr. Scott explains that you should be selective about the social networks you join and try to be active in. You can only do so much, and trying to be active in all of them will result in low quality publicity in each of them. Each social network also seems to have its own somewhat unique demographics, so you should figure out who your target audience is and join the social networking site that is home to that demographic.

Here are some suggestions the author makes to optimize the value of your social networking pages:

  • Target a specific audience.
  • Be a thought leader.
  • Be authentic and transparent.
  • Create lots of links.
  • Encourage people to contact you.
  • Participate.
  • Make it easy to find you.
  • Experiment.

Mar. 3, 2010 – Chapters 20 & 7

Chapter 20 talks about search engine marketing (SEM), which is different from the search engine optimization (SEO) we hear about all the time. SEO is one form of search engine marketing, the other main one being paid or sponsored search. SEO includes using appropriate (valid & semantic) tags and structure for your HTML, using key words and phrases you want your pages to appear in search results for, and link-building (both internal and external) whereby you create links to the more important pages in your site. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are two paid search programs known as pay-per-click (PPC) services. In this advertising model, companies bid on key words or phrases so that the pages on their website with those words and phrases show up in a list of ads on a search results page.

People often only look at the first page of results when they search for a word or phrase on a search engine, and they generally browse the results page from top to bottom, left to right. This means that the top result (or top few) will get significantly more traffic than those further down the list. Getting your website to the top of the search results can be difficult, but one way to help do that is to specialize in “long tail” search phrases. “Long tail” refers to the tail-like shape created by a graph of which key words or phrases are searched for most often. Many people will search for a single common key word or phrase, but many others will search for a variety of different, very specific phrases. It’s much easier to get to the top of the search results list if you specialize in these very specific phrases that are relevant to your business. In addition, the people who will be searching for those phrases are probably looking for a business, service, or product like yours anyway if they’re being that specific, so the leads from these key phrases are usually higher quality too.

In chapter 7 we learn about the new rules of news releases. The title of the chapter leads into these new rules: press releases are not just for the press, especially in this Internet-connected world, and so we should call them news releases instead. The name “press release” implies that its main audience is the press, or media. However, the Internet allows all interested publics to be equally connected to what’s going on in your organization through news releases. Now, anyone can subscribe to an RSS or ATOM feed of your company’s news releases, and these releases can show up in search results to0, which can be a powerful marketing technique. The author gives an example of a time when he was searching for ways to speed up the sales cycle in preparation for an address he was giving soon. A news release for a product from WebEx came up as the top result, which was rich with key words geared towards consumers who were looking to accelerate their sales cycle. In addition, the news release contained links to relevant product pages, acting much like a landing page for a specific marketing campaign.

Mar. 10, 2010 – Chapter 15

Before you begin blogging, you should read other blogs about the industry or topic you’ll be writing about. Know the people behind those blogs, comment on them, and establish yourself as someone who cares about the subject matter. Then, when you begin blogging, you will have a better understanding of the people you will be communicating to, and your words will be more believable. Commenting on other blogs also helps you to develop a voice for yourself, improving your writing.

There are ethical considerations to blogging too, some of which I hadn’t considered. Transparency on your own blog and website is crucial to building the trust of your visitors, but it’s also important not to misrepresent yourself on other sites, such as when commenting on another blog. If you disagree with something, posting your argument openly can help generate discussion on your site as well as the one you’re posting on because of trackbacks and pingbacks. Also, ask for permission before using another person’s material, give credit to others whose material helps with your own, and disclose any relationship you might have with a person or company you blog about.

Once again, consistency is the key to success with blogging. While you’ll have relatively few visitors at first, everyone starts out that way, and it takes time to build a following. Post your blog address on your main website (if you have one), add the link to your email signature, mention it to friends and clients, and link to it from other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Make sure to link your blog to those other sites so that when you post something to your blog, it sends an update to these social media sites. Google and other search engines also rewards sites that have consistently fresh content with higher page ranking, so post consistently and often (at least once a week). As your blog content grows, remember to keep posting on other related blogs, but be sure you’re contributing to the discussion and not shamelessly spamming people about your blog. That would destroy the trust you’ve worked to build.

Mar. 15, 2010 – Chapter 16

While video and podcasting does cost more than many of the other social media strategies discussed in the book, it’s still relatively inexpensive and easy compared to many traditional forms of marketing, especially as hardware and software become cheaper and more capable. Similar to all other forms of marketing and PR, you have to consider your target audience in deciding whether or not video or podcasting is an appropriate media to deliver your content. Video content is especially useful in product demonstrations or other how-to type scenarios, such as the KitchenArts example in the chapter where they record video about how to use kitchen knives.

Both video and podcasting can require extra work in preparing, recording, editing, and publishing your content. It’s best to produce a script that will help you stay on track and minimize stumbling over your words and pausing unnecessarily. If you will be interviewing someone, providing them with a script, outline, or list of questions will help them be prepared too. You should also make sure you know how to pronounce the names of those you will be speaking with or about. After recording, it’s a good idea to do some editing so that your speaking flows well and isn’t distracting from the message. One of the best things you can do is provide a transcription of the audio so that search engines can find your content, perhaps listing it on a companion blog.

Mar. 17, 2010 – Chapter 21

Of the two groups described when it comes to “making it happen,” unfortunately I identify with the latter group who feels like there’s too much to do in the world of social media to be able to keep up with it all in addition to the work I’ve already got. If I take it a piece at a time as the author suggests, however, it feels much more manageable. I also tend to stress over the minutia of things–everything’s got to be perfect or it’s not worth putting out. I’m making a goal right now to stop obsessing over the little things that hold me back. There, it’s done: I made a goal and wrote it down. Now let’s make it happen…

One thing Mr. Scott suggests to help organizations get started is to ask for help when needed. But companies who hire out social media work need to be very careful of trusting just anyone with their online image. He’s got a great suggestion to make sure prospective help is really up to snuff:

Ask the prospective agency to show you its social media presence.
[ . . . ] [I]f an agency can’t blog or tweet or create interesting content for themselves with any success, then they’re going to come up short for clients as well.

When dealing with legal departments or other policy-makers who would like to restrict social media use in the workplace, Mr. Scott recommends working with them to create guidelines, rather than restrictions. These guidelines help people know what to do rather than what not to do. Some good guiding principles are to reveal your full name, state your relationship to the company, and refrain from posting company secrets or other sensitive material or anything that would affect stock prices or trading.

After a couple more suggestions about bringing a journalist onto the team and helping your boss and other decision-makers understand social media, the Mr. Scott concludes with an example of a pastor who gets his message out to his audience in non-traditional ways through social media. The implication, and invitation, is that anyone can and everyone should be using these new rules of marketing and PR to deliver their message, regardless of their line of work or their audience.