by David Meerman Scott
(John Wiley & Sons. Hoboken, New Jersey ©2007)
As a strategic communications and marketing consultant whose practice leans heavily on strategy development, I do a substantial amount of reading. While the majority of the marketing and communications tomes that roll out of the publishing houses offer only limited contributions, every now a then a real gem rolls off the presses.
One of those gems is the 2007/2008 best-seller The New Rules of Marketing & PR. In it, David Meerman Scott demonstrates how the Internet has dramatically disrupted the marketing/PR of the past, forcing major organizational change. Although this book is almost two years old, its insights remain fresh and tremendously relevant to any organization that seeks to maximize its marketing prowess.
Before the Internet, small businesses rarely had enough money to compete against the big players because of the high cost of advertising and the exclusivity of what was considered news. Conversely, large firms were at a distinct disadvantage to small ones in terms of staying close to their customers and cultivating customer intimacy. But all that has changed.
One important new rule Scott shares is that businesses no longer have to wait for a reporter to tell their story. Now you can tell your own story. With such catch phrases as “You are what you publish,” and “think like a publisher,” Scott encourages businesses and organizations of any size to get into the heads of their buyers and create content that focuses on them, not you.
Instead of telling buyers how good your products are, use the functionality and efficiency of social media to research their needs and replace self-serving promotional material with information that speaks directly to those needs. He urges organizations to embrace the richness of the web — everything from blogs and podcasts to wikis and Squidoo lenses to use in creative ways to take their messages to the world.
Scott has been criticized I some quarters over the last year for offering little that is new. But his critics miss the more salient point: Very little in business is actually “new”, since business is ultimately all about human nature and the basic realities of human nature don’t change. What was rare, if not exactly “new” was Scott’s combination of sophisticated analysis explained in simple terms.
And both the sophistication and simplicity remain fresh today in my view. Scott was dead-on in asserting that the old “one-way interruption marketing” has given way to a strategy of reaching many previously under-served audiences right at the time of need with products and services that appeal directly to them.
One of the basic points I often repeat to my consulting clients is to keep the main thing the main thing. It is easy to get to get so caught up in the new technologies and tactics of communications and marketing that they lose sight of the ultimate goal — growing their business. To his credit, Scott hammers this point home: “PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV,” he writes. “Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. . . It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the web and . . . your organization winning business.”