Customer Reviews

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 2nd Edition

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

David's book integrates what he has learned as a corporate marketing strategist, and now teaches as a business speaker and seminar leader, into a practioner's guide for Marketing and PR in today's dynamic and competitive business conditions.

He emphasizes that while the most advanced technology cannot replace a fundamental and sound marketing plan and execution, the new age of web and wireless communication demands that marketing and PR people know and understand the latest tools and techniques.

The new rules of Marketing and PR, David points out, are especially beneficial for small businesses and organization, in that marketing staffs can now more easily select, focus, and reach their target markets in a more cost effective manner. Traditional mass media marketing and public relations activities have given way to a more advanced electronic and information technology based methods.

Throughout David's book, he introduces and explains by real case scenarios how the new marketing and PR tools can most effectively be used. Examples of the new techniques are detailed throughout his book and include:

* Social media
* Blogs
* Video/Audio Enhancements
* Podcasts
* Online PR & News Releases
* Internet & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

David continually recommends and reinforces his central theme of leveraging online media and use of current technology to successfully achieve your marketing objectives--here are some examples:

Social Media & Target Marketing
Through social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia) and blogging, one can reach target markets and drive them via links to your website. People and see and share content and ideas, plus make recommendations to others on specific products and services.

Video & Audio Content
Advancements in video technology, especially small, powerful, and inexpensive video cameras, allow a marketing/PR person to be their own videographer and greatly enhance the content and features on a website. Target market customers can see and hear the best attributes and amenities of places they want to visit as they conduct their decision making process.

Search Engine Marketing & Optimization
This highly significant and powerful tool drives target customers to your website. Through ensuring and words and phrases on your website, blog, or other web links can be found by search engines, which brings already interested customers to your website and to your sales and marketing staff to be contacted, qualified, and potentially closed for a sale. Search engine advertising is another tool by which a marketer purchases words and phrases that appear prominently on a pay-per-click basis, whenever customers click the link to your website.

I'm a little rusty on how to use social media in my marketing efforts as Vacation Rental Manager for the Village of Nashaquisset on Nantucket; I am confident David's recommendations will help immensely.

This book is exceptional. It will not only tell you how to use new marketing and PR techniques to get noticed, it will help you understand how to apply what you learn and provide examples along the way. It was provided to me by the college I enrolled in for my very first course, Introduction to Internet Marketing. It set the tone for the next 24 months of my education, and did a great job in doing that. I have been involved in Internet Marketing for ten years, yet I learned a lot I didn't know!

This is a necessary book for EVERY entrepreneur, business of any size, and even job seekers! Reach your customers (or your future employer) and know how to speak to them, engage them and convert them!

Make sure it's at the top of your reading list for 2010!

This book is great and I think it should be required reading for every outbound-facing person, not just marketing, but sales, bus dev, product management, and senior executives.

If you don't know what social media is, blogs, podcasts etc.... Well, you should probably just google it. This book is so painfully outdated, I am sad for my 10 dollar loss for the kindle edition, and the time I wasted. Really if the author wants to write the "New Rules", he should write them every year or so. Or put a disclaimer on the book.

I agree with another reviewer ... What is this 1999. I honestly did not find one single useful tip; although I admit, I couldn't get past the half-way mark without cutting my losses.

He seems like a really smart guy, I am sure his ideas were cutting edge. But not anymore.

The book is a good read. The 2nd edition has been completely revised and updated compared to the previous version.

Apparently, we all know the reason why David Meerman Scott started to write this book in the first place. In the digital market, the "New Rules" indicate a paradigm shift as far as marketing & PR is concerned. As mentioned by David himself, in the past before the Web came along, there were only three ways to get noticed: buy expensive advertising, beg the mainstream media to tell your story for you, or hire a huge sales staff to bug people.

So what has changed? David went on to use himself as an example. The process of promoting his new book is exactly like a live demo illustrating how David lives up to the "New Rules" depicted in his book. He did not spend a buck buying the ads and promoting his book through PR agencies. Instead, he sent out hundreds of free copies in advance to other influential bloggers in exchange for their reviews. This kind of practice is commonplace in today's world because of the "long tail" phenomenon, which says our marketplace has been dramatically democratized and everybody now can be a reporter and publisher.

David's book can be organized into three parts

I. A rigorous overview of how the Web has changed the rules of marketing and PR

II. Details about each of the various media

III. Detailed "how-to" information and an action plan to help you put the new rules to work for your organization

Essentially, the message in the book is plainly simple and easy to understand: cut off all the inefficient layers in between you and your buyers so you can reach them directly. But I would suggest you treat the "New Rules" as a how-to book and implement ideas introduced by the author. In addition, I particularly enjoy the following aspects covered in the book, including topics such as social media, video/audio podcasts, news releases, blogs, search engine marketing, etc.

This review is part of a blog post I wrote on WebStudio13. If you like it, please leave a comment on my blog [...]

There are few people so qualified to write about how companies can tap the online medium to reach prospects and win them over. David is an authority on this subject, and he has a unique grasp of the Brave New World of marketing and public relations in the world of social media and "conversational" mediums. His new edition does more than update people on changes since his first... it includes new tips, examples, and sage advice. A brand, agency or PR firm should make this mandatory reading, as it's a must-have handbook for not just large corporations but even entrepreneurs that are overwhelmed by Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and blogs... but know they need to harness these tools to educate, promote and engage with customers and prospects.

I say that this was probably the single best book I've ever purchased for several reasons. First, I found it in a book store by accident really. I'd been doing some consulting work in PR and had been asked to explore "social media." I'd joined Facebook and Twitter. I enjoyed the former but really just didn't get the latter. But I'd also seen "Julie and Julia," and I was intrigued by the power of blogs ... yet I'd never spent any time at all reading one. I also started looking for a new job and found that most every job I was applying for required some active knowledge of ways to use social media. These cyber-curiosities were now part of my daily reality, and I thought I better do what I could to learn more.

I found Scott's writing to be just as he describes good Web content should be--easy to understand and concise. Talk about your page-turner! I recommend that anyone reading this book make sure you have a note pad and pen handy because, if you have any interest at all in starting your own business (or, in my case, a non-profit), you will find yourself endlessly inspired with how to harness the Web to promote your business or services as never before. It's full of examples of ways other businesses have used blogs, Web content and social media to their advantage.

As a PR professional who graduated at a time prior to the Internet Age, I'm embarrassed that it took me this long to seek out a book like this to further my education. I've recommended it to everyone I know who is looking for a job or running a company. It is truly a fascinating read!

David Meerman Scott is someone who I know personally and this book is a bestseller for a reason. It was the first and best book on how marketing and PR have changed and the content in this book is still applicable today and will be in the future. If you aren't onboard with how the media landscape has changed, your business and your career are in serious trouble. Read this book now before it's too late.

I can't speak in general terms about how effective this book can be - I can only speak about what has happened in my company. I started a technology consulting company in the Philippines early in 2009. My background is computer programming and software architecture - marketing was like a foreign language to me! After a few months into the business, I had some very talented Filipino computer programmers ready to take on client projects. The only problem was... we had no clients!

I remember listening to the audio version of this book over and over and over again while I was in the Philippines contemplating how I can continue to support my business without income. I would listen to the book everywhere I went. When the audio book ended, I would start from the beginning and listen to it all over again. I also had the people in my marketing staff listen to it. We would then have meetings about what we learned from the book. We had a slogan that we keep saying whenever we were stuck. We asked, "What would David Meerman Scott do?" I'm not joking. We really did that.

There were no results for the first few months, and I actually started to lose faith in the author's ideas. However, I kept my faith in the book's numerous suggestions, and our team continued to work hard to implement them. We created educational YouTube videos, a website full of substantial content, submitted online articles, and so on, as the author suggested.

I'm delighted to say that after about five months of implementing the ideas in this book, clients started contacting us instead of us trying to chase them. Now my biggest problem is trying to politely say no to some potential clients because we can only handle so much as we grow at a healthy pace. As a business, that's a wonderful problem to have!

I'm not kidding when I say that I would actually love to buy a big poster of this author, so I can hang it up and feel grateful every time I see it, the same way the North Koreans pay homage to their leader Kim Jung Il! Well, maybe not to that extent, but my gratefulness towards this author is definitely of significant proportion.

Although I have listened to the 1st edition of this book more than a injured jockey would beat his dead horse, I just had to buy the 2nd edition to find out what new ideas the author might bring forth. I am listening to it now!

David Meerman Scott, I just want to express my deepest thanks for the wisdom you have shared with me by writing this book. I seriously believe I would have gone out of business and be severely broke had I not discovered this book. Words are insufficient to express the depth of my gratitude. Thank you, and please continue doing your good work... and please tell me where I can buy a life-size poster of you!

The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Second Edition, written by David Meerman Scott, is absolutely a worthwhile read. Scott does an excellent job of drawing a clear distinction between the "old rules" (the traditional methods of marketing and PR) and the "new rules" (where the industry is rapidly shifting). Before ordering this book, however, I would warn you of one thing: while this book clearly highlights the necessity of understanding how marketing is changing, it is written on a high-level, failing to do a deep dive into any specific area. At times this feels more like a marketing 101 book, more targeted toward business owners, entrepreneurs, and students - basically, those people who need a general introduction and understanding of the industry, but don't need the deep knowledge. Seasoned marketers will not find this book to be as valuable to read cover to cover, and instead I would recommend concentrating only on the chapters that are relevant to their business.

Overview:
The book is broken into three sections: section one makes the case for social media and shows how it differs from traditional marketing; section two offers an introduction to web-based marketing and the different platforms; and section three provides an action plan for using the new rules and implementing them into the different platforms.

Section 1:
Scott begins his book by drawing a clear distinction between the "old" and the "new" rules - and is not timid about providing his opinion on how he feels the "old" way of marketing, simply put, can be a waste of money. Although I do not necessarily agree that the old way of marketing should be forgotten, nor that the new rules are quite as simply as he makes them out to be, this section of the book does an excellent job of putting the changing landscape of the marketing industry into perspective. This is a very interesting and extremely important section to understand. If nothing else, ALL marketers should read this short section, whether a social media strategy works for their business objectives or not. As marketers, we need to know where the industry is going and Scott provides this knowledge in an eloquent, easy to understand manner and provides plenty of proof points to build his case. Read this section.

Section 2 and Section 3:
I pair sections 2 and 3 - which are the majority of the book - together because they follow the same structure. Section 2 introduces the platforms and section 3 discusses the action plan in that platform. Scott has strategically broken these sections out into chapters by marketing channel, meaning there will in most cases be two chapters on a specific channel, one in section 2 and one in section 3. In this way, Scott provides his readers the ability to jump around the book and choose the necessary information to read, rather than reading straight through. This was very useful and I found myself jumping ahead to read the chapters on video since I am currently implementing a strategy at work by way of this channel. This also made me again realize, however, how little detail each chapter offers. With that said, if you are specifically looking for a deep dive into creating videos for your Web site, I'd recommend buying a book on that subject alone.

Since this book is meant to provide a broad view of the different ways to utilize social media and, in this way, the real value-add of this book are the anecdotes woven into every chapter. Sections 2 and 3 are jam-packed with examples of how certain companies have implemented the new rules into their marketing strategies as well as many tips, reminders, and "internet etiquette" explanations. Most importantly, these sections drive home the new rules of marketing and PR with real, tangible evidence. One of the best, most eye-opening examples of how the new rules can influence and engage consumers is the example of Scott's "gobbledygook manifesto". The basic story, without going into too much detail, is that Scott made up this word - gobbledygook - and tested to ensure it did not have Google hits before starting to use it. Within three weeks he was able to bring the fictitious word "gobbledygook" from 0 Google hits to over 500 Google hits. This goes to show how rapidly things move in the cyber world - and these two sections discuss the different things you need to think about in order to obtain these types of results.

Criticisms:
I have touched on a few "warnings" I have to readers, however my biggest criticism is that Scott tells a very one-sided story. His portrayal of the "new rules" is all butterflies and rainbows, when in reality many of these strategies won't work for everyone. To be fair, he does have a short chapter at the end of the book and discusses how you should put a strategy in place and only use the platforms that fit your business objectives, but I think readers would have learned a lot more by hearing more stories about failures and challenges, and then seen how those companies learned from and worked through the challenges they faced. He briefly touches on collaborating with legal, but never provides actionable advice as to how to work through this - or perhaps more importantly provide examples of how others have handled this. Scott put so much emphasis on selling the idea of shifting to the new ideas that he fell through when providing actionable advice that was also realistic to most readers.

All in all, I would recommend this book to all marketers. It's a very eye opening piece of literature, especially if you are not very close to the web or social media. For those of you who are more seasoned in your professions, you will find value in some areas, but don't read the book cover to cover - unless you are looking for a marketing 101 refresher.