Let me just begin this review of David Meerman Scott's "World Wide Rave" by saying that I admire and respect the innovative concepts that David teaches.
If you are in marketing or communications or public relations or, especially, the leader of an organization, today's world has gotten to be too competitive, too fast-moving, and too smart for you to cling to many of the tired old tenets of traditional outreach. You must ignore the old rules of advertising and PR, David writes ... and I agree completely. Success comes from people wanting to share the more credible information and stories they hear about you with their friends and colleagues. Conventional wisdom, as it is applied to marketing and promotion, is broken and far less effective in today's online world.
"World Wide Rave" is, I believe, one of the most important books about marketing in the Internet Era that I have read. The author is a man with deep credentials and perspective, and who, himself, has created world wide rave for his new approaches and ideas to marketing, and for his books.
David explains that we must "lose control," that we must understand that creating visibility in today's online world means releasing control of old approaches, like promoting messages, and capturing sales leads. The old PR agency idea of counting press clips is antiquated and silly in today's world. We can measure success but no longer through outdated business school Return on Investment (ROI) calculators.
Nobody cares about your organization or your products, David writes. What people care about are themselves and ways to solve their own problems. In order to have people talk about you and your ideas, he writes, you must resist the old urge to sell or hype your products and services. Today's style is rather one of finding "triggers" that stimulate attention and harness the power of the digital revolution. Rave is finding ways to get people talking about you.
"World Wide Rave" is filled with practical examples and guidance on how anyone can create world wide buzz about their organization or products or themselves. And, the best part is that we are living in an age when we have the ability to create rave ... or, a splash of significant awareness ... at little or no cost.
As an author and journalist, myself, who has studied and consulted on evolving trends of image-making and getting attention for many years, I would rank David Meerman Scott's "World Wide Rave" as one of the distinctive, trend-setting works, in the same category as Blanchard's "The One Minute Manager," and Beckwith's "Selling the Invisible."
After reading the 194 pages, I sat back, and thought, Wow!"
