The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Scott David Meerman

beautiful board out! You'll get right down to it in this four-day class, beginning on Day 1 with a board that has pre-installed (by us) frames, chine and one railstrip. You'll pair up with another student to build the rails of your board in the morning and your classmate's that afternoon. Spend the remaining three days completing, shaping and sanding your board. It's fast, but it's fun and in only four days, you've got a shaped and sanded board ready for glass.” Sign me up!

      It was an amazing experience to build my own board. Many others share my enthusiasm, and they tell the story of their Grain Surfboards experience via the company's Facebook page. This further spread the word about the brand. My story? Four days to a beautiful 6′4″ Wherry fish model board, which I left behind to be finished with a fiberglass coating. When I went back to pick it up, I signed up for a second course to build yet another board.

      The company has me hooked. Grain Surfboards has built a thriving business and become number one in its marketplace. And the online content is a primary reason for its success. The company doesn't resort to paying for expensive ads in surfing magazines. It doesn't focus on trying to get retailers to carry its product. Instead, it reaches potential buyers directly – at the precise moment when those buyers are looking for a wooden surfboard.

      I did a search on Google for “wooden surfboard,” and less than a half-hour later, I had my credit card out to book a class in another state! Had it not been for Grain Surfboards' content-rich website, beautiful images, detailed process information, and happy customer showcase, I would have quickly clicked away to check out other manufacturers. Instead, I spent thousands of dollars, rewarding a company that had treated me with respect and invited me into the wooden surfboard world.

      The web provides tremendous opportunities to reach buyers directly, and you will learn how to harness that power. What was science fiction just a few years ago is science fact today! How incredible that you can instantly create a video stream using that small device in your pocket and a service like Facebook Live or Snapchat and reach thousands of interested people who pay attention to what you are broadcasting. At no cost! Or you can have a two-way video conversation with a potential customer on the other side of the planet. For free! Your mobile device is much more powerful than what the creators of The Jetsons imagined decades ago. Each of us has the ability to reach almost any human on the planet in real time. You can publish content – a blog post, video, infographic, photo – for free to reach potential customers who will be eager to do business with you.

      There used to be 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 individually about your products. Now we have a better option: publishing interesting content on the web – content that your buyers want to consume. The tools of the marketing and PR trade have changed. The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg or bug your way into opportunity are the skills of interruption and coercion. Online success comes from thinking like a journalist and publishing amazing content that brands you as an organization or person it would be a pleasure to do business with. You are in charge of your own success.

The New Rules

      At the height of the dot-com boom, I was vice president of marketing at NewsEdge Corporation, a NASDAQ-traded online news distributor with more than $70 million in annual revenue. My multimillion-dollar marketing budget included tens of thousands of dollars per month for a public relations (PR) agency, hundreds of thousands per year for print advertising and glossy brochures, and expensive participation at a dozen trade shows per year. My team put these things on our marketing to-do list, worked like hell to execute, and paid the big bucks because that's what marketing and PR people did. These efforts made us feel good because we were doing something, but the programs were not producing significant, measurable results because we were working based on the rules of the past.

      At the same time, drawing on experience I had gained in my previous position as Asia marketing director for the online division of Knight-Ridder (then one of the largest newspaper and information companies in the world), my team and I quietly created content-based marketing and PR programs on the web. Against the advice of the PR agency professionals we had on retainer (who insisted that press releases were only for the press), we wrote and sent dozens of releases ourselves. Each time we sent a release, it appeared at online services such as Yahoo! and resulted in sales leads. Even though our advertising agency told us not to put the valuable information “somewhere where competitors could steal it,” we created a monthly newsletter called The Edge, about the exploding world of digital news. We made it freely available on the homepage of our website because it generated interest from buyers, the media, and analysts. Way back in the 1990s, when web marketing and PR were in their infancy, my team and I ignored the old rules, drawing instead on my experience working at an online publisher, and created a marketing strategy using content to reach buyers directly on the web. The homegrown programs we created at virtually no cost consistently generated more interest from qualified buyers, the media, and analysts – and resulted in more sales – than the big-bucks programs that the “professionals” were running for us. People we never heard of were finding us through search engines. We had discovered a better way to reach buyers.

      In 2002, after NewsEdge was sold to the Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters), I started my own business to refine my ideas and teach others through writing, speaking at conferences, and conducting seminars for corporate groups. The objective in all this work was to help others reach buyers directly with web content. Since then, many new forms of social media have burst onto the scene, including social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest, plus blogs, podcasts, video, and virtual communities. But what all the new web tools and techniques have in common is that they are the best way to communicate directly with your marketplace.

      This book actually started as web marketing on my blog more than a decade ago. I published an e-book called The New Rules of PR, 1 immediately generating remarkable enthusiasm (and much controversy) from marketers and businesspeople around the world. Since the e-book was published, it has been downloaded several million times and commented on by thousands of readers on my blog and those of many other bloggers. To those of you who have read and shared the e-book, thank you. But the first edition of this book was much more than just an expansion of that work, because I made its subject marketing and PR and because I included many different forms of online media. I had also conducted years of additional research.

      This book contains much more than just my own ideas, because I blogged the book, section by section, as I wrote the first edition. And as I have done revisions, including this sixth edition, I've continued to blog the stories that appear here. Thousands of you have followed along, and many have contributed to the writing process by offering suggestions through comments on my blog, via Twitter, and by email. Thank you for contributing your ideas. And thank you for arguing with me when I got off track. Your enthusiasm has made the book much better than it would have been if I had written in isolation.

      The web has changed not only the rules of marketing and PR, but also the business-book model, and The New Rules of Marketing & PR is an interesting example. My online content (the e-book and my blog) led me directly to a print book deal. I published early drafts of sections of the book on my blog and used the blog to test ideas for inclusion in subsequent editions. Other publishers would have freaked out if an author wanted to put parts of his book online (for free!) to solicit ideas. The people at John Wiley & Sons encouraged it. So my thanks go to them as well.

Life with the New Rules

      The New Rules of Marketing & PR has sold remarkably well since the initial release in June 2007. The first edition made the BusinessWeek bestseller list for multiple months. Since then, the revised editions have remained a top title for more than 10 years among thousands of books about marketing and public relations. Want to know the amazing thing? I didn't spend a single penny advertising or promoting it.

      Here's what I did do when I launched the first edition: I offered advance copies to approximately 130 important bloggers, I sent out nearly 20 news releases (you'll read later in the book about news releases as a tool to reach buyers directly), and my publisher alerted contacts in the media. That's it. Thousands of bloggers have written about the book over the years (thank you!), significantly

1

www.webinknow.com/2006/01/new_complimenta.html