The New Rules of Marketing & PR

When I first picked up this book, I was a little skeptical. Mostly because of the lengthy title (The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video and viral marketing to reach buyers directly). It seemed like a lot to cover in only 270 pages but the author, David Meerman Scott does a wonderful job and balancing all mediums and explaining how marketing techniques have changed for businesses and how customers are now interacting with businesses. Scott gives a very fair analysis of the old and new rules of marketing & PR, presenting his reasons why these new rules exist and real life examples to support them.

I learned a lot from his book. Scott is very knowledgeable about the changing world for marketers in that instead of using a push strategy and spending thousands of dollars on mass media advertising, businesses are communicating directly, having conversations and building relationships with their customers, or at least they should be. Customers want to be informed, interact, a choose for themselves rather than being told what to do and be ignored. His 'new rules' for this shift are presented as follows:

1. Marketing is more than just advertising
2. PR is far more than just a mainstream media audience
3. You are what you publish
4. People want authenticity, not spin
5. People want participation, not propaganda
6. Instead of causing one-way interuption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
7. Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.
8. PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It's about your buyers seeing your company on the web.
9. Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It's about your organization winning business.
10. The internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
11. Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
12. Blogs, online video, ebooks, new releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate.
13. On the Web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred.

Knowing these new rules is not enough, you need to understand how and why these changes have occurred and how to adapt to these changes well. It's about creating an authentic personality online. He refers to social media as a cocktail party in that 'Social media sites are places that people congregate to discuss things that are important to them'. Throughout his book, he presents analogies like these for us to better understand how social media and business via the web works.

Scott progresses from explaining what choices marketers now have to communicate with customers and why they're important to specific techniques and considerations for utilizing the web. The aspect I really enjoyed was his voice throughout the book as if he was leading a conversation with the reader rather than lecturing to the reader. The presentations of case studies from various industries and sizes of businesses, also helped to give credibility to his book. This book allows you to understand the latest trends in marketing, how to execute them well and looking at marketing in a different point of view as the world changes with these advances in technology.

I would highly recommend this book not just to anyone in marketing or PR but to business owners, college students and anyone trying to comprehend this marketing evolution. No matter what business you are in or its size, marketing plays an important role to gain customers but this book explains that it's more than increasing your sales. It's about being more authentic in your techniques and being more personable with your customers and the profit increases will follow.