Читать книгу The New Rules of Marketing and PR - Scott David Meerman - Страница 7
INTRODUCTION
ОглавлениеAs I write this, it is several months after Donald Trump was elected 45th president of the United States. Rather than rely on the marketing and public relations techniques that had worked in the past, like dozens of other major party candidates did in 2016, Trump embraced the new rules. He spoke directly to his audience via Twitter, and he used real-time content to get the media to pay attention to him, generating more than $5 billion in free exposure for his candidacy. While Hillary Clinton used the strategies that had gotten her husband elected, and Jeb Bush used those that had allowed his father and brother to win, Trump forged his own path using the tools and techniques that you will read about in this book.
Many of the same marketing techniques that elected the most unlikely candidate to the most important job in the world are available to you, right now, for free. I'll show you how they work. Rest assured that you don't need a big international company or controversial opinions to take advantage of these new rules. Let's look at a more approachable example. We'll return to President Trump in Chapter 10.
A few years ago I was considering buying a new surfboard. I've been mainly riding an 8′0″ Spyder Wright over the past several years, and I wanted to get a smaller board. In an article in Surfer magazine, I read about a trend back to wooden surfboards, so I thought I'd do a little research on wood as an option for my next purchase. Like billions of other consumers, I headed over to Google to start my research. I entered the phrase “wooden surfboard.” Then I followed the link to the top search result: Grain Surfboards at grainsurfboards.com.
I was not disappointed. The Grain Surfboards site drew me in immediately with beautiful images of the boards and excellent descriptions of how the company makes them. No wonder Grain Surfboards had the top search result for the most important phrase in their business.
I learned that while surfboards were originally made of solid wood a hundred or more years ago in Hawaii, for the past 60 years machine-made materials such as polyurethane or polystyrene foam have all but replaced wood. After all, wood is heavier and harder to work with.
But along came Grain Surfboards. The company pioneered the idea of applying boatbuilding techniques to make a hollow wooden board that is light, beautiful, and eco-friendly. The Grain Surfboards site wasn't just talking up their products; it was educating me about the history of my sport.
The lessons didn't stop with history. In fact, the company details its building process on the web for all to see. The idea of sharing your best ideas is foreign to many marketers and entrepreneurs, because people don't like their competitors to understand their business. Yet the more you educate a consumer, the more likely he or she is to buy.
Along the way, I learned that at Grain Surfboards, you can buy a build-it-yourself wooden surfboard kit that has everything you need, including detailed plans. I also learned that the company conducts classes most months in its Maine workshop and also has a traveling course (held recently in New Jersey, North Carolina, and California). If building your own board doesn't appeal to you, you can have the artisans at Grain Surfboards craft one for you.
Grain Surfboards perfectly illustrates a different way of doing business – the very method we will discuss in this book. Grain Surfboards understands that when you share your work on the web, you spread your ideas and grow your business as a result. Throughout these pages, we'll discuss how to create content that educates and informs, just like Grain Surfboards does.
As I was poking around on the site, I found my way to the Grain Surfboards Facebook page (12,000+ likes) and the @GrainSurfboards Instagram feed (50,000+ followers). Grain Surfboards engages with fans and shares what's new. Because they are excited to be engaged, fans naturally help spread the company's ideas – without even being asked. On the Instagram photo-sharing site, for example, Grain Surfboards posts get hundreds of likes and many comments and shares. The team regularly shares images of the boards they are building, of customer-created work, and, of course, images of surfing enthusiasts shredding atop beautiful Grain Surfboards.
In this book, you'll learn how to use tools like Instagram and Facebook in your business too. Social networks are easy, fun, and powerful! It just takes a minute or two to shoot a photo, manipulate it with the filters, and share it with your network. With Instagram, the images do the talking, so even writing-challenged people can create awesome content.
In about 10 minutes of research on the Grain Surfboards site, as well as their Facebook and Instagram feeds, I made up my mind to purchase one of their boards. But I did more than that. I signed up for the four-day wooden surfboard building class held at the factory in York, Maine. When I read this description, I just couldn't refuse this empowering opportunity: “Four days in, 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 driving its sales. And the mainstream media have found me as a result of this blogger interest. The Wall Street Journal called several times for interviews that landed me quotes in the paper because the journalists had read about my ideas online first. I've appeared on international and local television and radio, including MSNBC, Fox Business, and NPR. I've been interviewed on hundreds of podcasts. Magazines and newspaper reporters email me all the time to get quotes for their stories. How do they find me? Online, of course! And it doesn't cost me a single penny. I'm not telling you all this to brag about my book sales or my media appearances. I'm telling you to show you how well these ideas work and to let you know that you can achieve a similar result in your business.
But the coolest part of my life since the book was published isn't that I took advantage of the new rules of marketing and PR, nor that this book has been selling like hotcakes as a result. No, the coolest part of my life right now is that people contact me every day to say that the ideas in these pages have transformed their businesses and changed their lives. Really! That's the sort of language people use. They write just to thank me for putting the ideas into a book so that they could be enlightened to the new realities of marketing and PR.
Take Jody. He sent me an email to tell me the book had an unexpected effect on him and his wife. Jody explained that, to them, the really exciting and hopeful idea is that they can actually use their genuine voices online; they've left behind the hype-inflated, PR-speak their agencies had used so tediously.
Jim wrote to tell me “more powerful than saying I read your book twice, I used it to innovate a new writing model. I've been building my audience from scratch on LinkedIn ahead of publication of my first novel and I've now got over 70,000 subscribers and was named a Top Voice for 2016.”
Jorge, who lives in Portugal, commented on LinkedIn that “it was because of this book that I started blogging. It took me one entire day to do my first blog post. Now I use content marketing on a regular basis and all my business comes from Mr. Google! Thanks David and thanks New Rules.. (and Mr. Google)!”
Andrew left a comment on my blog: “David, your book so inspired me, I decided to start a brand-new business (launching shortly) based around the principles you espouse. You cogently expressed many of the things that I'd been grappling with myself. So your book has certainly changed one life.”
Mark said, “I took your advice back in 2006 and started a blog. If you Google ‘fix sales problems,’ you will find 42 million listings, and I am number one in the world! Thanks again for the advice years ago, and I forced myself to do it and I am glad I did.”
Julie, who is a senior executive at a PR firm, handed out copies to all 75 of her staff members. Mike wrote to say that his company takes advantage of all the trends and techniques described in the book. He purchased a bunch of copies to share with everyone in his organization. Larry bought copies for all the members of his professional association. Robin, who works for a company that offers public relations services, purchased 300 copies for clients. People approach me at conferences asking me to sign wonderfully dog-eared, coffee-stained, Post-it-noted copies of the book. Sometimes they tell me some funny secrets, too. Kathy, who works in PR, said that if everyone read it, she'd be out of a job! David told me he used what he learned to find a new job.
While all this incredible feedback is personally flattering, I am most grateful that my ideas have empowered people to find their own voices and tell their own stories online. How cool is that?
Now let me disclose a secret of my own. As I was writing the first edition of this book, I was a bit unsure of the global applicability of the new rules. Sure, I'd found a number of anecdotal stories about online marketing, blogging, and social networking outside North America. But I couldn't help but wonder at the time: Are organizations of all kinds reaching their buyers directly, with web content written in languages other than English and for cultures other than my own? I quickly learned that the answer is a resounding yes! About 25 percent of the book's English-language sales have come from outside the United States. And as I write this, the book has been or is being translated into more than 29 other languages, including Bulgarian, Finnish, Korean, Vietnamese, Serbian, and Turkish. I'm also receiving invitations from all over the world to speak about the new rules. In the past few years, I've traveled to many countries, including Bulgaria, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Trinidad, and the Dominican Republic. So I can say with certainty that the ideas in these pages do resonate worldwide. We are indeed witnessing a global phenomenon.
What's New
This sixth edition of the book builds on the completely revised fifth edition with another extensive rewrite. I have checked every fact, figure, and URL. But I've also listened. In the past few years, I've met thousands of people like you, people who have shared their stories with me. I have drawn from those experiences and included in these pages many new examples of success. For those of you who have read earlier editions, you'll still find many fresh ideas in these pages.
I've made some more significant additions as well. The tools of marketing and public relations are constantly evolving. Consider this: When I wrote the first edition of the book, Twitter didn't even exist and Facebook was available only to students. Now Twitter is an essential tool of marketing, and as of the fourth quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users around the world. And those are just two examples.
The real-time web has sparked a tremendous opportunity for reaching members of the media directly – as they are writing breaking news stories. So I've added much more to the chapters on real-time marketing, including a section on Snapchat, and added to the chapter on newsjacking, the technique of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to generate tons of media coverage.
I also got out my scalpel and cut stories and concepts that I felt were no longer appropriate. This edition is shorter than the last. While some cuts were obviously needed (such as removing the discussion of video-sharing site Vine, which was shut down), others were more about how the tools have changed. Want to know the single most significant change since the fifth edition was published? I eliminated the chapter on mobile marketing. It may seem radical to get rid of the chapter on the marketing aspect of reaching people via mobile devices and mobile applications. These days we're using our mobile devices more than ever. But that's precisely why I deleted the chapter. Mobile marketing is now so important that it seemed odd to dedicate just one chapter out of 24. I kept some of the sections from the old mobile chapter, moving them to other places in the book. For example, I moved the section about optimizing for screen size to the content chapter.
When I first wrote about mobile marketing, the smartphone wasn't all that smart. Nearly every web search happened on a desktop or notebook computer. A few smartphone apps were becoming important for marketers to understand. Geolocation was an exciting new capability. QR codes were gaining popularity. So I added a chapter on mobile in an early edition of the book.
Today, mobile is the dominant way we consume content.
According to comScore, it's now the leading digital platform; total activity on smartphones and tablets accounts for two-thirds of digital media usage by time. Smartphone apps alone now capture roughly half of digital media usage. In the United States, smartphone usage has nearly doubled from three years ago, whereas tablet usage is up 26 percent and desktop usage down 8 percent. This change is so pervasive that about 20 percent of millennials have no desktop or notebook computer at all, relying exclusively on a mobile device.
So yes, mobile marketing is critically important to your business. Much more than just one chapter.
Writing Like on a Blog, But in a Book
Because the lines between marketing and PR have blurred so much as to be virtually unrecognizable, the best online media choice is often not as obvious as in the old days. But I had to organize the book somehow, and I chose to create chapters for the various tools, including blogs, video, social networking, and so on. But the truth is that all these techniques intersect and complement one another.
These online media are evolving very rapidly, and by the time you read these words, I'll no doubt have come across new techniques that I'll wish I could have put in the sixth edition. Still, I believe that the fundamentals are important, which is why Chapter 10 (where you'll start to develop your own online marketing and PR plan) is steeped in practical, commonsense thinking.
The book is organized into three parts. Part I is a rigorous overview of how the web has changed the rules of marketing and PR. Part II introduces and provides details about each of the various media. Part III contains detailed how-to information and an action plan to help you put the new rules to work for your organization.
While I think this sequence is the most logical way to present these ideas, there's no reason why you shouldn't flip from chapter to chapter in any order that you please. Unlike a mystery novel, you won't get lost in the story if you skip around. And I certainly don't want to waste your time. As I was writing, I found myself wishing that I could send you from one chapter to another chapter with hyperlinks, like on a blog. Alas, a printed book doesn't allow that, so instead I have included more old-fashioned references where I suggest you skip ahead or go back for review on specific topics.
When I mention people and organizations, I frequently mention their Twitter IDs, which are preceded by the “@” sign. So if I were to reference my name and Twitter ID, you'd see it like this: David Meerman Scott @dmscott. That way, you quickly learn more about that person or organization by checking them out on Twitter.
You'll notice that I write in a familiar and casual tone, rather than the more formal and stilted voice of many business books. That's because I'm using my “blog voice” to share the new rules with you. It's how I like to write, and I believe it also makes things easier for you, the reader.
When I use the words company and organization throughout this book, I'm including all types of organizations and individuals. Feel free to mentally insert nonprofit, government agency, political candidate, church, school, sports team, legal firm, or other entity in place of company and organization. Similarly, when I use the word buyers, I also mean subscribers, voters, volunteers, applicants, and donors, because the new rules work for reaching all these groups. Are you a leader of a nonprofit organization that needs to increase donations? The new rules apply to you as much as to a corporation. Ditto for political campaigns looking for votes, schools that want to increase applicants, consultants hunting for business, and churches seeking new members.
This book will show you the new rules and how to apply them. For the people all over the world interacting on the web, the old rules of marketing and PR just don't work. Today, all kinds of organizations communicate directly with their buyers online. According to the International Telecommunications Union,2 an agency of the United Nations, in 2016 the Internet was used by 3.9 billion people, about half of the world's population. Even more remarkably, there were 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions – that's 96 cell phone subscriptions for every 100 people in the world, a greater percentage of people than have access to a toothbrush. So it's no surprise that, in order to reach the individuals who would be interested in their organizations, smart marketers everywhere have altered the way they think about marketing and PR.
Showcasing Success
The most exciting aspect of the book is that, throughout these pages, I have the honor of showcasing some of the best examples of building successful programs on the web. There are more than 50 profiles throughout the book, many of them in the marketers' own words from my interviews with them. These profiles bring the concepts to life. You'll learn from people at Fortune 500 companies and at businesses with just a handful of employees. These companies make products ranging from racing bicycles to jet helicopters and from computer software to men's hair accessories. Some of the organizations are well known to the public, while others are famous only in their own market niches. I profile nonprofit organizations, political advocacy groups, and an inner city school district. I tell the stories of independent consultants, churches, rock bands, and lawyers, all of whom successfully use the web to reach their target audiences. I can't thank enough the people who shared their time with me, on the phone and in person. I'm sure you'll agree that they are the stars of the book. My favorite part is that many of them are people who read earlier editions and shared their success with me. How cool is that? You can read this edition and be equipped to create programs that could grow your business and lead you to achievements that might inform readers of future editions!
As you read the stories of successful marketers, remember that you will learn from them even if they come from a very different market, industry, or type of organization than your own. Nonprofits can learn from the experiences of corporations. Consultants will gain insights from the successes of rock bands. In fact, I'm absolutely convinced that you will learn more by emulating successful ideas from outside your industry than by copying what your nearest competitor is doing. Remember, the best thing about new rules is that your competitors probably don't know about them yet.
Thank you for your interest in the new rules. I hope that you too will be successful in implementing these strategies and that your life will be made better as a result.
– David Meerman Scott
