Must Read Web Marketing Book: D. M. Scott’s “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”

Michael Volpe, VP Marketing at Hubspot, the web marketing software company, pointed me to this book in one of his presentations. I have been sufficiently impressed by the quality of HubSpot’s work that I ran over to my local library and signed it out.

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The New Rules of Marketing & PR is a breakthrough book for me about the new world of web-marketing. Here is Scott’s list of the new rules of marketing and PR (I added the numbers to the list for reference later):

  1. Marketing is more than just advertising.
  2. PR is for 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 interruption, 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 under-served audiences via the Web.
  8. PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyerts seeing your company on the Web.
  9. Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. Its about your organization winning business.
  10. The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclsuive focus on media.
  11. Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
  12. Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news 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.

Numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, & 12 are the core of the message. And I might add a couple of more notes here. First, all of this is hard work. You don’t hire some outside ad firm to handle this. People intimate with your company’s core values need to be involved. But, then, this means that with a bit of good focus and time management, you also do not need to spend a lot of money to utilize these tools. Second, the role of truth seems central to how you communicate, listen to, converse with, and engage your audience, your clients and customers.

Scott’s book is very well written and clearly organized. This is a must read for those of us still trying to figure out how to leverage the new web-marketing world. It provides a great introduction to seeing an overall strategy for web-marketing.

If Content Is King on the Web? – What Are the Best Modes of Communication?

If you are trying to build traffic and adhesion for your business on the web, “content” is central to any strategy. But, what is this “content”? How do you decide what the content should be?

The answer to this question probably lies in some basic thinking about who your target customers are.

Jaffe Customer RolesIn addition it would be useful to think of the many ways in which you might communicate with your customers. On the web you have a lot of modes in which to play. As suggested by the excerpt ( shown to the left) from Joseph Jaffe’s Join the Conversation, a consumer can play a range of roles. So, in thinking about content, it may prove most productive to engage a parent of middle school children (in the Participant and Community faces a la Jaffe) in a conversation about barriers to better school performance in web community using blogging, bulletin board, or wiki techniques. Here your content expertise in middle school eduction can shine through in the discussion. And, you might even learn something about how parents view these issues.

A future departure for thinking about how to target and communicate with customers on the web is to lay Jaffe’s contribution of the Six Cs mentioned in an earlier blog article (opens new window) on top of his “Many Faces” idea show here.