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.