David Meerman Scott is the author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” “Tuned In,” and the forthcoming book, “World Wide Rave.”
Summary (David Meerman Scott)
- Three years ago, most companies were more interested in site usability and design for their site, not content.
- Marketers are still being trained that the way to get your information into the marketplace is to buy advertising and convince the media to write about you.
- With new media, you can technically get your message out there for zero cost. That’s simply not possible with traditional media.
- Stop measuring sales leads and start measuring the number of people exposed to your ideas.
- If you’re only talking to and about your customers, you’re missing a huge percentage of your market. You have to focus on your non-customers. You have to focus on the market you’re trying to attract, not just the market you currently have.
- Fallacy of viral marketing. Traffic doesn’t equate to customers for you. Offering a free iPod can go viral and lots of companies do offer free iPods. That’s just people who want a free iPod, not people who want your stuff.
- Ask yourself what can you do today to get more people online to know who you are. Ask that question every day, and over a couple of years you’ll be an industry voice.
- Everyone’s a dork sometimes and I think the alternative is you’re not out there.
Full Article:
(NOTE: I admittedly bury the lead on the title as it doesn’t appear to the end, but you’ll see all of Scott’s commentary leads up to not fearing making stupid mistakes online.)
I discovered David M. Scott while researching for this very blog and podcast, looking for people who wrote about the value of creating content for your business. I reached out to Scott in hopes of just having a conversation with him on the phone. He was so busy with his day long seminars which sends him all over the world, that the earliest time he’d be available for just a phone call would be in a month. I put a note in my calendar to follow up with him in a month, but I also started following him on Twitter and he started following me as well.
Two days later Scott sends out a Tweet announcing that he was flying to San Francisco the next day. He didn’t know I lived there, so I tweeted back that I’d love to get together for a drink or a meal. The next day, Scott and I sat down for dinner and I shot this quick video interview with him.
Ahead of the curve on developing content for your business
David M. Scott’s book, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” has been wildly successful. But it wasn’t his first book. Scott has written many books before that, and the one that caught my eye, which was so in line with the thinking for “Be the Voice” was his book “Cashing in with Content” which didn’t do nearly as well as “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.”
Scott believes “Cashing in with Content’s” lack of success had a lot to do with the obvious reasons: a small publisher, limited distribution, and it was only available in paperback. But he believes he was too early for the market. “In 2005 I was talking about content [saying that it] was the most important part of the Web site and [at the time] the whole world was focused on design and technology,” Scott said. From my own experience, it’s still difficult to explain to people why creating content is so valuable for their business.
Patting himself on the back for his foresight three years ago, Scott really felt like a pioneer touting the value of content and getting out there and blogging. While blogging has been out for a while, nobody else had written a book about the value of creating content for your company at that time. That’s why I stumbled across Scott.
Explaining the value of content for your business is still difficult. Scott believes the reason is because marketers are still being trained that the way to get your information into the marketplace is to buy advertising and convince the media to write about you. Business and communications schools still teach advertising and media relations.
But what Scott, myself, and many others are trying to prove is that you don’t need to be beholden to others to distribute your information. You can create the content and distribute it yourself. That idea by itself is an enormous logical leap from ‘you have to buy access’ for which we’ve been trained through schooling to believe.
It’s going to cost you zero
If you want to buy access on TV, you have to pay for access. There’s absolutely no other way around it. If you want to buy a TV ad, you need to pay for the audience that it will be shown to. In the new media and social media sphere, there are no pre-defined costs. You can technically get your message out there for zero cost. That’s simply not possible with traditional media.
Measure success of influence
One of the questions I use to chronically get during my early days of trying to sell new media was “How much is it going to cost us, and how many people are we going to reach?” It’s a question that I could never answer because neither I nor my client can control the audience.
Scott argues that in marketing we’ve never truly been able to measure reach and that what we do is we calculate success based on other metrics like sales leads or number of press clips/mentions in the media. “I don’t think either of those are effective ways to measure the success of being a thought leader. Of getting really great information out there. Of creating something that people spread one to another because they want to consume it,” Scott said.
Luckily there are tons of valuable metrics out there that will show your place in the market and your thought leadership. You can measure how many people were exposed to your ideas (e.g. how many people have seen your video, downloaded your whitepaper, etc.). You can measure what people are saying about you. Is it positive or negative? How many blogs are talking about you versus the competition? Where you appear in search results on key words and phrases versus your competition?
Look beyond your current customers – The “Tuned In” methodology
“If you’re only talking to and about your customers, you’re missing a huge percentage of your market,” said Scott, “You have to focus on your non-customers. You have to focus on the market you’re trying to attract, not just the market you currently have.” Think of your potential market as a pie. Your current customers are but a small slice of that pie. There’s so much more to go after.
Scott recommends a simple solution to reaching your non-customer audience. Talk to them. Go to where they are in the real world and in the virtual world. Attend conferences, networking events, and read the blogs that they read. Interview them on their turf and ask open ended questions and listen to phrases they use.
This was exactly the technique Scott used to come up with the idea for his new book. In his open conversations with people, the phrase that kept coming up was “viral marketing.” To test the waters, Scott wrote a free online ebook entitled, “The New Rules of Viral Marketing.” Prior to writing the book, a search for “viral marketing” on Google and Scott would appear deep in the weeds, on page 20, where no one ever looked. Once his ebook was published, Scott’s public recognition for the term “viral marketing” on Google placed him as the fourth result on the front page on Google (as of publishing this blog post). Currently his ebook has 250,000 downloads and more than 500 bloggers have written about it.
“There’s a huge misunderstanding about viral marketing. And there’s a whole cadre of basically charlatans and fly-by-night experts who talk about viral marketing and suggest they know how to create a viral marketing campaign. And typically it’s traditional advertising techniques. Things like bait and switch. Things like inane contests that have nothing to do with your products. Ways to interrupt people to get them to do something and not truly information that spreads because it’s valuable,” said Scott.
That kind of viral marketing doesn’t build a relationship with your audience. “Offering a free iPod can go viral and lots of companies do offer free iPods. That’s just people who want a free iPod, not people who want your stuff,” Scott warned.
All of this plays to the advice he’s building in Scott’s new book, “World Wide Rave: Creating triggers to get millions of people to spread your ideas and share your stories,” coming out in March, 2009. He’s hoping the phrase, “World Wide Rave,” will change people’s thinking about the term viral marketing.
Admire those ahead of you
Scott reminds people though that it’s not just doing one thing that gets you recognized. It’s a lot of little things that add up. He’s written more than 500 blog posts and has four ebooks available for free.
Yet with all of Scott’s success, he looks to someone like Seth Godin, whom he greatly admires, and wonders when will he be able to write as well as him and have as much of an industry name as him. Even the billionaire wonders if he’ll be as rich as Bill Gates. We’re always looking at the people ahead of us. Don’t let others’ success prevent you from beginning the path of your own success.
Scott suggest you ask yourself what can you do today to get more people online to know who you are. It can be just a little thing like leaving a comment on a blog. But do something every day, and those multiplied over a few years, and now you’re the expert in your industry.
Blogging for research and writing a new book
Scott uses his blog to gauge the audience’s interest on different ideas. Certain topics that he think will be of great interest will fall flat with his audience while others that he doesn’t think much of will take off. But what he loves best is when he starts a concept, and those people with more knowledge and greater interest jump in and add value and sometimes correct him.
Scott points to an example about a post where he said the NY Islanders hockey team were the first to give bloggers press credentials. The post alerted the VP of marketing for the bloggers, and another reader commented that the Islanders weren’t the first hockey team to do this.
You can’t control opinion
I asked Scott what was the feedback from his new book, “Tuned In,” and he said it was split. Businesspeople liked the practical nononsense approach while academics thought it was too simplistic and it didn’t break any new ground. In essence, both are saying the same thing, but they’re coming from different viewpoints, each choosing to spin it a different way. You can’t control opinion, you can only disclose what it is that you’re doing. For more, watch this great video which includes Chris Shipley of the Guidewire Group discuss the need for transparency and how people will generate different opinions based on their viewpoint.
Scott thinks that negative comments on his blog are a very positive thing because the person is taking the time to argue against your point. But more importantly, those who support your argument will jump in and defend you. And what was originally going to be a blog post with just one or two comments is now a blog post with forty comments.
David M. Scott is a dork
When I asked Scott about his biggest mistake made in social media, he admitted to a moment of online uncoolness that was pointed out to him by his teenage daughter. After setting up his Facebook profile, he showed it to his daughter to which she responded, “You’re not supposed to write on your own wall. You’re such a dork, dad.”
“It’s OK to be a dork online every now and then,” said Scott. We don’t always know what we’re supposed to do when we start using a new technology. Scott felt foolish when he first started with Twitter and he had only one follower. Scott said you just have to jump in and not worry, “I think everyone’s a dork sometimes and I think the alternative is you’re not out there.”
