Business in the Cloud

The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott is well worth a read. My take is that it is written to be accessible to those relatively new to Marketing and PR, but contains useful ideas for almost anybody at any level. Overall, the book is very clearly written, easy to read and is full of clear, practical, how-to advice.

I won’t summarize the entire book, but here a few of the key take-aways that I thought were particularly worthwhile.

The Core Idea

In the old days, you had to write press releases for the press and hope that they would accurately pick up those stories. Often the press was pre-briefed, so the actual press release coming out of a company was often written in company jargon.

Those days are over.

Marketing and PR in the Age of the Web and Social Media

• Build a “Buyer Persona” or Personas so that you are clear on who you are trying to talk to.
• Write clearly and target the buyer of your product or service.
• Deliver your message in multiple media to match your customers multiple learning styles.
• Speak in an authentic voice.
• Avoid marketing hype. Seek to provide useful information in a format that will be genuinely helpful to your customer.
• Do not write to the press. They are important, but they are often not the key influencers.
  • Enterprise customers trust industry peers firs
  • Enterprises trust vendor Web sites second
  • The press is down the list in level of trust with this audience
• Do target influential bloggers. In the case of Enterprise Marketing, look for the bloggers who are respected in your industry and favorable towards your company. Take care of them and encourage them.
• Do not think of press releases as once-a-year, big-bang types of events. With the Internet and Social Media there is no reason for that anymore. Provide a steady stream of useful information to your customers.
• Think of your press releases and messages in terms of an Editorial Calendar that provides a constant flow of information.
• Make your customers want to read your messages.
  • Be informative
  • Be entertaining
  • Provide value to them

Biggest Laugh Reading This Book

My biggest belly-laugh came from reading Scott’s “Analysis of Gobbledygook” (pps. 144-45). He used Factiva to analyze 388,000 news releases over a nine month period to find the most overused, meaningless, buzzwords. Here are the winners:

• “Next Generation” with 9,895 uses.
• “Flexible, Robust, World Class, Scalable and Easy to Use” all scored over 5,000 uses.

No wonder our eyes glaze over when we try to read this stuff! Break out the Buzzword Bingo cards and start playing. You too will have a good laugh. . And, no surprise, the technology industry is the worst offender.

See his book for the full list.

In Conclusion

If you have to write product messaging and collateral or have to build marketing plans this is very worth reading.