Marketing according to David Meerman Scott

Marketing rules have changed according to New Rules of Marketing and PR written by David Meerman Scott.
Hereafter know as David. Viral marketing is a topic that has gotten a lot of buzz lately but what is it? The old school is

dying a slow and painful death. I chuckled at the number of newsletters, blogs and businesses I found recently still dedicated to the old outbound marketing methods. Techniques I learned over 30 years ago. Oh well, some folks never learn. Hey, that’s me in the mirror.

I think David’s recounting of the story of the new marketing can best be illustrated in the Cindy Gordon story. Cindy was a vice president of the Universal Orlando Resorts in Florida. She was ordered to launch a new theme park. She was allowed an unlimited budget. She could have run T.V. ads, magazines ads, hire the best writers, buy the best lists, and retain the greatest agencies. available. But to launch the project “The Wizardry World of Harry Potter” theme park Cindy did none of those things.

All she did was tell seven people. That’s it! Well, who did she tell? She told the seven most popular bloggers about it. And she did it on a secret midnight web cast. They alone were invited and they alone had a special pass code to enter the secret meeting. In this odd “marketing” meeting they came face to face virtually with Stewart Craig who was the scene director for the Harry Potter movies. There in the this internet marketing revolution they sat for hours discussing ideas about the new Harry Potter theme park.

She only told seven people and you all know what happened next. The bloggers wrote and people wrote and talked and talked and it went to every social media outlet on the planet. Then the main stream media picked it up. Within 24 hours of telling those first 7 people over 350 million people were buzzing an idea about a new park. The funny thing about this is story is that Cindy thought she was going to get fired for taking this approach.  Management said why aren’t you out there doing ads, and doing press releases for the major magazines and contacting major media outlets. The point David makes in his book is that we are all looking for ATTENTION. And there are four ways to get it. You can buy it. You can beg for it. You can bug people for it. Or you can do it the Cindy Gordan way and earn it. The park is due to open this Spring.Translation? Plug in now if you haven’t. If you have DIY (do it yourself) or hire someone to help you. Put great content online. Interact with customers. Letting them know you really care. Consider their ideas. Share with them what is going on with your company.

Get people to talk about you. Spread your ideas. Tell your story to people that are interested and create a world wide rave or what is commonly known as viral marketing. David shares the story of being fired in 2001 when his bosses found out he was spending his time on the internet build relationships in social networks, forums and message boards. Now that this type of marketing catches on it’s rather ironic.

Fired! Wow and that was less than 10 years ago. But most companies are still in that mindset fortunately for you if you are reading this. Fear grips
them! People are terrified that if they put something out there on the web that someone won’t like it. Maybe they won’t think it’s cool and let the whole world know. Too bad for them as we used to say in the islands. If you remember the Cindy Gordan story she had invested all of nothing to put the webinar together and the worse thing that could have happened is someone said Universal Orlando Resorts had a bad idea. That’s it! Ouch!

Well most of us don’t have a Harry Potter or a Universal Studio budget. Right? So let’s bring it down to the local business level. David shares a story of a dentist in the Boston area, Dr.Helaine Smith. She was doing what most dentists are doing.  Advertising in the yellow pages, paying $2000 a month competing in the A-D section with hundreds of other dentists.  She had her business cards, a member of the Chamber of commerce and the rest of the obsolete marketing strategies.

She then started a online marketing campaign that was brilliant. She created a e book. Her e book was titled “Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex!”.
The e book was put together professionally, full of excellent information and it was passed to friends and associates and sent out to her mailing list.  And then put on her site as a completely free download.  No email, no registration, just point and download.  The next thing that happened is that it got loads of search engine traffic. She stopped all forms of traditional advertising and her business has exploded. Prior to doing this her business was worth 150K a year and it now it has grown ten fold to 1.5m.

Both examples illustrate what can be accomplished in your business but you are going to have to let go of everything you think you know about
marketing. Do it right now. Just let it go. Just get in front of mirror and shout out loud “I don’t know a darn thing about marketing. I’m a dumb as stump when it comes to marketing”. Now you can learn to take your business to a whole new level.

David touches on several subjects in a free webinar you can listen to given in the Inbound Marketing University given by Hubspot.com.

1. First buyer personas.

How do you create demographics for the people you want to reach. So many organizations market their “stuff” to nameless, faceless, prospects. A kind of cloud of people that are completely unknown to the marketing department. Tell your tale directly to an interested market. You have to interview the people to find out what they are looking for in the a service or product.

For instance, every hotel website looks exactly the same. The pretty building, the room, the fluffy pillow a list of amenities and prices. In other words they are building their entire site around a product not the personas in the world of the traveler. In David’s book he identifies 5 main personas in the world of ‘hotel’. The business person, the corporate travel manager, the family choosing a vacation spot, the event planner and last but not least the couple organizing a wedding.

Each of these has completely different needs. Think about it for a moment. Go ahead! That wasn’t rhetorical. Think about this and “get it”. Because if you don’t you might as well stop reading.

Product vs. person. Stuff vs. relationship. Them vs. You. What a dramatic difference a hotel site would be if it built itself around tons of quality content around meeting the needs of the above personas. What makes this so exciting for the local businesses is that you do know about your customers to a much greater extent than a huge corporation. What does this mean? It means you have a real chance of leveling the playing field with the box stores out there. It is truly a very exciting time for those who embrace this new way of marketing.

If you are a specialist in ANYTHING there is a e book in your head just waiting to get out. There are articles and videos and so much you can do to convince folks you are the expert in your field in your local area. And if those e books and videos and articles are looked at a few thousand times and the people can get a hold of you it is going to make a dramatic difference in your business this year. David gives a statement that you should memorize, “on the web, you ARE what you publish”.

The next item on David’s list is “Play nice”. Play nice in the sandbox, if your mother would say it’s wrong it probably is because this form of marketing is about people. There is a company that didn’t do this and it’s a pretty funny story. This guy name Scot Abelman decided he wanted to play a prank on his colleague.

He stuck 14,000 multi colored post it notes on his friends jaguar. He then posted the picture on Flickr, a photo sharing site, and over a 100,000 people saw those photos. 3M who makes post it notes gets excited. They contact Scott asked to use the pics in national campaign at Staples and Office Max. They asked Scott if they could use his photographs in the displays. Well, let’s see Scott reasoned, “It’s my idea, 100,000 people have seen the photos, I spent a bunch of cash on the post it notes and it took me hours to do it. But sure you can “play” with my pics for $2,000. ” Wow, where’s my checkbook right? But yeah you guessed it. 3M said NO! In a matter of days bloggers around the country started writing like mad and you couldn’t do a search on 3M without it being seen by millions of people. 3M earned attention in the new market with headlines like “3M Steals the Post It note Jaguar, 3M Hijacks the Post It note jaguar”. Words like shady, steals, hijacks and on and on it went. Autoblog stated “the marketing folks at 3M clearly don’t get the whole social media thing…Not cool
3M, not cool.”

The next rule in the sandbox is “Encourage Sharing”. David calls it “word-of-mouse”. It’s the whole idea of creating a “world wide rave.” It is when a group of people are talking about you and what you do and think you ARE cool. We are so blessed that we can let go of the old ways of marketing; buying, begging and bugging and instead earning our way in with value. The first rule of the rave is: Nobody but you cares about your products. People care about themselves and their problems and solving their problems.

In quoting David “When people care too much about their God da.m.n products this is what you get: [Company X (Nasday:12345)] provides business integration software to integrate, assemble and optimize available IT assets to drive business process productivity. [Company X] delivers an innovative, enterprise- class business integration platform that incorporates proven integration technology with generation capabilities into one interoperable set of tools that delivers a unique combination of efficiency, agility and control.

What in the world is this? Nobody knows.

David was so intrigued with this gobbledygook nonsense he created a “gobbledygook manifesto.” And with Hubspot he created the gobbledygook grader. Oh, by the way “innovate” was the number one gobbledygook word of 2008. Others, were unique, focused, partnership, new and improved, leverage, flexible, world class, and commitment. Heard any of those lately? He also addresses visual gobbledygook. When you have stock pictures on your site that has a group of teeth perfect, smiling, happy, multi-cultural people starting at the camera or computers you have bent the knee to visual goobledygook.

If you want to create something viral you have to make it a “no coercion” zone. Have you ever seen a pop up or survey and you take the time to participate and it linked you to something that had nothing to do with the survey. That’s coercion, manipulation and just plain evil.

The next rule to create a rave is to lose control. A great example David uses is of the Grateful Dead. They gave away their control of their music. All the started this in the seventies. They allowed their concerts to be taped and recorded and pictures to be taken and distributed. And they started this back in the seventies. They said “well sure why not, their our fans”. They got it. And as a result the Dead became the most popular touring band in history selling hundreds of millions of dollars in concert tickets.

So what? Here’s what. Make your content completely free. Don’t require that they fill out forms, emails, names or anything else to get the FREE information. Just give it away. There’s a company out there called MailerMailer and originally they required a email address to get the report and they were getting a few downloads of a metrics report they had. Then they made it totally free. As soon as it became totally free bloggers started writing. People began to focus on it. It got to number one on the keyword phrase “email marketing metrics” because bloggers were pointing to it.

The CEO told David there was a twenty fold increase in downloads since changing their policy. The whole idea of measurement is changing. The old idea of leads and sales has changed. The way people are solving their problems is changing. Now the way to measure is to see how your ideas are spreading and how those people are perceiving that you are providing value and solutions. You have to lose control of your marketing.

Next little rule is “put down roots.” If you want people to share your ideas you have to be where they are hanging out. In other words pick some places where your audience hangs out and hang out there. Not to sell but to provide answers, ask questions and basically just be you. Whatever you are an expert in trust me their are thousands of people who need that knowledge. Something as simple as knowing what to look for in a transmission shop has an audience. Find the places, hang out, and be the expert.

The New Rules of Marketing all revolve around empowering the people who are I used to say in my corporate days “pulling the plow.” I used to fume that some group in some ivory tower “somewhere” would have a focus group and come down from the mysterious tower and never once ask us “plow pullers” what might be helpful to us and the companies customers. Hey Plow Pullers, our time has come! In just one area of social media, to get a glimpse of the power of the blogoshpere the collective reach of the blogger lounge at a recent South-by-Southwest convention is larger than the WSJ. And it’s happened in less than a decade.

Finally, “Point the world to your (virtual) Doorstep. Drive them into a place where they can do business with you. Look at the site “The Best Job in the World”. It was a campaign launched by Queensland Australia Tourist Board and the application was a one minute video. The winner, who is a bloke from the UK won 150K AU dollars and his only requirement is to blog and video and take care of an island off the great barrier reef.

Now this launch became a huge viral phenomenon thousands of bloggers and mainstream media picked it up. By creating something like this it has drove people back to Queensland and boosted the tourism trade.  Everyone hates to be sold but everyone loves to buy. Pepsi recently launched a campaign that I wrote about last week. You can read about it and it will be interesting to see it’s impact on sales.

Lastly, David discusses managing fear. He gets so much push back on the ideas I have shared. I still make a few calls every week both locally and nationally to talk to local business owners and marketing directors and I have good news for you. Not much has changed YET. If what you are doing is working keep doing it. But the thing is that while  you are doing that, realize this works better and for most companies to give it a try is insignificant in their budget. It truly is a drop in the bucket of their annual marketing budget. So the question becomes, why not? Why not give it a chance? With all the evidence that this is going to grow exponentially in the next decade why would you wait?

David finishes his talk about the New Rules of Marketing and PR with a story about the Air Force. Just Google Air Force and start reading. The Air Force is using Social Media in a major way to promote their image and share with the nation and world what life is life in the Air Force. He uses this as an example of why you should stop making excuses and get involved now.

After reviewing David’s book and blog my brain is working overtime on one question. What seven people do I need to invite to a secret midnight meeting for my clients? I would suggest you watch the whole webinar put on by the Outbound Marketing University and I thank you in advance for linking me to your site. I hope I earned your attention.

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