Book Review: The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Revised

Unless you’ve been living under a marketing rock for the past few years, there won’t be much new stuff in this book for you.

That being said, David Meerman Scott provides enough material in enough depth for everyone to learn a thing or two.

The highlights:

• One to one messaging is in. One to many messaging is out.
• Focus on content, not aesthetics.

I appreciated his presentation of “personas” - how they’re created and used to get more leads and sell more stuff. More than listing the whats and hows, he used them to bring the chaotic and oft-hyped elements of “new marketing” together in a strategic, coherent way.

I would have liked more details and depth in his examples, and examples and analysis of cases where "new marketing" techniques didn't work.

With Twitter analytics claiming a cacophony of 50,000,000 tweets per day, it takes more than a persona driven strategy to be heard above the noise.

How many web pages do you need to create? How many blog postings? And, if you’re going the Twitter route, how often do you tweet?

Yeah, I know: “it depends.”

I’d like his next edition to give more insight into what’s required to get “critical mass” in the new world of marketing.

Despite its shortcomings, this book is a good introduction to “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” If you haven’t read it yet, pick it up now.

You’ll be creating personas by next week!

Business Has Never Been Better

That's a direct quote from an LA Times article about a guy who runs a fleet of milk trucks.

The milk Jim Pastor's fleet delivers costs 20 to 30 cents more per gallon than you'd pay the supermarket, so you'd think he'd have a tough time picking up new customers.

He picked up 300 customers last month.

The secret? His customers like the milk he delivers from Rockview Farms better than the milk they can buy at the supermarket.

• It's fresher (generally delivered to the customer's door within 48 hours of milking).
• It's local and organic.
• Customers say it tastes better than "supermarket milk".
  

Jim Pastor and Rockview Farms know that only a certain kind of person is willing to pay "a little more" for their service and quality. Sure, they could try to get into supermarkets, and sure, they could spend big bucks on advertising and promotion.

But they're not.

Nope, they're looking for a few good milk drinkers cities of where (my Google search showed) there is no super-fresh milk delivery option: Marina del Rey and Santa Monica.

I'll bet Jim Pastor is going to be picking up way more than 300 new customers very soon.

Drink up!

Does SEO have to be Ugly?

Ever noticed how even though a web site might be super-ugly, the company behind it figures the site is successful because it attracts a lot of visitors?

What’s the point of dragging (er, attracting) someone to your site if you’re just going to scare them off when they get there?

Sure, there are cases where aesthetics and SEO compete.

Designs that use Adobe Flash are an obvious example: it offers lots of design options, yet is opaque to search engines.

Another example is the use of text: search engines like fresh content and lots of it. Aesthetics suggest using less copy, designed once to the highest possible standard.

Even so, you can populate your content with search engine bait and still have an attractive, effective design.

Maybe the reason we see so many ugly web sites that rank well (and beautiful sites that don't) is that SEO is more the province of the engineer; aesthetics more the province of the designer.

The bottom line: a successful web site requires the right marketing strategy and building a team to implement the strategy across all needed disciplines.

Boosting Sales with Packaging

I attended the LinkedIn Long Beach networking function last week, and as usual, had a great time meeting new people and renewing relationships (more about LinkedIn Long Beach).

This month, Yasemin Altuner of Maya Trade Corporation was on hand selling olive oil and spice imports. She had a nice display, but ordinarily, I wouldn't have bought anything from her. I buy olive oil and spices at the grocery store.

But Yasemin didn't actually sell me olive oil. She sold me a solution for Valentine's day.

Thanks to Yasemin, I found a reasonably priced, beautiful gift. She wrapped the gift bag using special Valentine's day paper (click the photo to see more of the wrapping accouterments).

My wife loved it. I can only hope next year Valentine's day goes as well as it did this year!

Now, back to you: can you repackage what you're selling and solve a problem? If you can, maybe you'll end up with a little extra revenue, just like Yasemin!

And that's practical marketing.

Learning from the Movie Biz

Like every other business, the movie business is being reshaped by a new economy and new marketing.

In the not too distant past, studio executives would spend big advertising bucks to generate “boffo” box office. Now, with the reactions and reviews of other movie-goers at their fingertips, prospective audiences can’t be swayed by big ad budgets.

As John Horm of the Los Angeles Times writes:

Marketability (can you sell it?) no longer trumps playability (will audiences like it?)

The declining power of advertising isn’t unique to the movie business, nor is it news that “hot” products and services can get a big bang from social media. If you don’t have a product or service people really want, you might as well close up shop.

But there is good news: now you can use social media to get the information you need to make your product or service so great it’s worthy not just of purchase – but of conversation.

Your company moves forward on great ideas. Leverage the conversations you find in social media to come up with a product or service so great you’ll be the buzz of the blogosphere, the toast of twitter, and the prince of Plaxo!

And that’s practical marketing.

Study: Women & Social Media

Most forward thinking organizations are already active in social media. Unfortunately, many of their social media efforts are suffering from mixed results.

This was proven recently in a study by ad:tech Chicago and Q Interactive. The study focused on women's participation in social media, but in my view the study's findings are absolutely gender-neutral.

Here's what they found: even though over 50% of women surveyed said they'd "friended" a brand, only 17% said their online experience with the brand was positive!

The survey concluded:

Brand marketers still have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a social environment actually means-people are communicating on their own terms.

[Marketers] need to find a way to disassociate the brand from product and associate the brand with lifestyle or something that has more meaning on a personal level.

I know, I know: it's corporate marketing-speak. Translated into practical marketing terms, the study concluded that the majority of social media marketing isn't very interesting to its target audience.

The reason: marketers want to talk about features and benefits, and ummm... not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody cares.

To get people interested and involved, make your social media efforts about lifestyles, or something else with personal meaning. Leave the hyping of features and benefits to those who aren't reading this blog.

And that's practical marketing.

Can You Wiki Your Brand?

Branding has changed through the years.

In its first form, it was nothing but a trademark. Businesses put it on their products so their customers would know who they were buying from.

As branding evolved, it went from something you buy to something you trust to something you want to something you prefer to something you love (please forgive the run-on sentence, I just covered over 200 years of branding history!)

Now, we're moving to the next generation of branding: Wiki Branding.

What's that, you ask?

It's a brand that's driven by its community, much as Wikipedia's 14 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world.

In order to have a Wiki Brand, you'll need a community to nurture it, to advocate for it, and ultimately to help shape its direction. If you're not sure how to build your brand's community, you're in luck: we wrote about how to do it in our most recent newsletter.

And that's practical marketing.