The New Rules of Marketing and PR. David Meerman Scott
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you all this to brag about my book sales or my media appearances. I’m telling you to show you how well these ideas work and to assure you that you can achieve a similar result in your business.
But the coolest part of my life since the book was published isn’t that I took advantage of the new rules of marketing and PR, nor that this book has been selling like hotcakes as a result. No, the coolest part of my life right now is that people like you contact me every day to say that the ideas in these pages have transformed their businesses and changed their lives. Really! That’s the sort of language people use. They write just to thank me for putting the ideas into a book so that they could tap into the new realities of marketing and PR.
Take Jody. He sent me an email to tell me the book had an unexpected effect on him and his wife. Jody explained that, to them, the really exciting and hopeful idea is that they can actually use their genuine voices online; they’ve left behind the hype-inflated, PR-speak their agencies had used so tediously.
Jim wrote to tell me, “More powerful than saying I read your book twice, I used it to innovate a new writing model. I’ve been building my audience from scratch on LinkedIn ahead of publication of my first novel and I’ve now got over 70,000 subscribers.”
Jorge, who lives in Portugal, commented on LinkedIn that “it was because of this book that I started blogging. It took me one entire day to do my first blog post. Now I use content marketing in a regular basis and all my business comes from Mr. Google! Thanks David and thanks New Rules . . . (and Mr. Google)!”
Andrew left a comment on my blog: “David, your book so inspired me, I decided to start a brand-new business (launching shortly) based around the principles you espouse. You cogently expressed many of the things that I’d been grappling with myself. So your book has certainly changed one life.”
Mark said, “I took your advice back in 2006 and started a blog. If you Google ‘fix sales problems,’ you will find 42 million listings, and I am number one in the world! Thanks again for the advice years ago, and I forced myself to do it and I am glad I did.”
Julie, who is a senior executive at a PR firm, handed out copies to all 75 of her staff members. Mike wrote to say that his company takes advantage of all the trends and techniques described in the book. He purchased a bunch of copies to share with everyone in his organization. Larry bought copies for all the members of his professional association. Robin, who works for a company that offers public relations services, purchased 300 copies for clients. People approach me at conferences asking me to sign wonderfully dog-eared, coffee-stained, Post-it-noted copies of the book. Sometimes they tell me some funny secrets, too. Kathy, who works in PR, said that if everyone read it, she’d be out of a job! David told me he used what he learned to find a new job.
While all this incredible feedback is personally flattering, I am most grateful that my ideas have empowered people to find their own voices and tell their own stories online. How cool is that?
Now let me disclose a secret of my own. As I was writing the first edition of this book, I was a bit unsure of the global applicability of the new rules. Sure, I’d found a number of anecdotal stories about online marketing, blogging, and social networking outside North America. But I couldn’t help but wonder at the time: Are organizations of all kinds reaching their buyers directly, with web content written in languages other than English and for cultures other than my own?
I quickly learned that the answer is a resounding yes! About 25 percent of the book’s English-language sales have come from outside the United States. And as I write this, the book has been or is being translated into more than 29 other languages, including Bulgarian, Finnish, Korean, Vietnamese, Serbian, and Turkish. I’m also receiving invitations from all over the world to speak about the new rules. I’ve traveled for talks to Bulgaria, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Trinidad, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. So I can say with certainty that the ideas in these pages do resonate worldwide. We are indeed witnessing a global phenomenon.
What’s New
This seventh edition of the book builds on the completely revised sixth edition with another extensive rewrite. I have checked every story, fact, and figure. But I’ve also listened. In the past decade, I’ve met thousands of people like you, people who have shared their stories with me. I have drawn from those experiences and included in these pages many new examples of success. For those of you who have read earlier editions, you’ll still find many fresh ideas in these pages.
I’ve made some more significant additions as well. The tools of marketing and public relations are constantly evolving. Consider this: When I wrote the first edition of the book, Twitter didn’t even exist and Facebook was available only to students. Now Twitter is an essential tool of marketing, and as of March 31, 2019, Facebook had 2.38 billion monthly active users around the world. And those are just two examples.
Here’s another example of how the ideas in this book have become mainstream: I first wrote about newsjacking, the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to generate tons of media coverage, get sales leads, and grow business, back in 2011. I’m honored and grateful that because of people like you who learned about my pioneering ideas around newsjacking in previous editions of this book, the concept has become incredibly popular.
In fact, Oxford Dictionaries listed “newsjacking” in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017 and named it to the short list of contenders for word of the year. In their announcement, Oxford Dictionaries said: “In the space of a few short years, newsjacking has gone from an experimental technique to a staple in every social media-savvy marketing department’s arsenal. Brands from across industry sectors fully embraced the strategy this year, increasingly taking advantage of current events to not only push their brand into the public consciousness, but to align themselves with certain ethical or moral positions. Blending ‘news’ and ‘hijacking,’ the word itself dates back to the 1970s with reference to the theft of newspapers in order to sell them to scrap dealers. Its contemporary iteration, however, dates from the early twenty-first century, as first popularized by marketing and sales strategist David Meerman Scott.” You will learn about Newsjacking in Chapter 21, where I have added several new examples in this edition of the book.
Since the last edition of the book was published, the number of people using voice assistants from the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple has dramatically increased. That means understanding how people use voice to ask questions has become an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization, and I’ve added a section about this.
In early 2019 Google shut down its social networking service Google Plus (G+), so I needed to remove that section from the book. Google Plus launched in mid-2011 to great excitement. Initially available by invitation only—a clever ploy to get early adopters like me to sign on—G+ became the fastest growing social network in history when it opened to everybody in September 2011. However, once people started to use the service, it didn’t seem much different than Facebook. Most didn’t stick around. Less than a decade after launch, the service was abruptly shut down. We can learn several lessons from this saga: (1) “Me too” social networks never succeed, and (2) never tie the majority of your personal brand to a single social network.
I used my scalpel to cut other stories and concepts that I felt were no longer appropriate, including an entire chapter on viral marketing that was in previous editions. With the tremendous rise of social media, newsjacking, and real-time connections between people around the world, the fact that information travels quickly and grows in reach is an aspect of many ideas in various chapters in the book. The idea no longer needs its own chapter.
Finally, this edition includes a brand-new chapter on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Since the last edition of the book was published, the rise of AI in marketing and public relations has become an important way to automate routine tasks to save time and money as well as to increase the success