David Scott - The New Rules of Marketing and PR

Marketing is more than just advertising.

PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.

You are what you publish.

People want authenticity, not spin.

People want participation, not propaganda.

Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.

Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.

PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the web.

Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.

The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.

Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.

Blogs, online video, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate.

Buyers want information in language they understand, not gobbledygook-laden jargon.

Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn allow people all over the world to share content and connect with the people and companies they do business with.

In our always-on world, buyers expect instant, 24/7 communications.

On the web, the lines between marketing and PR (and sales and service, too) have blurred.

As I originally wrote this list and edited it down, I was struck by how important one particular concept was to any successful online strategy to reach buyers directly: This concept is the convergence of marketing and PR. In an offline world, marketing and PR are separate departments with different people and different skill sets, but this is not the case on the web. What’s the difference between what Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix are doing to reach customers via online marketing and what The Concrete Network does? There’s not much difference. How is the news that Open Cycle creates itself and posts on the site different from a story on Bicycling magazine’s website? It isn’t. And when a buyer is researching your product category by using a search engine, does it really matter if the first exposure is a hit on your website, a news release your organization sent, a magazine article, or a post on your blog? I’d argue that it doesn’t matter. Whereas I presented two separate lists for The Old Rules of Marketing and The Old Rules of PR, now there is just one set of rules: The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Great content in all forms helps buyers see that you and your organization get it. Content drives action.

1 1 kakslauttanen.fi/en

2 2 cervelo.com

3 3 opencycle.com

4 4 opencycle.com/blogs

5 5 concretenetwork.com

6 6 concretenetwork.com/decorative-concrete-contractors

7 7 concretenetwork.com/photo-gallery/

The frustration of relying exclusively on the media and expensive advertising to deliver your organization’s story is long gone. Yes, mainstream media are still important, but today smart marketers craft compelling information and tell the world directly via the web. The tremendous expense of relying on advertising to convince buyers to pay attention to your organization, ideas, products, and services is yesterday’s headache.

Chip McDermott founded ZeroTrash 1as a nonprofit organization to rid the streets and beaches of Laguna Beach, California, of trash. Population and tourism had exploded, and the city had not kept up in providing sufficient infrastructure for public trash collecting and recycling. McDermott used the web to rally the community with a grassroots movement.

“The spark of the idea was that trash was becoming commonplace on the streets and the sidewalks of Laguna Beach,” McDermott says. “We started to tackle the problem with a Facebook 2page for ZeroTrash Laguna and quickly built it to hundreds of members.”

People use the ZeroTrash Facebook page to organize events and to connect local store owners with residents. Facebook was instrumental in launching the ZeroTrash First Saturday movement, where store owners and volunteers walk the city and pick up trash on the first Saturday of each month. The store owners love it because people support local stores and keep the shopping areas clean. In turn, McDermott has tapped store owners as sponsors who fund the purchase of supplies and tools like trash pickers, trash bags, T-shirts, and gloves.

Facebook serves to keep people updated about what ZeroTrash is up to. For example, on a recent First Saturday, the Laguna Beach community helped to remove another 590 pounds of trash and 375 pounds of recyclables from the streets; McDermott used the social media sites to report these totals to interested people.

After the initial success in Laguna Beach, ZeroTrash now also serves Newport Beach and Dana Point in Southern California and Chico in Northern California, and is launching in Seattle, Washington, soon. “We want people to take individual ownership of each new local ZeroTrash community,” he says. “How can they get people with a passion to take control and start in their own communities? The obvious answer is to use social media to influence people.”

There’s no doubt that getting the word out about an idea, a product, or a service is much simpler when you can rely on social media sites like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. The web allows any organization (including nonprofits like ZeroTrash, as well as companies large and small, government agencies, and schools) and any individual (including candidates for public office, artists, and even job seekers) to reach buyers directly. This power is clear to nearly everyone these days, but many executives and entrepreneurs still struggle to find the right mix of traditional advertising and direct communication with buyers.

Century 21 Real Estate LLC 3is the franchisor of the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization, an industry giant with approximately 8,000 offices in 45 countries. The company had been spending on television advertising for years but, in a significant strategy change, pulled its national television advertising and invested those resources into online marketing.

Wow! I’ve seen Century 21 TV ads for years. We’re talking millions of dollars shifting from TV to the web. This is a big deal.

“We are moving our advertising investments to the mediums that have the greatest relevance to our target buyers and sellers, and to where the return on our investment is most significant,” says Bev Thorne, chief marketing officer at Century 21. “We found that our online investments provided a return that was substantively higher than our more traditional TV media investments.”

Thorne and her team learned that people who are in the market to buy or sell a home rely heavily on the web and that the closer they get to a real estate transaction, the more they use online resources. “We are embracing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ActiveRain, and others,” Thorne says. “YouTube is a central component of our activities, and we seek to utilize it even more.”

Many companies spending large amounts of money on television advertising (and other offline marketing such as direct mail, magazine and newspaper advertising, and Yellow Pages listings) are afraid to make even partial moves away from their comfort zones and into online marketing and social media. But the evidence describing how people actually research products overwhelmingly suggests that companies must tell their stories and spread their ideas online, at the precise moment that potential buyers are searching for answers.