Despite the massive take-up of new media technologies over the past six to seven years, the basic strategies of marketing in an ever-evolving hyper-connected world have not changed.
That’s one of the big take-outs I got from this interview (below) I recorded with David Meerman Scott – author of the best-selling book ‘The New Rules of Marketing & PR’.
What has changed, of course, are the tools that we use to publish our content on the web and engage with our audience.
Weird thing called Second Life
Twitter wasn’t up and running when David wrote the first edition of the New Rules book back in 2005-06, while Facebook was only for college students; interestingly, MySpace had four times the number of users as Facebook did back then, and “we had this weird thing called Second Life”.
Fast forward to the latest edition and it has coverage of Twitter and Facebook naturally, but also the likes of Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.
In this interview David chats about:
- how senior executives of companies, agencies and institutions were “actively dismissive of the ideas in the book” when it first came out;
- the importance for companies to create content that’s useful and valuable for their buyers, rather than be focusing all the time on their products and services;
- with the rise of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, brands are bypassing the perceived ‘old fashioned ideas’ of having a content-rich website, a great blog and online video;
- the power of real-time communications now that Google has the ability to instantaneously index content such as a blog post, within minutes of it being published;
- the scourge of ‘corporate speak’ (over-used jargon) and ‘visual gobbledygook’;
- the trend of brand journalism (companies engaging journalists to create content);
- how US defence contractor Raytheon employs a team of journalists to create content on behalf of the company, headed up by a former television producer from Canadian Broadcasting;
- how an in-house journalist at aircraft manufacturer Boeing created awesome multimedia content around an activity the company had been doing for years (performance testing of aeroplanes in a refrigerated hangar)
NOTE: Apologies to David, for the first six minutes or so he’s pixelated in this video but then it all comes good; the audio is clear throughout but very occasionally you might experience a split-second dropout; however, it’s a great chat so definitely worth persevering 🙂
David writes an excellent blog called Web Ink Now – I thoroughly recommend adding it to your list of PR/social media/marketing ‘must-reads’!
You can follow him on Twitter at @dmscott, or check out his website at www.davidmeermanscott.com.
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