I use my full name, David Meerman Scott, for search engine marketing purposes. I carve out my niche online with my full name. There are many David Scotts out there and it gets confusing online. There's a bunch of famous David Scotts including one who walked on the moon as commander of Apollo 15.
I also happen to be an Apollo mission memorabilia collector and huge fan of the Apollo program. I collect signed astronaut biographies and also spare parts and other artifacts from the spacecrafts. Weird huh?
What we did seems even more amazing 35 years after the landings. Imagine, with less computing power in the spacecraft than I have in my mobile phone, we sent 12 men to walk on the moon’s surface. What an audacious and eccentric concept that could only have been contemplated in the context of the cold war and "beating the Russians". During the peak of the program, over 400,000 people worked on Apollo and five percent of US budget was used to finance it.
This weekend, I attended an astronaut reunion event and space memorabilia show. The highlight was the Saturday night dinner with 22 astronauts (including five men who walked on the moon) plus flight controllers and others associated with the program. There were only a few hundred people at the dinner, so mere mortals like me could easily roam around and jump into conversations with the astros who all seemed to be enjoying things as they renewed friendships with their colleagues.
At my dinner table, Dave Scott told fun stories about such things as getting airborne in the Lunar Rover "all four tires" while going over small craters in one-sixth gravity, and working with Tom Hanks and crew on Apollo 13 (where he was the technical advisor). "I spent 9 months on the film and unlike what I've heard about Hollywood, they were real class acts, very professional, paid great attention to detail," he said.
So, what the heck does this have to do with The New Rules of Marketing and PR you ask?
Two things:
1. You need to carve out a niche online. In my case, since there are lots of other David Scotts, so I became David Meerman Scott.
2. Your buyers are looking for what you have to sell right now. I recently purchased a Gemini spacecraft SE-6 thruster motor made in the mid 1960s via a rocket parts dealer I located on the internet. You can’t get much more long tail than that.
Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11, first lunar landing mission talks with Alan Bean, Apollo 12, the 4th man to walk on the moon.
Some famous Russian's were there too -- Velentina Tereshkova, first woman in space and Alexi Leonov, first man to EVA (space walk).
Gene Kranz, Flight Director (played by Ed Harris in the movie Apollo 13) and Sy Liebergot, Apollo EECOM for Apollo 13
