Web Ink Now

The Truth in Ad Sales

Alert readers of this blog will recall that I really enjoy smart YouTube video spoofs on all things marketing. For example, a few weeks ago I shared the Make My Logo Bigger video.

Today, for your viewing pleasure, is The Truth in Ad Sales.

We're taken inside an Agency in London where we meet the owner of the agency, a bunch of agency staffers, a producer, and the client from "Kiddi Care."

This agency thinks outside box. When the other guys zig, they zag. They think 360. They think integrated communications. They think social networking. Massive ROI.

Hat tip to Tim Dempsey for sharing this with me.

The New Rules of Viral Marketing - free ebook!

The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free

> Imagine you're the head of marketing at a theme park, and you're charged with announcing a major new attraction. What would you do?

> What would you do if you were a vice president of marketing for a technology company and you were ready to find a new opportunity to advance your career?

> If you were a marketing executive for a big, famous company, how could you quickly put a human face on your organization?

> Or think of a marketing program that you might initiate if you suddenly had to launch a startup technology and services company targeting marketing professionals, Web designers, and business owners interested in improving their Internet marketing. How would you do it?

The answers will surprise you. The smart marketers profiled in The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free tell you exactly how they used viral marketing and provide advice in their own words.

Download The New Rules of Viral Marketing now! It's free and there's no annoying registration requirement.

You and I are incredibly lucky.

For decades, the only way to spread our ideas was to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write (or broadcast) about our products and services. But now our organizations have a tremendous opportunity to publish great content online—content that people want to consume and that they are eager to share with their friends, family, and colleagues.

How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free!

Word-of-mouse is the single most empowering tool available to marketers today. I wrote this e-book so you can take advantage of the power of viral marketing too. In it, I share ideas that will help you create your own viral marketing strategies and campaigns. These are the "new rules" I've used to create marketing programs that have sold more than a billion dollars' worth of products and services worldwide.

It's not easy to harness the power of word-of-mouse, but any company with thoughtful ideas to share—and clever ways to create interest in them—can, after some careful preparation, become famous and find success on the Web.

Please download my new ebook. And if you find it interesting, please share it with whomever you believe would benefit from reading it. Thank you.

Will your company be successful in the year 2208?

I spent an enjoyable day this week with my editor and his colleagues on the marketing, editorial, and PR teams at my publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. to discuss new initiatives for my current book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR and ideas for future book projects. For example, there will be an Amazon Kindle version of New Rules shortly. And yes, I've got two more books in the works—one to come out in 2008 and one in 2009. It is just a little early to announce anything now, but you'll be the first to know.

Amazingly, Wiley has been publishing books for 200 years. Can you imagine—Wiley was founded in New York City when Thomas Jefferson was president! And Wiley has been a significant player in the publishing industry for two centuries.

How can a company be around for that long? Simple, the only way is to be tuned in and develop products and services that people want to buy and markets them in the ways that people find information or solve problems.

Here are a three examples of the new rules at work at Wiley:

1. When I wrote New Rules, the professionals at Wiley embraced my new publishing model of blogging the book as I wrote it. They encouraged me to give away a large percentage of the book for free on my blog. Other publishers would freak out if an author wanted to put bits of the book out for comment and solicit ideas online. Wiley encouraged it.

2. Wiley has a group of passionate employee bloggers. One of them is my friend Joe Wikert (who introduced me to Wiley). He writes the terrific Joe Wikert's 2020 Publishing blog: A Book Publisher's Future Visions of Print, Online, Video and All Media Formats Not Yet Invented.

3. Wiley Europe has a cool online media room where they educate and inform reviewers, the media, and consumers.

To mark the company's bicentennial, Wiley has just published a terrific coffee table book to mark the occasion Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry.

Think about your business. Will your company be around in the year 2208?

Thank you fellow business book authors

11,000 business books are published each year. The published ideas in these books educate, inform, and influence how people go to work every day. As an author, I like to think that our efforts help to make people more successful. It is an honor that tens of thousands of people have invested time and money to read what I am passionate about.

800-CEO-READ (8CR) is the premier business bookseller and is used by corporations to buy copies of the best business books available. They created the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards to recognize the best business books of 2007.

How cool is it that my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR was selected as "authors choice" from nearly 300 books submitted. I’m stunned that my fellow business book authors chose my book as a best title of the year. If you voted for me, thank you!

Please check out all the terrific books that were selected. These authors work really hard to write great books.

Holy Crap-A-Rooni -- I've been busted by Nick Selby!

I hate when I have to fill out those damn registration forms for the 50 or so conferences and events I speak at each year. I know that whatever I put into the form will appear on the damn badge that I'll need to wear.

Name? ___________ Check – got one of those. Hmm... No space for middle name, so I guess I'll put both my middle name and last name into the last name box.
Company? __________ Well, let's see. I don't have one, really. Maybe I'll use the title of my latest book instead.
Title? __________ Oh boy. Do I put speaker? Author? I'm not a consultant, so that won't work. For a few weeks I used "evangelist" but then someone asked me what church I preached at. These days I put "Viral Marketing Strategist." It sorta describes what I do. But more importantly, it is a conversation starter while waiting for a (free) drink at the 5:00 happy hour in the exhibit hall of the event that I just keynoted.

Unlike me, Nick Selby has no trouble naming things. The man is a genius. His blog is called, get this, Nick Selby’s Blog. Isn't that a great name?

Anyway, Nick must have really dug deep into my virtual stuff, because he says: "David Meerman Scott is a weird combination of flack, author and self-proclaimed ‘anti-gobbledygook’ vigilante."

Yup. Busted. Except, Nick, you forgot a bunch of other things like speaker, blogger, board member, collector of Apollo moon mission artifacts, and really bad surfer. I could go on.

Nick also found a title I was using a while back "Thought Leadership Strategist" (I know, it's a bit lame. Like saying you’re a "Web 2.0 guru"). Nick asks: "I mean, I agree with, like, so much of what he says, but what the &%$# is an online thought leadership strategist?"

(Disclosure: Nick used a really, really bad word for which I substituted &%$#.)

Nick continued: "Okay, okay, maybe I get it. But I'm calling my mom now to see if she understands it."

Nick: Hi, Mom.
Nick’s Mom: Hi, darling.
Nick: What’s an online thought leadership strategist?
Nick’s Mom: No idea.

Yes, I'm still struggling with what to call myself and I thank Nick for pointing out the difficulties in assigning a title to what I do. For now, I'll stick with "Viral Marketing Strategist." Anyone got any better ideas?

I thought about copying Nick's title and just being "head." See what I mean? Nick is an absolute wizard at naming things. I mean the man's title is "head" – is that awesome or what?

Nicks bio: "As head of The 451 Group's security practice area, I engage regularly with vendors and the enterprise IT investment community, speak with vendors, and analyze business and technology in IT security. I use this blog to record several types of information I gather in this process, but most of all as a vehicle to freeze in time some of the best marketing blather and gobbeldygook corpo-speak handed to me in lieu of English."

But then I called my mom to ask her what she thought of this title choice:

Me: Hi, Mom.
Mom: Hi, honey.
Me: What’s [insert Nick’s title here].
Mom: [silence]
Me: Mom, hello? Mom, are you there?

Nick Selby, keep up the good work. We've got to continue to ferret out gobbledygook wherever we find it. I salute you too, sir!

The most significant marketing news in the 2008 Presidential race! (and you probably missed it)

Yesterday John Kerry endorsed Barack Obama.

This is not a political blog. So I won't comment on that aspect of the news.

What is absolutely amazing to me is that the vast majority of mainstream media have misunderstood the HUGE significance of this news from the marketing perspective.

Let me explain: In 2003 Howard Dean pioneered the use of the Web in Presidential politics. With staffers like Mathew Gross, who was Dean's Internet Communications Manager and Blogmaster, Dean built a huge list of names—people who could be counted on to donate millions and millions of dollars. When Dean dropped out of the race, his online marketing machine (in particular his huge email list) was passed on to John Kerry. Kerry built it even further through the general election campaign and for the past three years.

Yesterday, Kerry didn't just endorse Obama.

Kerry passed on an marketing asset potentially worth a hundred million dollars in donations (or more). Kerry gave Obama millions of email addresses of Dean and Kerry supporters. Wow.

Yet all the stories you see in mainstream media that have anything to do with marketing are about this incredible obsession with "TV ad buys." Television pundits act as if TV ad buys are all that exist in marketing. We see all the TV ads as editorial content. "Check out this ad, Anderson." We hear about a third tier candidate running an ad in the upper peninsula of Michigan (as if that's really important).

At the same time, the media has missed the fact that Obama just received an email list of MILLIONS OF NAMES of people ready to kick in money, time, and blog power.

These are the people who supported Dean, then Kerry. These are the people who donated hundreds of millions of dollars. These are the people who donated hundreds of man-years of time.

This is a significant marketing milestone.

Join me for a free live conversation with Seth Godin and Michael Port to discover the one thing that will make or break your marketing

Alert readers of this blog will recall that last month I reviewed Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin's terrific new book.

Good news—I'll be speaking with Seth as part of his virtual book tour and I would like you to participate. All it will cost you is an hour of your time.

On Monday, January 14th, at noon ET, join New York Times bestselling author, Seth Godin, Michael Port (author of Book Yourself Solid) and David Meerman Scott (that would be me) for a panel discussion.

Seth promises that you'll discover the one thing that will make or break your marketing efforts this year. (I can't wait to find out myself…)

Here are some other things we hope to discuss. (But then again we may just take the conversation down some equally interesting other paths.)
> The most important question to ask when choosing a marketing strategy
> How to increase sales and build brand awareness with less effort
> Why My Space, You Tube and viral marketing work for some, but not for others
> How to effectively generate buzz and word-of-mouth referrals

Can't make the live call? Go ahead and register anyway and we'll send you an email with a link to the recording so you can listen to it on your iPod.

It's free to register.

I hope you can make it.

What are the search terms your buyers use to find products and services like yours? Where does your company rank on Google for those terms?

Three months ago, Mike Volpe at HubSpot blogged about his experience speaking with a friend at EMC, a huge company (roughly ten billion US $ revenue). Mike and the EMC person discussed the most important search terms for EMC and came up with two critical ones "data storage" and "information infrastructure."

They then Googled those terms. Remarkably, EMC was nowhere near the top of the search heap for the phrases. Mike came to the obvious conclusion: "EMC is a Laggard Playing by the Old Rules of Marketing."

I thought that was an amazing thing. Here is a company that spends well over one billion US dollars on sales and marketing and they are nowhere near the front page on Google for two of the most important phrases in their industry.

As Mike at HubSpot said: "This is like opening the Yellow Pages in 1990 and looking under 'car rental' and not seeing an ad for Hertz!"

Last week I Googled those phrases again, wondering if they EMC had implemented any Web marketing programs to boost their results in the past three months:

Google search for "data storage"
Google search for "information infrastructure"

At the time I checked, EMC was ranked number 115 in the Google search results for "data storage" and number 76 for "information infrastructure."

Not so great for a company whose tagline is "where information lives."

EMC is not doing a good job at helping buyers find them via search engines.

How about your company? You should be able to answer these questions:
Do you know the most important search terms that people are using to find products and services like the ones you sell?
Where do you appear in the results?
If you aren’t satisfied with your results, what great content can you create (a blog or an ebook or some news releases) to help boost your ranking?

Disclosure: I am a member of the HubSpot board of advisors.

Say No To Dirt

Imagine you're a marketing manager for a company that makes toilets. Your company just came up with a spiffy new self-cleaning model. What do you do?

Most marketing managers would talk about their "flexible, scalable solutions for toilet cleaning processes using cutting edge technology" or some such gobbledygook.

Not CWS.

Instead of yakking about their product, YouTube shows how it works. A million people have seen this video via word-of-mouse.

Instead of selling, can you find a way to tell your story?