Web Ink Now

THIRD EDITION of The New Rules of Marketing and PR released today

I'm psyched to announce the latest edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR!

I've been blogging since well before I started writing the very first edition way back in 2006, so in a way, we’ve shared this journey together on this blog.

At the time I was writing the first edition Twitter did not even exist and Facebook was only for students! Seems like the dark ages.

Thank you for your support. Thank you for providing me with ideas and examples. And thank you for steering me back on track when I sometimes go down a rathole.

The newly revised and updated third edition has started shipping in paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers today and is available now in Kindle, Nook, and Apple iBook formats.

The third edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR will be "officially" published in early September (meaning that physical bookstores in North America have it in stock). It will appear later in September in bookstores around the world.

Some are now calling The New Rules of Marketing & PR a modern business classic. I'm not sure about that, but I can say that previous editions spent six months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list and there are more than a quarter million copies in print in over 25 languages from Arabic to Vietnamese. In addition, many hundreds of universities now use the book as required text in marketing, communications, PR, and business programs.

Many things have changed since the first edition was published way back in 2007. The biggest difference is that these ideas are now mainstream. People no longer question the importance of marketing online. The credit for that goes to you—for implementing the ideas, pushing your organizations to implement, and sharing your success. Wow – we have come a long way together!

What's new in the third edition?

New examples and stories
In the past few years I’ve met thousands of people around the world who have shared their stories with me, so I have drawn from those experiences and included many new examples of success, and I’m convinced they are even more valuable.

How-to information on measuring success
The most common questions I’ve been asked since the release of the second edition are ‘How do I measure success?’ and ‘How do I get started?’ To respond, I included new sections dedicated to marketing and PR strategic planning and implementation and tools for measuring these efforts.

A new chapter on mobile marketing
The explosion of mobile marketing is being driven by GPS-enabled mobile applications for iPhone, Android, and other devices. Since the second edition was published, the importance of location-based marketing has gown significantly so I needed a new chapter. When the second edition came out a little less than two years ago, Foursquare and other GPS-enabled mobile sharing apps were just coming on line and I did not talk about them. Now they are mainstream so I am including a lot in the mobile chapter about how to market with these tools.

New chapter on real-time marketing & PR
The idea of communicating instantly is essential, so a chapter on real-time was added. Readers of this blog know that I've been talking about the importance of real-time for several years now. I made it a point to make the case examples for this new chapter all new - none were re-purposed from my 2010 book Real-Time Marketing & PR.

What did not change
One thing that doesn’t change in any of the editions is the concept that the Web is an essential way to market. The idea that you no longer have to rely exclusively on buying advertising and begging mainstream media to cover you is liberating! Creating great content (a YouTube video, blog post, ebook, photo, infographic, and the like) truly brands an organization as one that’s worthy of doing business with.

Thanks again for all of your help and support. It has been such a fun journey. And we have much farther to go together in the coming years.

Promoting the Playboy pin-up who flew to the moon

UPDATE January 21, 2010. The Playboy pin-up that flew to the moon sold for $17,511 hammer price at auction late last night. Amazing result driven by the new rules of marketing & PR.

+++++++++++++++

Promoting a valuable one-of-a-kind object for sale to achieve the best possible sales price requires a seller be clever and utilize both traditional public relations as well as new media.

This is a story of a 1969 Playboy stowaway on Apollo 12 and how she has been marketed to the world. As of this writing, a mere Playboy calendar is going to sell at auction for more than $13,000. It could achieve possibly much more when the auction closes on January 20.

Marketing & PR for a unique item

When Richard Jurek, a marketing and communications professional who is also a space enthusiast and collector decided to part with a few unique and treasured items from his collection, he put his twenty years of marketing communications experience to work.

Jurek is a friend and fellow space collector. Like me, Jurek displays his collection on the Web. My site - Apollo Artifacts - showcases the various items related to the Apollo moon program I have collected over the years.

Jurek, however, has recently chosen to focus his collection and site on one type of artifact: Two-dollar bills that have flown in space. His site, the Jefferson-in-Space Collection, highlights the world's most complete collection of space-flown U.S. $2 bills in existence.

When Jurek made the difficult decision to sell several key Apollo items from his collection in order to focus his collecting efforts on flown currency, he knew that one item, the unofficial fourth crew ‘mate’ of Apollo 12, needed special attention.

DeDe Lind goes to the moon

In a prank of lunar proportions, the vintage color calendar photo of Playboy Playmate Miss August 1967, DeDe Lind, was stowed away in the Apollo 12 command module Yankee Clipper during its November 1969 voyage to the moon.

The photo was affixed to a cardboard cue card and, unbeknownst to the crew, secreted onboard their spacecraft. The iconic piece of 1960s pop culture travelled the approximately 475,000 mile round-trip journey to the moon and back and still retains the Velcro strips used to affix it to inside the spacecraft for easy viewing.

(Since this blog is read by people of many nationalities and beliefs, I'm using a pixelated version of the calendar image. Apologies to readers who find this excessively prudish.)

Jurek acquired the item directly from Apollo 12 astronaut Richard Gordon. "This is an absolutely singular item, unique in the space collecting world," Jurek says. "But it also has tremendous cross-over appeal. I figured that DeDe would appeal not only to space collectors, but collectors of '70s pop culture because Playboy was at its peak in 1970s America. There are also collectors of erotica and collectors of Playboy items. So it appeals to a lot of audiences."

Jurek knew that he wanted to sell DeDe through a recognized auction house and he had narrowed the choice down to a handful. "I selected RRAuction for the sale because the auction house has a phenomenal Internet and social media platform and they leverage it in their marketing," he says.

Modern marketing in an antique business

The auction business is an incredibly old profession, having been around, well, almost as long as the "oldest profession." The idea that you can apply new forms of marketing to an ancient business is fascinating to me and I wanted to learn more.

"I come from a traditional PR background and I’ve been doing auctions since 2008," says Bobby Livingston, vice president of sales and marketing at RRAuction. "One of the first things I got rid of when I joined RRAuction was Google AdWords. It was a waste because it wasn't driving traffic and I wasn’t getting registrations from it."

Livingston worked with Jurek to write the catalog description for the item and they worked together on promotion.

"The Apollo 12 calendar has a great story," Livingston says. "It has a bunch of things going for it: It is Apollo, is flown, and it's cheesecake so it's easy to understand and easily translates around the world. It brings back the 1969 timeframe. It's just a remarkable piece."

Livingston worked with Mike Graff of The Investor Relations Group in NYC to craft a press release and get it directly to bloggers who write about current events and technology. Graff also made follow-up phone calls. Very quickly, sites like Gawker, Nerdist, and io9 picked up on the story.

"When Gizmodo talked about the auction, suddenly we got 20,000 visitors," Livingston says. "We got 40 new auction registrations. On the best day, we do seven to ten registrations. Then we got 30 the next day. Well, this is all coming from viral and new media."

Soon, the international media picked up on DeDe by finding her on the blogs. Stories appeared in Australia, Brazil, France, China, Japan, and dozens of other countries. Large outlets like the BBC, The Discovery Channel, The Sun, Daily Mail, UPI, Toronto Star, and TIME wrote about the Apollo Playmate stowaway. Even the Playboy Satellite Radio Channel and Website got in on the fun.

As Livingston was working the media, Jurek was helping things along by contacting appropriate bloggers via social networking. "Every time I would see an article, I push it out using appropriate hashtags and try for cross-over appeal," Jurek says. The strategy was to target related audiences who might be interested in DeDe via hashtags, so Jurek taged his tweets with things like #playboy #photography #space #NASA #auction #apollo #moon #porn and more. "I wanted to reach not only space collectors, but also Playboy folks, or hell, even pornography people!"

Jurek says many Tweets came from women who run their own webcam businesses and have thousands of followers. "Others are Tweeting about space porn and moon porn and so on," he says. "It's hilarious, but I viewed DeDe as perfect for social media and the internet, because porn is a huge business on the internet, and so are collectibles, and so is history. It was right in the center of all of that and people are picking up on it."

The story even made Saturday Night Live Weekend Update with Seth Myers.

I gotta say, I've worked in and around PR for twenty years and this is the first time I've known anyone who's made Weekend Update!

Achieving the goals

All of these efforts have driven large volumes of traffic to the RRAuction site. Visitors are up 290% according to data from Alexa. And as of this writing, the auction, which runs until January 20, values the DeDe Lind item at over $13,000. You still have time to bid!

Learning from a Playboy Pin-up

Jurek says he's learned some valuable lessons from this marketing effort. "Content drives marketing," he says. "DeDe, from a content perspective, is perfect. She has appeal not just as a moon-flown artifact for space geeks like me, but something that would appeal to collectors of Americana, collectors of erotica, collectors of unique niche pop culture items. Once you have the content, it is connecting it with the right audience, making sure the pitch is real and right on.”

Who knows how far the price will soar?

Shaq Googled Big House Outside of Boston

Last night the big man from the Boston Celtics, Shaquille O'Neal, was on David Letterman's talk show.

I live in Boston and it is amazing how quickly fans have embraced Shaq. I had a chance to watch him in action a few weeks ago from courtside. Amazing.

Anyway, Shaq told Letterman that he found his house on Google with the phrase: "Big house outside of Boston."

Some smart real-estate person scored big time with that one!

You'll hear the Google reference at about 2:25 in the video: "I live in a small town called Sudbury. I signed kind of late, so I really didn't have a chance to find a house, so I went on Google and put 'big house outside of Boston,' and I found this big 10-acre farmhouse..."

Direct link to video on YouTube.

Do you own the search results for your marketplace?

If not, can you create some great content to drive the natural search results so that when "the big one" searches for what you have to offer, you'll be the winner?

Photo by David Meerman Scott shot December 1, 2010 at the Boston Garden

Nobody cares about your products

For years, I've been saying that to create great Web content, you need to always be thinking: Nobody cares about my products and services except me and the others in my organization.

What your buyers do care about are themselves and they care a great deal about solving their problems (and are always on the lookout for a company that can help them do so).

The good news for smart marketers is that this knowledge has the potential to make you many times more successful with your marketing. It may quite literally transform your business (that’s not just my opinion; many people write me to tell me so).

Here's an interesting example of a humorous video from Cisco created with this idea.

Direct link here.

Cisco created this video with no references to products. Instead it offers a twisted look at the problem with older TVs. The link at the end of the video points to a webcast with Cisco chairman John Chambers, during CES on Jan 5.

Image: Shutterstock / Franck Boston

Disclosure: I have done work with Cisco in the past, however I was not involved in this video project.

Your global marketplace

This week, I'll be meeting with Shigesato Itoi, an influential Japanese futurist. Itoi-san is a popular blogger, video game creator (Nintendo Earthbound series), copywriter (he thought up the name Game Boy), & television personality.

Itoi-san is coming to Boston to spend time with my co-author Brian Halligan (CEO of HubSpot) and me to discuss our book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. Itoi-san and his company will be leading the creation of the Japanese version of the book, scheduled for release in mid-2011.

Over the USA Thanksgiving holidays, I got to thinking about the importance of the global market for businesses. While we Americans took time off to be with family and friends, the rest of the world was hard at work.

While many lament that the real-time Web now means no true downtime, I feel the opposite. I'm excited that the Web allows any business to go global (even a one-person businesses like mine). In my case, my books are published in 26 languages from Bulgarian to Vietnamese and I deliver talks all over the world.

Many readers of my new book Real-Time Marketing & PR have said how much they liked its global aspect -- examples of real-time innovation (and some missteps) come from Amsterdam, Tokyo, Toronto, Mumbai and more. I'm glad to see that recognized because some of the most fascinating innovations I encounter are bred by obstacles specific to local environments very different from the U.S.

One of the most important lessons of the global market is that you need to localize on the Web platforms of choice for that country and marketplace.

In the Netherlands, social networking site Hyves is essential to reaching the Dutch market. It is the second most visited site in the Netherlands after Google, but in terms of time spent, it is certainly tops. And Hyves has more users in the Netherlands than the other major social networking sites Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter combined.

In Japan, it is much easier to reach consumers today than when I lived there from 1987-1993. (I established the Wrightson ICAP business and then was Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder).

Back in the pre-Web days, Japan's media was a monolithic gatekeeper that kept all eyes focused on the agendas of giant corporations like Toyota and Panasonic. And huge physical advantage went to bricks and mortar establishments (like bars) visible from train station exits that were -- you guessed it! -- owned by giant corporations.

The whole system was rigged to keep outsiders from breaking in -- foreign companies AND domestic upstarts. It was like weed killer, designed to keep entrepreneurs from springing up in the cracks.

The real-time online world is blowing that regime apart as innovators such as Kenko.com figure out how to engage Japan's 75 million net-enabled mobile users. Japan’s consumers can now stand in front of a train station with their mobile and instantly find hundreds of bars within a 5-minute walk...

Like Hyves in the Netherlands, you need to engage the Japan market through the services that make sense.

News2u.com is the local press release wire (think PR Web or PR Newswire) that’s optimized for social media in Japan. Founded by Minako Kambara, an amazing woman entrepreneur (Japan didn't have such a thing when I lived there), News2u is 10 years into a mission to crack the Japanese market open to upstarts, home-grown or gaijin.

Until last week there was little in English about News2u, so this is breaking news from me. If cracking Japan's still huge and dynamic market is on your radar, due diligence requires a thorough look at what News2U offers.

Image: Shutterstock / Gl0ck

Rock stars get out the vote by making personal phone calls to fans

An interesting aspect of real time marketing & PR is how organizations work towards an event happening at a fixed, known time. Here in America, for example, we’re in the thick of the midterm elections happening on Tuesday November 2.

I like the approach of HeadCount, a nonpartisan organization that works with musicians to promote participation in democracy. A particular focus of HeadCount is getting young people interested in the process, registered to vote, and to the polls on election day.

Learning from what works in other industries

I'm convinced that all organizations can learn from others' success in the real-time world – it doesn't matter if you work at a B2B company or an ecommerce site or in the music business.

Several months ago, HeadCount led a voter registration effort where musicians placed a link on their Facebook pages linking their fans to a HeadCount voter registration page with state-by-state information. People who pledged to register could download free music. These sorts of efforts have led to nearly 175,000 people registering to vote since HeadCount was founded.

Now, as the election is just one week away, HeadCount is working with artists to get people to the polls next Tuesday. Fans may sign up to get a reminder phone call from their choice of participating artists

While most calls will be automated, what makes it particularly interesting is that many musicians will be making personal phone calls to randomly selected fans.

Choices include Bob Weir, Wille Nelson, Wayne Coyne, Grace Potter, Warren Haynes, Jon Fishman, Marc Brownstein, Matt Berninger of The National, Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket, Brett Dennen and Adam Gardner of Guster.

Since I'm a member of the digital media advisory board of HeadCount, I was able to participate on a conference call yesterday with some of the artists. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead (and now touring with Furthur) says he wants people to think about the implications of voting and why voting is important. He says he is planning to make a lot of personal calls because he wants to hear from people to get a sense of where to take the get out a vote effort in the future.

"People have busy lives," Bobby told us. "Younger people, by the nature of their lives are a little more scattered. They have a lot of irons in the fire. Voting and participating in the process is one more nagging interest in your life. We're trying to subtly bring them to the awareness that you've got to do it. It’s going to make a difference for you and your future and your children’s future. We need to remind people at every election. You've got to make yourself heard if you want things to go your way."

As you think about your business, what event is coming up that you can play off of in real time?

Free Marketing Strategy Planning Template

Download my Marketing Strategy Planning Template
(No registration required).

As I speak with people from around the world -- those who have read my book The New Rules of Marketing and PR (published in 26 languages from Bulgarian to Vietnamese) or who have seem my dozens of talks a year -- many tell me that they struggle with how to get started.

Most of the implementation challenges people describe involve the shift from marketing products and services to the much more effective approach of focusing on a buyer personas and creating information that helps solve problems for buyers.

A secondary challenge is to get marketers away from a reliance on offline marketing techniques and started with online initiatives.

I have distilled my solution to these challenges -- drawing from The New Rules of Marketing and PR -- to create a simple, two-page Marketing Strategy Planning Template.

Download the free Marketing Strategy Planning Template now (no registration is required).

Feel free to blog it, tweet it, post it on your site or print copies. I’ve put a Creative Commons license on it encouraging you to share.

I created this as a way to get marketers goals oriented to reaching buyers directly. I want everyone to shift out of the comfort zone of preaching about products and services and advertising features and benefits.

For example, if someone says: "I want to start a blog" I would point them first to the template and have them start planning there.

Who are you trying to reach with the blog?

Is a blog the best tool?

What problems can you help solve?

What value do you bring?

What search terms are people entering to find you (will help you name the blog and title posts)

What sort of person are you and what is the company personality (for design).

What do you want people to do? (Buy, donate, subscribe, etc.)

I want to thank my friends Toby Jenkins and Adam Franklin for creating this with me. Toby and Adam run Bluewire Media, a Brisbane web strategy firm. They had been working on a similar strategy template and shared their draft with me. Our ideas were so similar that we collaborated to create this. Thanks guys. Now, when are you going to have me come to Australia so we can surf together?

I am interested in your feedback on the template.

Am I missing anything?
Is this useful?

Many marketing and communications professors are criminals

One student literally cried on my shoulder. Sobs and snot. (Really). I had never met her before. She came up to me after a speaking gig to tell me her story.

Another student asked: "Why do my professors not know about social media?"

Another emailed: "Two years going through an MBA program and Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were never mentioned!"

Another: "Did I waste my money on a 1950s education here?"

Another: "Only one professor in 4 years understands today’s world."

Many university professors are criminals

Wikipedia says malpractice is: "a type of negligence in which the professional under a duty to act, fails to follow generally accepted professional standards, and that breach of duty is the proximate cause of injury to a plaintiff who suffers harm."

By not teaching modern methods to marketing, communications, and journalism students, professors are guilty of malpractice.

By not showing MBA students how to reach buyers on the Web, professors are guilty of malpractice.

I hope these professors have liability insurance, because my guess is that lawsuits are coming.

Here's what Jake LaCaze writes in a post called Mistakes I Made in College

"There was a time when I read nothing but fiction, fiction, fiction. Now, I read mostly business and marketing-related books. But in college, I didn’t go that extra mile to further my education on my own. I listened to the lectures and read the required texts all for the sake of passing the test. However, after reading books by authors like Seth Godin and David Meerman Scott, I’ve since discovered that most of what I learned in my business courses was obsolete. These two guys have taught me so much more than my lectures and classroom texts ever did. Please, go that extra mile. Pick up a book related to your subject. Professors teach the same subjects year after year. They teach the same material because it's familiar and rehearsed. But this is your future we're talking about. No matter what your major is, read books related to your major. You’ll be glad you did."

Here is the good news.

Hundreds of university professors are on top of modern marketing and are teaching students what they need to know to be successful in today’s world.

While I still get those gut wrenching messages from students, I also get many tweets, Facebook messages, and emails from others who are thrilled that their professors are showing them the world of Web marketing.

They reach out to me because over a hundred universities are now using my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR as a text in class.

Now, I'm not suggesting my book is the only way to teach this stuff. But because many students read my book, I'm hearing a lot about what's going down on campus.

Robert French, Stephen Quigley and Karen Miller Russell were three of the first professors embracing New Rules when it first came out in 2007.

"I've relied on The New Rules of Marketing & PR as a core text for my New Media and Public Relations course at Boston University for the last six semesters. David's book is a bold, crystal clear and practical guide toward a new (and better) future for the profession."
- Stephen Quigley, Boston University

"David Meerman Scott not only offers good descriptions of digital tools available to public relations professionals, but also explains strategy, especially the importance of thinking about PR from public’s perspectives, and provides lots of helpful examples. My students loved this book."
- Karen Miller Russell, Associate Professor, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia.

Here's a post from Robert, a professor at Auburn University, from 2007 called Felling a Buzz.

Or read what Pete Codella, who created a course for the University of California, Irvine Extension says.

Time to pick books for next term

The higher education department at my publisher Wiley has made it easy for professors to check out the new second edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

Since it's time to choose books for summer and fall courses, Wiley is offering free examination copies to professors.

Here’s what Wiley says about the second edition:

The first edition of this title presented readers with a unique playbook to navigate marketing in the Internet Age. Now, in this fully revised and updated edition, author and renowned online marketing strategist David Meerman Scott gives your students all the hottest insider tips so that they can confidently market any product, service, or idea. The book features new case studies and includes the latest marketing and PR techniques using social media sites. The New Rules of Marketing & PR shows readers how to leverage the potential that Web-based communication offers the business world.

If you are a professor, please check out my book. While I’d love it if you did use the book, you will certainly need to start teaching the new rules to your students. Either that, or check your liability insurance to make sure you’re covered.

If you are a student, please pass this blog post on to your professors or department head.

Image Shutterstock / Evlakhov Valeriy

New Rules, new ideas, and a few secrets: Second Edition of my bestseller

The SECOND EDITION of The New Rules of Marketing and PR is in bookstores now!

The book has gone through a complete re-write. See below for what's new.

• If you haven't read the book at all, now is the time!
• If you read the first edition thank you!! (If you're considering re-reading the book, you'll want to get the new edition).
• If you're a fan of the ideas in The New Rules of Marketing & PR, I hope you will help me spread the word by tweeting, blogging, doing a video, or talking it up somehow. I really appreciate it.

Here is my first secret

I didn’t spend a single penny advertising or promoting the first edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

You did it.

Well over 1,000 of you have blogged about the book since the first edition published in 2007. You told your friends, you tweeted, you talked the book up in some way. The power of the ideas I talk about in The New Rules of Marketing & PR are what propelled the book to the BusinessWeek bestseller list and kept it there for six months.

A stat I am particularly proud of is The New Rules of Marketing & PR has been the number one Public Relations book on Amazon for approximately 910 days. Over nine hundred days. I’m stunned. And you did that by talking up the book.

Thank you for making The New Rules of Marketing & PR such a success that it needed a second edition.

Here's what's new in the second edition.

The second edition of the book has gone through an extensive rewrite. Of course, I have checked every fact, figure, and URL.

But I've also listened. In the past two years, I've met thousands of people like you who have shared stories with me, so I have drawn from those experiences and included many new examples of success.

While including so many new stories and examples has resulted in my removing many of the less interesting originals, I'm convinced that these exciting replacements are even more valuable. And for those of you who have read the first edition, you'll still find many fresh ideas in the second edition.

I've made some major additions as well. When I was writing the first edition of the book back in 2006, Facebook was only available to those with a .edu email address (students and educators), so I didn’t feature Facebook. And Twitter didn’t even exist at the time I was researching the first edition. So I have added extensive new information and examples on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.

In fact, the rise of the term social media has been so strong in the past few years that I’ve even changed the subtitle of the book to include it.

Here is my second secret.

A global phenomenon

As I was writing the first edition back in 2006, 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 of North America. But I couldn't help but wonder: 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?

The answer is a resounding yes! About 25 percent of the book’s sales have come from outside the United States. As I write this, the book has been or is being translated into 24 languages.

I’m also receiving invitations from all over the world to speak about the new rules. In the past year, I’ve traveled to nearly a dozen countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UK, Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Croatia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, 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.

Thank you again for your help and support.

Please consider talking up the SECOND EDITION The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

I sure do appreciate all that you've done for me.

You've changed my life. And I'd like to think that people who have implemented the ideas in The New Rules of Marketing & PR have changed their lives too! (How cool is that?)

Amazon as social networking

With all the buzz in 2009 about the big social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, I'd like to give a plug to one of my favorite social networking sites.

I know, I know. Most people don't consider Amazon to be social networking. It's shopping, right?

Don't overlook the incredible communities that thrive on sites like Amazon, where customer reviews, profiles of those customer reviewers, author profiles and user conversations take place every day.

My book The New Rules of Marketing & PR has 181 reviews as I write this. The book has sold tens of thousands of copies through Amazon since it came out, so imagine how many people have seen the page?

The first review that people see on the page was written by Brad Shorr on May 30, 2007 - the first day that the original hardcover edition of the book was offered for sale.

How about that for social networking? Brad's review along with his name and affiliation is seen be perhaps 100,000 people. All he had to do was read the book and post a short, thoughtful review in real-time when the book was released.

Amazon customers can also link over to Brad's profile and see the other 250 reviews Brad has done too. Or they can see the review by Jill Konrath in the number two position as ranked by reader feedback. Not bad for Brad's and Jill's personal brands, don't you think?

Think about your marketplace. Why not be the first to review a new book on Amazon? If you're a real estate agent and you write a thoughtful review on a new book about real estate investing, it may be seen by tens of thousands of people.

Don't forget that the author and members of the media will likely see your review too. People who then visit your Amazon profile learn about you and your business and some may contact you. Maybe someone looking to buy a home will see your location and contact you. That's what social networking is all about, right?

Other review-based sites to check out include Rotten Tomatoes (movie reviews), Zagats (restaurant reviews), and Yelp (reviews of local businesses). There are many more such sites. Don’t forget to create a useful profile for yourself with contact information.

But it's not just reviewers. Authors also have a page on Amazon. If you're an author, you need to customize your Amazon page like I did – you can even link your blog's RSS feed to your Amazon author profile.

Thank you for reading this far.

As a bonus for careful readers, I'd like to quietly announce that the second edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, completely revised and updated for the new decade, will release in the first week of January 2010. (Note that the nearly 200 Amazon reviews of the first edition will carry over to the second edition upon release.)

You'll find the second edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR available for pre-sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million, 800 CEO Read, and other booksellers now.

I'll blog more about the second edition in January. But I wanted you to know first. Thanks for your support.