But the coolest part of my life since the book was published isn't that I took advantage of the new rules of marketing and PR, nor that this book has been selling like hotcakes as a result. No, the coolest part of my life right now is that people contact me every day to say that the ideas in these pages have transformed their businesses and changed their lives. Really! That's the sort of language people use. They write just to thank me for putting the ideas into a book so that they could be enlightened to the new realities of marketing and PR.
Take Jody. He sent me an email to tell me the book had an unexpected effect on him and his wife. Jody explained that, to them, the really exciting and hopeful idea is that they can actually use their genuine voices online; they've left behind the hype-inflated, PR-speak their agencies had used so tediously.
Jim wrote to tell me “more powerful than saying I read your book twice, I used it to innovate a new writing model. I've been building my audience from scratch on LinkedIn ahead of publication of my first novel and I've now got over 70,000 subscribers and was named a Top Voice for 2016.”
Jorge, who lives in Portugal, commented on LinkedIn that “it was because of this book that I started blogging. It took me one entire day to do my first blog post. Now I use content marketing on a regular basis and all my business comes from Mr. Google! Thanks David and thanks New Rules.. (and Mr. Google)!”
Andrew left a comment on my blog: “David, your book so inspired me, I decided to start a brand-new business (launching shortly) based around the principles you espouse. You cogently expressed many of the things that I'd been grappling with myself. So your book has certainly changed one life.”
Mark said, “I took your advice back in 2006 and started a blog. If you Google ‘fix sales problems,’ you will find 42 million listings, and I am number one in the world! Thanks again for the advice years ago, and I forced myself to do it and I am glad I did.”
Julie, who is a senior executive at a PR firm, handed out copies to all 75 of her staff members. Mike wrote to say that his company takes advantage of all the trends and techniques described in the book. He purchased a bunch of copies to share with everyone in his organization. Larry bought copies for all the members of his professional association. Robin, who works for a company that offers public relations services, purchased 300 copies for clients. People approach me at conferences asking me to sign wonderfully dog-eared, coffee-stained, Post-it-noted copies of the book. Sometimes they tell me some funny secrets, too. Kathy, who works in PR, said that if everyone read it, she'd be out of a job! David told me he used what he learned to find a new job.
While all this incredible feedback is personally flattering, I am most grateful that my ideas have empowered people to find their own voices and tell their own stories online. How cool is that?
Now let me disclose a secret of my own. As I was writing the first edition of this book, 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 North America. But I couldn't help but wonder at the time: 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? I quickly learned that the answer is a resounding yes! About 25 percent of the book's English-language sales have come from outside the United States. And as I write this, the book has been or is being translated into more than 29 other languages, including Bulgarian, Finnish, Korean, Vietnamese, Serbian, and Turkish. I'm also receiving invitations from all over the world to speak about the new rules. In the past few years, I've traveled to many countries, including Bulgaria, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Trinidad, 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.
This sixth edition of the book builds on the completely revised fifth edition with another extensive rewrite. I have checked every fact, figure, and URL. But I've also listened. In the past few years, I've met thousands of people like you, people who have shared their stories with me. I have drawn from those experiences and included in these pages many new examples of success. For those of you who have read earlier editions, you'll still find many fresh ideas in these pages.
I've made some more significant additions as well. The tools of marketing and public relations are constantly evolving. Consider this: When I wrote the first edition of the book, Twitter didn't even exist and Facebook was available only to students. Now Twitter is an essential tool of marketing, and as of the fourth quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.86 billion monthly active users around the world. And those are just two examples.
The real-time web has sparked a tremendous opportunity for reaching members of the media directly – as they are writing breaking news stories. So I've added much more to the chapters on real-time marketing, including a section on Snapchat, and added to the chapter on newsjacking, the technique of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to generate tons of media coverage.
I also got out my scalpel and cut stories and concepts that I felt were no longer appropriate. This edition is shorter than the last. While some cuts were obviously needed (such as removing the discussion of video-sharing site Vine, which was shut down), others were more about how the tools have changed. Want to know the single most significant change since the fifth edition was published? I eliminated the chapter on mobile marketing. It may seem radical to get rid of the chapter on the marketing aspect of reaching people via mobile devices and mobile applications. These days we're using our mobile devices more than ever. But that's precisely why I deleted the chapter. Mobile marketing is now so important that it seemed odd to dedicate just one chapter out of 24. I kept some of the sections from the old mobile chapter, moving them to other places in the book. For example, I moved the section about optimizing for screen size to the content chapter.
When I first wrote about mobile marketing, the smartphone wasn't all that smart. Nearly every web search happened on a desktop or notebook computer. A few smartphone apps were becoming important for marketers to understand. Geolocation was an exciting new capability. QR codes were gaining popularity. So I added a chapter on mobile in an early edition of the book.
Today, mobile is the dominant way we consume content.
According to comScore, it's now the leading digital platform; total activity on smartphones and tablets accounts for two-thirds of digital media usage by time. Smartphone apps alone now capture roughly half of digital media usage. In the United States, smartphone usage has nearly doubled from three years ago, whereas tablet usage is up 26 percent and desktop usage down 8 percent. This change is so pervasive that about 20 percent of millennials have no desktop or notebook computer at all, relying exclusively on a mobile device.
So yes, mobile marketing is critically important to your business. Much more than just one chapter.
Because the lines between marketing and PR have blurred so much as to be virtually unrecognizable, the best online media choice is often not as obvious as in the old days. But I had to organize the book somehow, and I chose to create chapters for the various tools, including blogs, video, social networking, and so on. But the truth is that all these techniques intersect and complement one another.
These online media are evolving very rapidly, and by the time you read these words, I'll no doubt have come across new techniques that I'll wish I could have put in the sixth edition. Still, I believe that the fundamentals are important, which is why Chapter