• If you are J. K. Rowling and you issue a press release about a new book, the news will be picked up by the media.
• If Apple Computer CEO Tim Cook announces the company's new iPhone, the news will be picked up by the media.
• If the president of the United States announces a pick to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, the news will be picked up by the media.
If you are smaller and less famous but have an interesting story to tell, you need to tell it yourself. Fortunately, the web is a terrific place to do so.
To harness the power of the web to reach buyers directly, you must ignore the old rules. Public relations is not just about speaking through the media, although the media remain an important component. Marketing is not just about one-way broadcast advertising, although advertising can be part of an overall strategy.
I've noticed that some marketing and PR professionals have a very difficult time changing old habits. These new ideas make people uncomfortable. When I speak at conferences, people sometimes fold their arms in a defensive posture and look down at their shoes. Naturally, marketing and PR people who learned the old rules resist the new world of direct access. It means that to be successful, they need to learn new skills. And change is not easy.
But I've also noticed that many enlightened marketing executives, CEOs, entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, and professionals jump at the chance to tell their stories directly. These people love the new way of communicating with buyers and are eager to learn. Smart marketers are bringing success to their organizations each and every day by communicating through the web.
Here's how to tell if the new rules are right for you. Consider your goals for communicating via marketing and public relations. Are you buying that Super Bowl ad to score great tickets to the game? Are you designing a creative magazine ad to win an award for your agency? Do you hope to create a book of press clips from mainstream media outlets to show to your bosses? Does your CEO want to be on TV? If the answers to these questions are yes, then the new rules (and this book) are not for you.
However, if you're like millions of smart marketers and entrepreneurs whose goal is to communicate with buyers directly, then read on. If you're working to make your organization more visible online, then read on. If you want to drive people into your company's sales process so they actually buy something (or apply or donate or join or submit their names as leads), then read on. I wrote this book especially for you.
2
THE NEW RULES OF MARKETING AND PR
My wife, Yukari, was checking out her Twitter stream one day and noticed that someone she follows tweeted about Hotel & Igloo Village Kakslauttanen.7 Yukari clicked the link and learned that the resort is located in the Saariselkä fell area of Lapland in northern Finland. In winter, you can stay there in a private glass igloo, which means that from bed you can check out the stars (or, if you are lucky, the aurora borealis). She found this terribly exciting, so she tweeted a response from her Twitter ID, @yukariwatanabe: “I want to go there!”
We discussed the resort that evening over dinner. Why not go? Our daughter was off to university, so we had the time. The next day we booked the trip for several months later. Done deal.
Now, I know that a winter vacation above the Arctic Circle might seem like a punch line to a bad joke. Heck, the sun didn't even rise when we were there in mid-December (the “day” consists of just four hours of twilight at that time of year). But for us it seemed perfect, because we've traveled all over the world and are always looking for unusual adventures.
How did we know that we wanted to go? By the resort's website, of course. The site lists all sorts of winter activities for guests. When I saw “Husky Sledding Safari,” I was ready to pack my bags (bucket list…). But Yukari wanted to do a little more checking, so she Googled the resort, looked at the reviews on TripAdvisor, and also read about it in a New York Times article.
Everybody I know has a story like this. Somebody makes a comment via a social network site. It leads someone else to a website where the content educates and informs. And that person ends up becoming a customer of a company that he or she had never heard of moments before. We're living in a new world of marketing and PR.
If you are the seller in this transaction, it all comes down to content: What are you creating, compared to what are others saying about you?
You're in control. You create the content. You bring in the business.
Our time in Lapland was amazing. We had all kinds of wonderful adventures. The dogsledding was especially fun, because I got to drive (well, more like hang on). And we never would have had this amazing experience if the Hotel & Igloo Village Kakslauttanen only marketed their property using the old rules. We never would have heard about it.
I'd like to step way back and look at the big picture. This is not a view, to use the cliché, from 30,000 feet. It's more like the view from the moon. The new rules of marketing and public relations are part of the much bigger and more important communications revolution we're currently living through – the most important communications revolution in human history.
Johannes Gutenberg's invention of printing with mechanical movable type (circa 1439) was the second most important communications breakthrough in history. It meant books could be mass-produced, rather than painstakingly copied by hand. It meant ordinary people could refer to things in books, like laws. These used to have to be committed to memory.
The printing press created the first important communications revolution by freeing people's minds from memorization and allowing them to use that extra brainpower to be creative. At the same time, this first communications revolution (which took many decades) helped large numbers of people become literate and raised living standards along the way. It brought humanity out of the medieval period and into the Renaissance.
Some 556 years later, in 1995, an even more important communications revolution began. I choose 1995 because it was the year that Netscape went public on the success of Netscape Navigator, the first popular product to allow easy Internet connection and web browsing.
We're fortunate to be living in this time in history, the time of another important communications revolution. I figure we're about halfway through it. The first 20 years or so were fast-paced, and things changed very quickly. Usage went from a few million people online to billions. But many organizations still aren't communicating in real time on the web.
The next few decades will bring a continuation of the revolution. The pace of that change means that I need to update this book every two years. Soon, this sixth edition will be replaced by the seventh. And then the eighth. We need to be constantly learning and updating our skills to reach buyers as they're looking for the products and services we sell.
Are you one of the revolutionaries? Or do you support the old regime? Are you marketing your product or service like Hotel & Igloo Village Kakslauttanen? Or are you failing to produce content that will do well in the search engines and social networks? For your sake, I hope it's the former – or soon will be with the help of this book.
Gerard Vroomen will tell you that he is an engineer, not a marketer. He will tell you that the companies he co-founded, Cervélo Cycles8 and Open Cycle9 (aka OPEN), do not have any marketing experts. But Vroomen is wrong. Why? Because he is obsessed with the buyers of racing bikes from Cervélo and mountain bikes from OPEN. And he's obsessed with the engineering-driven products he offers them.
Cervélo Cycles, which Vroomen sold in 2011 but for which he remains an advisor, is a Canadian manufacturer of racing bicycle frames. He focused Cervélo to help his customers win races – and they do. In the 2005 Tour de France, David