My take on The New Rules of Marketing & PR 3rd edition

Posted by Adam Franklin

Updated on November 24th, 2019

When David Meerman Scott wrote the first edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR,  Twitter didn’t exist and Facebook was only used by uni students.

Haven’t times changed since 2007?

Yes, we’ve seen social media sites like Facebook and Twitter explode and some like MySpace, implode.  I agree certainly that internet years are like dog years!

I like how David explains the old rules. There used to be three ways to get attention.

1. Buy it (adverts)
2. Beg for it (press releases)
3. Bug people for it (salespeople)

Luckily, now there is a 4th: Earn attention by publishing remarkable content!

David’s third edition of his bestselling book is full of case studies of organisations large and small that have achieved phenomenal success by embracing the ‘new rules’.  Having read both the second and third editions, I am stilled most blown away by the powerful introduction where the ‘old rules’ are debunked.

Page 7 entitled One-Way Marketing is Yesterday’s Message had me hooked.

Old Rules
A primary technique of what Seth Godin calls the TV-industrial complex is interruption.  Under this system, the advertising agency creative people sit in hip offices dreaming up ways to interrupt people so that they pay attention to a one-way message.

New Rules

The web is different. Instead of one-way interruption, web marketing is about delivering useful content at the precise moment a buyer needs it.

On page 8, David elaborates:

The Old Rules of Marketing
– Marketing simply meant advertising (and branding)
– Advertising needed to appeal to the masses
– Advertising relied on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message
– Advertising was one-way: company to consumer
–  Advertising was exclusively about selling products
– Advertising was based on campaigns that had a limited life
– Creativity was deemed the most important component of advertising
– It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win new customers

The New Rules of Marketing
None of this is true anymore. The web has transformed the rules, and you must transform your marketing to make the most of the web-enabled marketplace of ideas.

My favourite quote

Put simply (and this is my favourite quote and message from the book).

“On the web, you ARE what you publish”

My take

In a nutshell, my interpretation of the ‘new rules’ is to publish remarkable content that helps solve your buyers problems.  Publish frequently and share it liberally.

You’ll be rewarded with loads of interested buyers, backlinks which will propel you up the Google search rankings and enquiries from journalists looking for experts to write about.  Most importantly this will lead to genuine customers who appreciate your useful content and love the fact you’re not interrupting them!

Thank You

Thanks David.  On a personal we were excited when you agreed to collaborate with Bluewire on the Strategy Planning Template and thrilled that you included the template in the book. Cheers for the mention on page 153!

You can follow @dmscott, buy his book and follow his blog Web Ink Now.

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About Adam Franklin

Adam Franklin is the bestselling author of Web Marketing That Works. He is an international social media speaker and CEO of Bluewire Media.  His blog was Australia's #1 Business Blog and his podcast was #9 on the top marketing podcasts in Entrepreneur magazine. His work has featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Huffington Post and iTunes. Download the popular Web Strategy Planning Template which has been used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. His weekly 'Bluewire News' email goes out to over 32,000 readers.

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