Chapter 18 deals with podcasting and video. It is interesting to see a small company like KitchenArts using video to compete with a huge corporation. I watched a few videos on their website, and they aren’t professional, but they’re funny enough to watch. Making videos that are kind of funny is probably better for them because 1. kitchen supplies aren’t serious and 2. a competitor, like Williams-Sonoma, could make much more professional-looking videos if they wanted to.
I guess the trick to making effective videos is fitting them into your business. I don’t think every business can benefit from making videos, but a lot probably can. The KitchenArts videos show the personality of the company and I think that creates a connection with the customer, which could lead to being trusted as a thought leader.
Chapter 15 of The New Rules of Marketing & PR was especially helpful because for our final project we have to build an online media room for a nonprofit client. This chapter had a lot of tips on how to make a good media room. David Meerman Scott suggested writing the news releases like they were for the buyers not the journalists, which I think is a good idea. This allows the buyers to find news releases that are targeted at them while they are researching your organization and also for the journalists to aim their writing at your buyers.
I have been researching Mattel for a case study project in another class, and have looked at their news releases and recall updates. It would be helpful to people who are researching Mattel, parents, etc. if this information was in the same place, but it isn’t. The easier information is to find and understand, the better. An online media room would help Mattel with these problems.
Chapter 11 of The New Rules of Marketing & PR is “Online Thought Leadership to Brand Your Organization as a Trusted Resource.” This brings up a good idea, giving your buyers information they need without pushing your products on them, but I don’t know of any companies that really do this. I had a hard time understanding the example David Meerman Scott gave of a company that is doing this well.
I did like the section on Forms of Thought Leadership Content because it defined the new tools. This section would be useful to people who didn’t read the book from the beginning. A similar section would be useful before the first chapter or in a glossary section at the end of the book.
Chapter 10 of The New Rules of Marketing & PR is “You Are What You Publish: Building Your Marketing and PR Plan.” I understand David Meerman Scott’s analogy of the seven-year-olds soccer team, and agree that it would be easy to focus on the ball rather than the goal when developing marketing and PR plans. Having a deliberate, thought-out plan is very important in any kind of PR campaign.
Buyer personas seem dangerous, though. I think it would be very easy for organizations to stereotype their customers and skimp on the research. Creating a buyer persona this way would be more damaging than not creating a buyer persona at all. What happens to the prospective college student who doesn’t fit into any of the stereotypes? I guess she chooses another college. Knowing as much as you can about your buyers is good for any organization. It just worries me if it isn’t based on research.
P.S. I want a Pleo. And I’m not a male in my twenties or a woman in my fifties. Luckily I don’t have $350 for a robot dinosaur, either.
Chapter 9 of The New Rules of Marketing & PR talks about building a content-rich web site. When our class talked to David Meerman Scott, he mentioned that awards for web sites were based on style and design, not content. That doesn’t make sense because newspapers, books, magazines etc. are judged on content. Can you judge a web site by its cover? I think a web site needs to be aesthetically appealing and content-rich, but I like books with pretty covers.
Meerman Scott’s example of a content-rich web site was the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). I visited the site (nrdc.org) and I like the design and the content. Every page has a link to donate and take action, which is what the NRDC wants people to do. These links act as a call to action.
From my experience, it is much easier to make a web site if it is planned out completely.  Organizations should make extensive plans for the web site before a designer puts it together. Outlining the goals of the site will make every step of the process easier, and result in a better end product.
Chapter 8 of The New Rules of Marketing & PR is titled Going Viral: The Web Helps Audiences Catch the Fever. The main example in this chapter is of Mentos causing a geyser when dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke. Mentos embraced this free advertising, and involved themselves in the viral excitement. I think they took all the right steps, and didn’t take themselves too seriously.
The new rules & tools involve more risk than the old ones, but the payoff can be larger, too. Coke decided to distance themselves from the Diet Coke/Mentos explosion, and I think that is fine. Mentos liked the way the candy was involved, and Coke must not have thought it was right for their target market.
Chapter 7 of The New Rules of Marketing & PR talks about Forums, Wikis, and Your Targeted Audience. The most valuable information for me was that if you aren’t monitoring what is being said about your company online and participating in appropriate conversations, you are losing.
It is obvious from the examples of Sony and B & H that it is in a company’s best interest to know what is being said about them and to say their piece as soon as possible. It seems ridiculous that Sony would use the radio to respond to customers who are online, but I think it is simple to make these mistakes if you don’t have a clear plan or strategy.
I worry about working for a company that doesn’t understand the importance of communicating in the same medium as the customers, or one that just doesn’t seem to think things through very well. I wonder how much impact an entry-level employee can have in these kinds of situations.
Chapter six of The New Rules of Marketing & PR deals with “Audio Content Delivery through Podcasting.” I don’t have any experience with podcasts, but Meerman Scott has convinced me that they play a valuable role in the new PR strategy.
I have only ever listened to very short podcasts on the NY Times website, so I am very new to this. It seems to make sense that podcasting would be especially useful to musicians. Meerman Scott mentioned NPR’s podcasts. I love listening to NPR and they always promote their website and podcasts, but I have never gone to their website or listened to a podcast.
Chapter four of David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR discusses blogs. This blog is the only experience I have with blogging. I started it as an assignment for the Style & Design class I took this summer, and I am continuing it this semester for PR Writing.
I like Meerman Scott’s example of the web as a city. This is a good analogy, and is easy to understand. You wouldn’t trust everything someone random on the street tells you, and you shouldn’t trust everything someone random online tells you. Some people in a city offer you valuable information as do some people online.
I don’t especially enjoy blogging, perhaps because I don’t fully understand it. I think Meerman Scott’s advice of monitoring the blogosphere before you participate is good, and I think I would be more comfortable blogging if I had done this before I started my own blog.
Even though I don’t enjoy blogging, I agree that there is a place for it in a PR strategy. It would be silly to ignore blogs if that is the medium your publics trust.
I think that blogs are more dangerous for corporations than email or personal computers. I understand that Meerman Scott is saying that corporations will get used to blogs like they did other technology, but I still think blogs have the ability to be more damaging than email.
This chapter mentions McDonalds’ blog and podcasts, but I have never heard of either one before. Maybe this is because I am not active in the blogosphere, but I ate McDonalds last week. I think it would be wise for McDonalds to put their blog information on their stores.
In my case studies class we have been learning about employee, community and investor relations. CEO blogs seem like a good way to communicate with these publics.
In Chapter 3 of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott addresses Reaching Your Buyers Directly. This section was especially interesting to me because I think I might like to do this kind of work after graduation. I think I would like to consult businesses on building effective websites by identifying their goals and target audiences. It seems like identifying concrete goals and providing the information the target audiences want would be common sense, but I think a lot of companies fail to do so with their websites.
This is useful information to any organization, so a consultant would work with lots of different kinds of businesses. I think I would like that a lot more than working for the same company every day.
Throughout the book, Meerman Scott tells success stories and cites the web addresses in the footnotes. I really like this style because it allows the reader to easily find the web page and research the successful companies even further.
