I know, I know. I've fallen off the posting wagon again. In my defense, my last month of school was hectic, but I'M DONE NOW!!!
During my last couple months of school though, I managed to read this great book in little 45min increments on my public transit commutes.
The book is David Meerman Scott's "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" and is a fantastic read. I highly recommend this book to not just anyone in marketing or public relations, but to anyone that does any kind of business now or wants to in the future.
This book takes a look at how the world of business has shifted thanks to the internet and how people are staying connected to their consumers through it. The best part about it is how Meerman writes the book like he does his blog. It's very easy to read and simple to understand. As well, there are tons of real life examples (or case studies) that make all the material he writes about easy to understand through actual stories.
The book is broken up into three distinct sections. The first talks about why the internet has changed how marketing and PR is done. The second section then talks about different tactics that are currently being implemented on the web and gives a nice overview of each. The final section then helps readers to make an action plan to harness all these new techniques and use them for their benefit.
The section I got the most out of (possibly because I was supposed to, as he reiterated it throughout the book) was about creating buyer personas. The chapter talks about how every business has to know their audience, and sometimes that could be more than one audience at a time, and make sure that you think like those people when creating your content. For example, words are very important. You need to make sure that the content on your website or blog is written in words that your target demographics would use in their everyday speech. It also talks about moving past just the basic demographics like age, sex, location, etc., and breaking it down even further into micro categories like "males in northern Canada from 14-30 years old that ride bikes, are heavy into music, love chocolate ice cream and walk their dogs without leashes" (that example isn't actually from the book).
This book was a great extension to "The Cluetrain Manifesto" which I blogged about earlier in the year.
Again, if you do business of any sort now or plan on it in the future, I highly recommend you read this book.
Next on my reading list: "Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success" by Dan Schwable and I'll explain why I chose this one in my next blog post which I'll hopefully have up in the next couple days.
Till then, enjoy this tune:
40deuce
