Learning "The New Rules"

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

FIRST BLOG EVER! (sounds cool if you say it like comic book guy)

So, it's been a long time coming, but I finally decided to start my own blog. 

We'll just call this my starter blog, or blog with training wheels, to get me going in the blogging game. Also, if you're wondering what this blog will be about, well you're looking at it (if you're looking at the title). I don't have a specific topic, so I figure I'm just gonna blog about anything I find interesting, or stuff thats on my mind, completely random shit. 

For this first post, I figured I should tell you all (if anyone's reading this) a bit about myself so you can have some idea of what to expect.

I'm a 26 year old student (sad, i know) in Toronto. I recently went back to school to do a post-grad in Corporate Communication and Public Relations at Seneca College. That's one of the main reasons I decided to start this blog, I figure it will be good writing practice for myself. The excuse of good writing practice is also a good excuse to not have an overall theme for my blog.

I'm a bit of a recent tech-geek. I've always been into computers and tech gadgets, but a few months ago I bought my first mac, and that was the end of everything. I've joined the cult of mac. I'm in love with my mac and love reading blogs and all things apple related. I of course had to get an iPhone 3g to go with that, so that upped my game a bit. ALL HAIL JOBS

I've also recently started to get into learning as much as I can about social media and web 2.0. I figure that's going to be the future of both PR and marketing, so I might as well try to get in on the 2nd floor (I figured I missed the ground floor). Hopefully by next week sometime I'll figure out how to put one of those boxes on the side of this blog that links to my twitter, digg, and other such accounts so you can follow my A.D.D. there as well.

I'm a huge music person. I don't play any instruments, although I did buy an acoustic guitar a little while ago and am teaching myself to play (I can play four whole chords now!). I love listening to music, and I've held many jobs related to music from working in a record store to DJing to working for a small concert promotions company. Music has been, and most likely always will be, my first love. I love finding new music and sharing it with other people. I'll listen to anything as long as it makes my ear drums dance, so please feel free to send me anything cool. Hopefully one day I will find a way to marry my PR/marketing and music loves together.

I'm a pop-culture whore. When I started university I was actually in a program called Popular Culture Studies. I love movies, TV, books, comics, everything pop culture, but I can't stand celebrity gossip.  I'm a crazy LOST fan. If I could only watch one show ever it would be LOST, so don't be surprised in the new year when the premire gets closer if I have a lot of LOST related blog posts. I've also gotten back into reading graphic novels lately. I just finished reading Marvel Zombies, which was a cool idea, but not the best thing I've ever read.

I think that's a good start for now. It gives you (and me) a fairly rough idea of what you'll find in this blog in the near future. If you're still reading, thanks, and I'll quit boring you for now, but come back and check me out every now and again, and I'll try my best to at least make one post every couple days.

Also, feel free to leave me a comment and make me feel loved.

ONE LAST THING!!! Since I love music so much I'm gonna try to put a song or a video at the end of every post, just for fun. I was going to put up something significant here for this first post, since it should be a big deal, but I just had way too many songs pop into my head, so instead I decided to put up this video I saw earlier today, cause it just rocked and it's stuck in my head.

Watch the whole thing, it's worth it, cause you don't even see Prince for the first 4 mins of the song, but then he comes out and steals the show with an amazing solo. enjoy!

40deuce