Valley PR Blog

A conversation with David Meerman Scott

By Linda VandeVrede on May 20th, 2009 In People

David Meerman Scott is a contrarian, and that’s what has made him so successful as a thought leader in public relations.  I figured it out while I was listening to him this morning tell me about the genesis of his use of ebooks.   He zigged when everyone else was zagging.  

His blog is called www.webinknow.com, started in 2004.  His visibility skyrocketed in 2006 when he created “New Rules of PR,” an ebook that he offered on his blog free without any registration.   “I expected just a few people to read it,” he told me, “and a few thousand people read it the very first day, 50,000 in the first month.    Anne Holland of Marketing Sherpa says it is the one of the most read business white papers in history.”   The ebook was later published as a print book as well, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.”

He also figured out that while press releases are dead for the media, they are not dead for buyers.   He was incorporating HTML into his releases as early as 1998.     Social media lets us earn attention by publishing something online, he feels.    Contrast that to the history of communications when you could either buy attention through trade shows, beg for attention by getting media to write about you, or bug people through direct sales or telemarketing. 

But “few people in PR get it,” He said.   (I was privately hoping he wasn’t lumping me into that category, and smiled benevolently).   They “still want to buy in.   They want to make social media about what they know.   They have to unlearn the skills that made them successful.  It isn’t media relations.” 

I mentioned Chris Heuer’s comment that social media isn’t what you do TO people, it’s what you do WITH them, and he agreed with that and with the concept that it’s about earning trust. 

His latest book, “World Wide Rave,” explains how to create triggers that get people around the world to spread your ideas and share your stories.  ebooks can be a part of that , because “people can instantly see the value of a product that looks like for-purchase content but can actually be downloaded for free.”  The goal of such an ebook should be to spread ideas, not to generate sales leads.   This is a radical departure from the more traditional whitepapers.  

Some tips if you decide to create an ebook:

• Make the content totally free, with no registration requirement at all
• Use a good designer
• Build conflict into the premise (all the good fiction, David told me, is based on conflict of some sort between the characters)
• Put it on your blog

Do any of our readers have a recent ebook they’ve created that has been successful?   What was your topic and what was your creation process like?  

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