David Meerman Scott calls himself a “recovering” Vice President of Marketing. And, for good reason. His innovative thinking was a bit too radical for the staid, corporate environment he was in at the time. This led him down a somewhat accidental path to become a marketing strategist and he has since written five books and hundreds of magazine articles on the subject. We talked about his latest book, World Wide Rave. He maintains that the way people make buying decisions has fundamentally changed. However, many companies are still stuck in the old ways of trying to reach customers such as yellow pages, direct mail, or a newspaper ad. Today, someone is much more likely to “Google” a product or ask their network of friends for recommendations than they are to respond directly to a company pitch.
The term World Wide Rave, as David explained, is all about creating something authentic to attract people to you or your company. It may, in fact, have nothing to do with your actual business. The main thing is to get people talking about your company. A World Wide Rave, as opposed to something “going viral” is less gimmicky and doesn’t rely on duping people to get your message out. There are many instances of the people who created a “viral campaign” posing as customers to review or rate a product. A World Wide Rave is vastly different and has a much more positive connotation than something that is “viral.”
One of the most revolutionary ideas that David talks about in his book is the notion of freely spreading ideas via an e-book or white paper. When he says freely, he means that companies do not need to hold information hostage in exchange for personal information such as an email or physical address. Those practices are holdovers from the old days when someone needed to supply their mailing address in order to get a white paper or other information from a company. If your e-book, white paper, or other information is readily available, people are more likely to download it and share it. Also, people will link to something that is truly free instead of something that requires a visitor to give up information about themselves. We decided to experiment with David’s advice and have unlocked all of our information at Zero-G Creative. Click here to learn more about our new initiative.
By the way, if you live in the Atlanta area, David will be at a Tweetup on Thursday, June 4th at the Three Dollar Cafe in Norcross.
To learn more about David, visit his website or follow him on Twitter. Again, a big thank you to him for joining us. We all learned a lot!
