World Wide Rave: David Meerman Scott’s latest rant (and it’s a good one!)

The first example in David Meerman’s Scott new book on effectively using the Web for marketing was about Universal’s Studio creating a World Wide Rave (his coinage, I believe) about a new Harry Potter-themed attraction. My first response was, well, duh, Harry Potter has a kabillion fans in place, who couldn’t start a world wide rave? What about us (boo-hoo) B2B marketers who spend a lot of time with products that have a much smaller niche, and aren’t that all-fired exciting to begin with.

David was, of course, a few steps ahead of me, because a chapter or so later he was writing about Approva’s inspired use of social media to create interest and, yes, buzz, around audit management software. You heard right: audit management software. And this one hit home. I might be able to dismiss Harry Potter-related marketing, but I am well aware of Approva, because for a couple of years I did marketing for an very small company with a product in the same space. I won’t lay the failure of “my” company to grow at anywhere near the rate of Approva to their lack of social media awareness, but the point was well taken: a world wide rave doesn’t have to involve 350,000,000 participants. If your universe has 100 people in it, and 35 of them are saying something about you online, you’ve got your own rave going.

If there’s one marketing book that will create buzz this year, it’s this one. (And if you buy one marketing book this year, this one should probably be it.)

David Meerman Scott doesn’t hold back.

From his opening salvo - “Nobody cares about your products (except you).” - to characterizing white papers as “usually dense and boring…which our buyers feel they should read but often don’t” - to calling out scaredy-cat marketers: “People are comfortable doing the same old rubbish, year in year out” - David has forceful opinions. And good ideas.

Throughout the book, David present challenges to marketers, specific things that marketers can and should be doing to get their companies off the dime with social media. This isn’t about demanding that your CEO start a continuous Twitter stream tomorrow. It’s about admitting that most products and services these days are found online - and putting yourself on the path to begin doing something about it that goes beyond SEO.

In the past month, I’ve had four conversations with four separate clients about use of social media.

One, which already has a long history of active, online user forums, is going to be doing blogging during an upcoming beta. They have the right attitude, expectation, approach - and audience - for this to work for them.

Another client wanted to explore blogging, which didn’t really seem to fit their style, or that of their audience. I didn’t have to do much hard steering to get them off the blog idea (at least for now), but they’re very excited about the potential for publishing contributed articles online, which they are a natural for. And they’re going to look into what online conversations are going on in their space, and start engaging in the conversation.

The contributed article approach, which we kicked off last year, is working very well for another client, and we’re now revisiting it, and seeing how we can expand our presence, now that they’re comfortable that “social media” doesn’t mean that they’re on the hook for blogging every day.

The fourth client had made an earlier decision to “blog” - but they have their own definition of what a blog is. In their world, it’s an anonymous post, written by committee, buried deep in their website, that doesn’t allow for comments - more of a mono-blog than a dialogue, that’s for sure. I have gently pointed out that what they’re doing is putting a viewpoint online, and that they’re not really blogging. But they like to think of themselves as bloggers. On the plus side, for a recent product announcement, part of our outreach was to prominent bloggers in their space. We got generally positive coverage - only one crank, but it was to be expected.

I can’t say that I agree with everything in World Wide Rave. To some degree, I think that David overstates his points about the worthlessness of “old-time” marketing tactics. And I don’t 100% agree with the blanket statement that “nobody cares about your products (except you)”. In the tech world, there remain “content junkies” who do really want all that dense, unreadable technical information in those dense, unreadable technical white papers.

But mostly I think David Meerman Scott is spot on.

I’m sure I’ll be revisiting this book on other occasions, but - for now - I must away to figure out what to do about an e-book for Opinionated Marketers….Or maybe I should go and sign up for Facebook. Or start Twittering. Oh, where to begin? (Hmmm. I guess I already did: I’m blogging.)

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