It's after lunch, and time for David Meerman Scott's PR and marketing talk. The old rules - you had two choices:

• The media wrote about you
• You bought advertising

The new rules: You are what you publish. Marketing and PR are not about your products. The way to do web marketing is to publish content that your buyers/prospects want to consume. It's about participating in the community and being found by search engines.

David is a big fan of "The Long Tail" [ed: might be interesting to hear David talk to Nick Carr :) ]. I tend to agree with David on this one - the long tail simply means that niche products can get aggregated enough to create a serviceable market.

You want to optimize your site for buyer personas - move people into and though the sales cycle. And example: an electronics vendor with two buyer personas: "uber geeks" who know the products already, and know exactly what features they want, and "clueless" buyers who know they want an HD tv, but not much more. You need different paths for these two personas.

Bottom line: Create marketing for your buyers. Most of the marketing literature out there is dreck, targeting no one. You can spot these via terms like "next generation".

Blogging for business works if your buyer persona reads blogs. david is showing us a sampling of business blogs he likes and reads. The idea here is pretty simple - you enable conversation between customers, you, analysts (etc). Heh - he's showing us a YouTube video put out by IBM - it's hilarious, because it pokes fun at IBM.

Online Press Releases: A good way to reach buyers. The evolution:

• Printed Media
• TV and Radio
• Financial Media (Dow Jones, Reuters, Bloomberg) over the wire (40 years ago)
• Lexis/Nexis, Factiva (etc) (25 years ago)
• Consumer outlets after 1995 (web)
• Feeds (2001 + RSS)

The news release is no longer for the media only - they are for the interested public. The old rules said that you had to have "real news" (analyst quote, customer quote, release, etc). They are now useful for getting information out via keywords to any interested party. And Example: keyword search for "accelerate sales cycle" - top hit brought back WebEx news releases. Following those links gets you to free trial offers, which takes you into the sales cycle.

The new rules: Send a press release whenever you have anything to associate with keywords you want to have linking back to you.

Viral Marketing: Publishing fantastic content and getting people to link to you. Even when you get negative reviews (Rubel panned david's ebook), you get lots of conversation and interest. That all led to a book deal, paid speaking gigs, consulting deals (via the 250k downloads). The investment: $2500.

Search Engine Marketing: does not rely on interruptions (ads) to get attention - it's the only form of marketing that does not rely on that. Interesting: He uses his full name (David Meerman Scott) instead of David Scott so that he comes up first for his name searches. When you want to "own" a space make sure to do Google searches.

Advice: Act the part of one of your buyer personas and visit your website. Do some Google searches for your company/product name. See what comes up, and where you are succeeding/failing. Some more advice for marketing people: get out of the office and meet the customers. Find out what language they use, and create your content based on those experiences.

Hey - since I got a mention in his book, I've got an autographed copy now. Neat.

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