The best piece of advice I’ve seen lately for marketing people in this age of new media comes from David Meerman Scott in this excellent piece on MarketingProfs.com called “The New Rules for PR”. It’s this:
“Think like a publisher. Marketers at the most enlightened organizations recognize that they are now purveyors of information, and they manage content as a valuable asset with the care of a publishing company.”
I think David has it right. I’ve never met him, but I told him in an email I’ve been wanting to articulate that very same thought, but I like his version. In fact, his message about the importance of content to marketing is so good, so relevant to our times, that I went right over to Amazon and bought his latest book: “Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers Into Buyers”. (See it at the right under “Reading.”)
Have you noticed how the terms “marketing” and “PR” are starting to blend together? At least in the tech world… PR people I know everywhere are now more like marketers, and (somewhat) vice versa. Is PR coming into its own — kind of a new era for the profession? I say yes. Long ago, I gave up reading the legacy marketing titles like Ad Age and AdWeek. Now I read PR Week. The disciplines of PR and marketing are coming closer and closer together. And this is a good thing.
David Meerman Scott captures the key point: content is what runs through it all. And you won’t do well in either discipline these days if you don’t understand, generate, nurture, and encourage it. Really live and breath it. Content isn’t just king in consumer media and the new world of social media/Web 2.0. The same thing applies to business — the purview of professional marketers. Content has a direct impact on the viability and growth of any organization. David comes to all this with an excellent background: here’s his bio. He has a great blog, too, which I’m adding to my regular reading, and my blog roll. The man gets it.
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