Video - The New Rules of Marketing and PR with David Meerman Scott

In this GYDA Talks, Robert talks to David Meerman Scott about 'The New Rules of Marketing & PR'.

David Meerman Scott spotted the real-time marketing revolution in its infancy and wrote five books about it including, The New Rules of Marketing and PR - now in a new 8th edition - with more than 425,000 copies sold in English and available in 29 languages from Albanian to Vietnamese.

Now, David says the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of superficial online communications. Tech-weary and bot-wary people are hungry for true human connection. Organisations have learned to win by developing what David calls a “Fanocracy” - (the subject of his Wall Street Journal bestseller) - tapping into the mindset that relationships with customers are more important than the products they sell to them.

He is a massive live music fan, having been to 804 live shows since he was 15 years old, is passionate about the Apollo lunar program, and he loves to surf but isn't very good at it.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR
Fifteen years after the first edition, with more than 425,000 copies sold in English and available in 29 languages from Albanian to Vietnamese, New Rules is now a modern business classic.

It’s used as a marketing and PR guide in thousands of companies and a text in hundreds in marketing, journalism, and business courses at universities around the world.

Robert and David discuss:

• Why the new book? Why now?
• How digital marketing and PR has changed in the 15 years since the 1st edition
• How agencies' short-termism and obsession with ROI hinders client growth
• How has the customer/buyer changed?
• The dangers of the algorithm (for all of us)
• Agencies' obsession with planned campaigns and inability to be more responsive
• News jacking and real-time marketing
• How have tactics changed?
• Big Takeaways for agency leaders
• What does he find himself saying a lot of the time?

Find out more about David Meerman Scott here:

Transcription:

David Meerman Scott  00:19

Doing great, Robert, how are you doing?

Robert Craven  00:21

Absolutely fantastic. Great. So I mean, let's just get straight into it. So the New Rules of Marketing and PR are the new New Rules of Marketing. Down the road, we've got the old and new in the pub 15 years after the first edition, over 425,000 copies sold in 29 languages from Albanian to Vietnamese. It's like the marketing and PR guide literally for 1000s of companies and is in just about every marketing journalism, business studies course, across the world. So the obvious question is, without further ado, is why a new version.

David Meerman Scott  01:06

Well, the new version, and this is the eighth edition. So this is actually the eighth time I've updated it since the beginning, because I always want to have up to the moment stories, new examples of success. I also want to make sure that I'm talking about the tools and the social networks. That makes sense right now. So that's really important to me, you know, the first edition came out in 2007. And I was actually writing it in oh five and oh six. And in 2005-2006 twitter didn't exist and Facebook was only for students. So people reached out to me and said, David, I liked this book. But hey, have you ever heard of Twitter? I'm like, Oh, my God. I mean, yes, of course, I've heard of Twitter. But it hasn't. It didn't exist when I was writing the first edition. So that prompted the second edition, and then third, fourth, and so on. And so in this particular edition, when I was writing the former, social audio really hadn't crept up yet on the seventh edition. But now we've got a clubhouse. And there are various offerings from LinkedIn, Twitter and Spotify and so on. So that's new. I've seen a big rise in the use of AI, from the seventh edition to the eighth edition, so I talked a lot about AI, in its good parts, and some of its bad parts. And, and then also, I've, I've pioneered the idea of newsjacking, about 10 years ago, and newsjacking has really taken off as a great way to generate instant attention, and so much so that it's now in the Oxford English Dictionary as a word. And they've cited me as the founder of the newsjacking movement. So I added a bunch of stories and ideas around newsjacking.

Robert Craven  03:13

Right. So I mean, I have to ask him whenever I talk about marketing, I always end up referring people to Harvard Business Review 1961. And a rather famous article called Marketing Myopia. And one of the things in that article is that it's, it's not about the tactics. Everyone talks about tactics if you want to, Oh, it must be about strategy. No, no, no, it's not about strategy. It's not about strategy. What can it be about it? And the answer is, it's about the customer.

David Meerman Scott  03:58

I actually disagree with all of those. Because the customer is too limiting. A customer is someone who already works with you. I think marketing needs to be about people who could possibly work with you. So I use the term buyers. I particularly talk about what I call buyer personas, which is a chapter in The New Rules of Marketing and PR. And the idea of buyer personas is if you understand deeply the people you're trying to reach, yes, they can be your existing customers, but also more importantly, your potential customers. If you understand their stories, if you understand the words and phrases that they use, if you understand the problems that they face and how your company products, services, ideas can help them solve those problems. That helps to bring your marketing alive because instead of just talking about products and services, and that's what I see so many or organisations messing up around is like all about our products AAA, instead of doing that you're focused on your buyers, the people who might buy something from you. And by the way, for nonprofits that buy, I use the term buyers, but that could be someone who donates or for university or a secondary school, that could be someone who's going to perhaps become a student. So apply for admission. So lots of different things come up with buyers, but I use it as a catch all term. And the difference between a buyer and a customer is important, because if you're only focused on customers, you're talking to people who already know your products and services. So they might say to you, Oh, yeah, thanks for calling. I'm really glad you called. Yeah, I love what you're doing. But why the heck is it black? I want it to be green. If it's green, I'll buy more. And then all of a sudden, the companies out there marketing the green product, and what sense does that make if you're talking to non customers, you're learning in a very broad way, the challenges that people face, and it helps you to market much better in my opinion.

Robert Craven  06:06

So that's like, you have prospects, and then you have paying prospects.

David Meerman Scott  06:12

That's another way to think about it. Yeah.

Robert Craven  06:15

But I think that's absolutely spot on about that being a limiting factor that we think of customers, because they are only buying what they know they can have. And you're, maybe you may be missing something entirely.

David Meerman Scott  06:29

Right, and I'm a huge advocate about getting out there and interviewing buyer, representatives of the buyer persona, you know, agency, people are famous in my mind, for sitting around really hip offices, in fancy iron chairs, often with the client, by the way, and then dreaming up what would be a cool campaign to do and once in a while that might hit and be successful. But, you know, you're basically sort of throwing stuff at the wall, all Mad Men. And I think that a better approach is to focus on getting out of your comfortable iron chairs out of your comfortable offices, and going to interview the representatives of buyer personas. So for example, I love talking about the idea of a university education. So universities obviously do marketing use agencies, market, using digital tools, and through digital channels. And so most university marketing is around getting people to apply for the university. But if you think about it, from a buyer persona, pet standpoint, you've got young teenagers who are four, five, or even six years away from a university education, who are beginning to do a little bit of poking around a little bit of research. It's a very different buyer persona than someone who is ready to apply, which is very different from a parent who wants to know is this school going to be appropriate for my child, and many times the parents are footing, our parents are footing the bill, is my child going to be safe at this school. And then you've got people who are alumni who might donate and there's other buyer personas. So if you focus on those buyer personas, understand what each of those people are thinking what problems they have, and you create the kind of content or the kind of marketing or the kind of promotions that will attract them, you're going to be way more successful than if you just number one are focused only on the people who are already going to the school, or what most universities do is assume that everyone who's hitting their website is ready to apply for admission. 

Robert Craven  08:56

But it isn't part of the problem. I can feel that this is a conversation we should be having over a bottle of wine or two.

David Meerman Scott  09:02

Yes. Yes. In fact, my wife and I have been very much in the red wine mode, because we're going to Napa, we're going to Napa Valley in California, home of some beautiful cabs next week for a speaking engagement and mapping out all the wineries we're going to be staying we're going to be going to so yeah, a good bottle of red would be a great way to have this discussion.

Robert Craven  09:28

Because it seems to me that nowadays the last five years, really, it's all been about ROI and attribution and agencies and especially digital agencies have bought in entirely into this idea of if you give me $1,000, I can give you 1000 clicks or whatever the piece is. So it's become so measurable and because clients are then expected to say what did I get for my $1,000 that that more general idea higher up the funnel, whatever you however you wish to describe a more general concept of marketing and getting the brand and disturbing getting people that that kind of falls apart. There's a quote that came out recently that, you know, marketers spend too much time, you know, picking the low hanging fruit, it goes back to Napa Valley stuff, and they forget to actually water the plants. You know?

David Meerman Scott  10:20

Well, ROI, I think it is a tyranny of marketing. It is terrible. It's awful to hate the concept, because people look at the ROI as very short term. And it's the same short term thinking that Wall Street has around stock stocks that are priced on a quarterly, you know, quarterly basis every time there's a quarterly earnings announcement. So what a short term ROI will do is it will get you to be thinking about simply the click, or, in the case of a B2B company, it'll get you to be thinking about how many people are going to fill out the form and express interest and become a sales lead. And that ignores so many different things. You know, I've done some fun kind of digging around in my site. And I've also talked with a number of different organisations about looking at the big picture of the metrics around their sites. One of the companies who shared their data with me was HubSpot. I happen to be on the board of advisors of HubSpot, and have been since the very beginning. And something like 90% of hub spots, content that drives to the point of people becoming a customer was created not this month, but prior months. So that might be the YouTube video that was created 10 years ago, or the blog post that was written five years ago, or the course that was developed for HubSpot Academy three years ago. And this content is what drives people through the selling process. And none of that was created this month. So I think that what marketers ought to be doing is valuing marketing, not as an expense, but as an asset of the business. So if you think about actually, there's one aspect of marketing that typically might be measured as an asset, and that might be the value of a URL, right? How much is apple.com worth millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps that's on the balance sheet, but is Apple's website, on their balance sheet, no way. And that has tremendous value. And so I think marketers if we could get the world to value the content we're creating as an asset versus an expense, we can partly get away, at least from this idea of measuring monthly, weekly or daily to generate ROI based on how people are clicking. It just doesn't really make any sense. The other reason that this binds us, in my opinion, is that it drives people to invest often in the wrong things. I'm a huge advocate, that marketers and agencies as well hired journalists, professional storytellers, people who know how to tell a video story. People who know how to tell a visual story people who know how to tell a written story use the written word to tell stories. And those people are creating assets that are valuable well beyond the time that you've paid their monthly salary. Or if they're a freelancer, their monthly fee. And that idea then gets in unless you're, unless you're valuing that as an asset that has value over many, many years, you're going to under invest in content creation. Because if you're only valuing based on what that writer has created, in terms of clicks for you for that month, you will always under invest.

Robert Craven  14:16

But it's something that the marketing industry kind of did for itself because it sort of thought you recur in about 2015. We can now sell ROI, we can now sell attribution, the other side rather the attributions accurate or not, or whether people go down the funnel in the way that marketers think people should go down this imaginary funnel, which doesn't really exist for the customer. So, marketers have kind of shot themselves as an industry has almost shot themselves in the foot to the point where I've got a client now who thought he said I can't find a good salesman. I can't find someone who's good at sales. I'm looking for something for my agency that needs to be really good at sales and then the penny finally dropped But if his marketing was better, knew and understand what his agency did and how he did it, and when it did it and, and what what its strengths and its weaknesses were, then the salesperson would almost become irrelevant because it'd be, it would just be turning up. So, Mark, but the industry has been lumped together as marketing and sales. And the, and marketers are paying the price for letting digital marketing agencies run the roost for a while, I guess.

David Meerman Scott  15:36

I think I think you're absolutely right about that. And I do think it's a challenge. And I think that it's the fault of the entire industry. You know, CMOs need to go into the boss, and you know, the board or the CEO, whoever they report to, and, and be able to talk about how we're going to measure this success. And no, it's not going to be on how many people fill out sales leads this month, it's not going to be on how many people clicked on some button this month, it's going to be on other metrics.

Robert Craven  16:12

But it's kind of got worse than that, I would argue, because we've been working recently with a really prestigious group of agencies, encouraging them to move into YouTube and YouTube advertising. And the idea is that the whole storytelling video opportunity was there. And two thirds of these agencies couldn't get it because they were, you know, we're a PPC agency. What we do is PPC, we do PPC, and you're saying Hang on a second, what do your clients want? They say they want more sales online. Okay, so we're offering you the opportunity to do that. Yeah, but what we do is PPC, and it was kind of like, what I do is drive a car. And now you're asking me to drive a motorbike, but that's not what I do, I drive a car. So the agency world, you know, becomes technicians who want to sell their, they want to sell their hammer, and therefore they want to see every problem ironically solvable by using a hammer. And they're not. They're not listening to their customers, nevermind getting their customers to listen to them, to the customers' customers. There's this sort of narrowing of thought that the industry seems to have.

David Meerman Scott  17:41

Well, that's been a problem for 25 years, you know, I, I started, my beginning of my career was on Wall Street, I was a bond trader. And then I moved over to the financial information business, I worked for companies like Dow Jones, and Thomson Reuters. And I worked at those companies prior to the web, so pre 1995. And so therefore, during 1995, I call it sort of the beginning of the web, because that's when Netscape went public with a wide availability of browsers. On average, people could get online reasonably easily. So that's my line in the sand. And I could see that agencies had dollar signs in their eyes back in the late 1990s. And they said, Oh, look at this, another place, we can sell ads. And so what agencies ended up doing and this is going back, what 30 years, when agents, little less 25 years agents, when agencies said was, oh, this is great. What we can do is we can go to our clients and say, Yeah, we know you know, how you love the TV ads we make and the radio ads and the billboards by the side of the road. Well, now we have another place, we can stick banner ads all over these websites. And so they were looking at the web, using the metaphor they already knew, which was selling ads that are displayed in people's faces. And that didn't work so well. Because what worked way better was the idea of creating great content on the web and having a wonderful content rich website and having and yes, you could do video even though YouTube didn't exist yet. And no, there wasn't any social media yet. But you could create a blog, you could create content like that. And it happened again, in a huge way just two years ago, you know, the pandemic hit. And no, there could no longer be in person corporate events and conferences. So many agencies said, Aha, we can create virtual events for our clients. And they just took the model they already knew which was in person events and stuffed them into a Zoom Room and that was ineffective because it was the wrong metaphor. So that's a problem that agencies have had, going back 30 years, which is taking, here's what I know. And then creating that to a new form of digital content, when you really need to rethink it. So in the case of virtual events, the idea was, this is not an in person event stuffed in a Zoom Room, this is something more like a live television show. And you can create something super great if you think about it from the perspective of a live television show, rather than somebody standing in front of a or of a bad webcam, pointing up their nose, at the lights in the ceiling, trying to deliver a speech for 60 minutes. So, you know, it's just continually a challenge. I think another challenge that I see happening right now, and I write about this a lot in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, is that the vast majority of agencies are not real time, the vast majority of agencies are working on the kind of an I use this word in quotes, I hate the word campaigns that are planned way, way in the future. So a typical approach, the agency, you know, talks to the client and gets a buy off on a campaign, which we're going to start working on this month, and we're going to execute on two months from now it'll go through the end of the year. Great. But what happens if the entire market changes in five minutes from now? Are you going to be ready? Are you going to be able to do something instantly? I call that either real time marketing the subject of a Wall Street Journal best selling book I wrote, I also call a subset of that newsjacking, which is understanding the news cycle, what happens and how a breaking news story is constantly changing. And if you are armed with an understanding of how news breaks, you can create real time instant content. And it could be an instant ad, by the way, which then drives people not when you're ready, not when your campaign is ready to go, which is how most agencies do it. But instead, when the market is ready, when people are ready to buy, when the media is looking for somebody to quote in their stories. So I really have a big problem with the agency campaign mentality rather than focusing on a real time mentality, because guess what the web is real time? It's not a campaign. It's real time. 

Robert Craven  22:48

What is their problem? Because day one, marketing 101 is that it's about the buyer. And there will be new value propositions about you know, what is what is? What are the jobs to be done? What are the hurts needs, she has scratches once, what is their environment, everything that they're taught, and everything they're shown about how to do marketing is about understanding the world, that they're the buyer, the customer is in and providing some form of solution to the problems hurts needed, it just crashes in one. So why should agencies insist on trying to run by their book, which is we're going to have a campaign or in November, we're going to do women in diversity? And then why don't they get that, that people live real time that I live real time that when I walk out of this room, you know, my problem is going to be whatever the problem is based on what's going on in the world as opposed to women in diversity or whatever the issue that the agency wants to talk to me about.

David Meerman Scott  23:56

I think that that's just the way that has been done since the beginning of time. You know, since you know, Ogilvy on advertising you can read that book has nothing about real time in there. You know, you study the book, you go to the school, you do an MBA class, you learn from people going back to the Mad Men era, and it's all about the campaign. I'll give you an example. It's a new story in The New Rules of Marketing and PR that I love. And it's a law firm out of Canada, they're called Ross Alexander family law firm. And there's you know, the legal business spends a lot of money on advertising because they're constantly trying to generate new business through advertising magazines, radio, television, newspapers, billboards by the side of the road Google ads. Social media advertising a huge amount of money is spent by LifeLock Al. Buy from us and who and we've all seen these advertisements have you been injured, come to us, we will help you get the money you deserve. So I'm what Russ Alexander is. He went to a Tony Robbins event. I met him there, I was speaking at Tony Robbins business mastery, which I have been doing for nine years now. And Russ learned about this idea of newsjacking, which is the idea that when you have an expertise, and a specific area of expertise, and all of a sudden there's a new story, which puts your area of expertise in demand, you push that news story out, on the web, in some form, video, a blog, whatever it is, and then you generate interest in real time something agencies are not good at for the most part. So Ross saw this as just I met him in January 2020. In March 2020, because of COVID, his family law practice started to have people reach out to him and say, What does COVID mean? For me as a divorced parent, if I want my child to remain home and do virtual school, but my ex spouse wants my child to go to in person school, turns out the law hadn't really been written around that. So Russ said, Oh, my gosh, my buyer persona. Here's a new buyer persona, it's people who are dealing with family law issues around COVID. It now has all these questions. Long story short, the worldwide expert number one in the world, on COVID-19, and family law in Canada. And he created a COVID 19. And divorce Information Centre on his website, created a YouTube channel, where he actually went to the courthouses and talked about the different court cases, as they were breaking, he created a podcast, he created a blog post series. And no agency told him to do that, because agencies don't think that way. The agencies were saying double down on your billboards by the side of the road. And it turns out that he ended up getting quoted in over, I think there's over 50 different publications, quoted on television, magazine radios, radio stations, and his business almost doubled. He had to hire five new lawyers just to keep up with demand. And that's the idea of instant. That's the idea of real time. But a campaign mentality does not get you there. Because when the moment is right, you have to be there right away.

Robert Craven  27:55

Okay, so, I mean, I, I'm, I think that's a lovely example. Lovely story, explaining exactly how people need to behave and respond to real time marketing newsjacking. I love that. So new book, I'd love to understand how you think, how do you think the buyer has changed for over 15 years? I mean, we've got Facebook, TIkTok, Twitter, yada, yada, yada. We now have everyone glued to their mobile phones. How do you think that the way that people think about buying the way that people buy has changed over that period of time? Or do you think it's still fundamentally the same?

David Meerman Scott  28:41

I think that as a general rule, people are way, way, way more comfortable buying on the web, and you might think my nearly 90 year old mother is totally comfortable pulling out our credit card, buying something on the web and going onto social networks. You know, and I think the vast majority of us are pretty cool about that. I am particularly worried, however, that consumers, the average user of online content, is not aware, as in general, about how our AI algorithms work. And I fear for humanity. And this may sound a little dramatic, but I believe that some of the social networking algorithms are among the most dangerous technologies ever invented. Because the algorithms as a general rule, reward, anger and polarisation and in my country, they put the blue team against the red team. All over the world, they've pitted people who believe vaccines are safe against people who believe that vaccines are not effective and they shouldn't take them. It led to things like Brexit in my opinion. And because what happens is that you're on social media. And let's say let's take Facebook as an example, which I believe to be among the worst offenders in the way the algorithm works. Facebook figured out that people who are angry spend more time on Facebook. And therefore Facebook can sell more ads to those people. So when you're angry, and you begin to click on things, Facebook serves you up more of the same thing. And then you end up going down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories in some not everybody, but many people conspiracy theories in some cases. And then the anger says there's this person is the negative, this person is the positive and people then I hate this group. And they like this group. And this whole process, I believe, is extremely dangerous for all of humanity. And so unfortunately, I believe that this is proving to be a big problem. And I think the social networks are ducking it by talking about free speech. Elon Musk buying Twitter says it's all about free speech. But it's not about free speech. It's about the algorithms, there's nothing that says free speech is the same thing as free social amplification. Sure, I can say something. But that doesn't give me the right that a social network can amplify my stuff to 10s of millions of people. So yes, on one hand, I think consumers have changed in the sense that they now are happy to spend time on the web, on social media, buying products, making friends doing all that but on the other hand, I see a huge danger with the AI algorithms that are being deployed by social networks.

Robert Craven  32:07

I couldn't agree more. I remember when I got my first copy of the book way back when, yeah, it was one of those books that had pencil marks and rings and lines, all the way.

David Meerman Scott  32:20

I appreciate that I have seen people's copies like that before every now and then one would have seen.

Robert Craven  32:26

As a fellow writer, it's when someone has broken the binding by putting in a photocopier that you know that people really, really like what you're saying, I guess that my question is, you know, new book, what are our hearts without giving the entire book away? Because then people wouldn't go and go and buy. But what are some of those people might kind of find in the new book where they, they literally start circling it. 

David Meerman Scott  32:58

So I just talked about some negative aspects of AI. I do want to talk about a positive aspect of AI. One of the new tools that I outlined in The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which I'm personally also a huge fan of, it's called Lately, Lately AI, and Lately is a tool that you can use to take long form text or video content, and break it super easily into short form text or video content. So for example, I use it to take a full blog post, maybe a 600 or 800 word blog post, I drop it into the AI engine. And it will create between say 10 and 25, depending on the length of the post, tweets and social posts from the original blog post content and it does so in just a few seconds. And then I can go in quickly and edit as appropriate. So it probably takes 10 minutes from start to finish to go from one blog post to 20 or so social posts that are then automatically queued up to be delivered through my social channel for example, Twitter going forward in the next weeks or months depending on how I set it up. And I love that I love that because nor what I used to do before I started using this service called lately what I used to do was I would write a blog post, then I would copy the headline, copy the link drop it into Twitter push the button and was the only time I promoted my own blog posts through Twitter. And now automatically I have 20 or 15 however many tweets going out driving people back to my blog posts for every blog post and it'll take just a couple of minutes to do, they do the same thing for video I can drop an entire speech in. And the AI algorithm goes in and takes 45 seconds or so chunks and makes them social media ready also. So while I am critical around some aspects of AI and how they're polarising, I also think there's some incredible uses for marketers for agency people around AI. And I think, especially for agencies, a tool like and there's other tools like it, but a tool like Lately becomes really interesting, because, you know, the magic happens behind the scenes, and the client doesn't necessarily know that lately is being deployed. And you can say, Oh, yeah, well, we can go and we can take a look at your website, we take a drive, take all the content from the website and create tweets from it. You don't have to even think about what you're going to tweet about for the next year. I've had people who've taken entire books, dropped it in there. And then they've got a tweet a day for the next year. So there's a number of differences there and that's just one tool that I happen to love. But there's other tools out there. And in fact, I love them so much. I became an advisor and investor in the company. 

Robert Craven  36:16

Very good. And from the book, what do you think the kind of the big takeaways would be for agency leaders? So for leaders of agencies, what do you think the big takeaways are?

David Meerman Scott  36:29

I continually say that the book has not changed since the first edition around the strategy. And the strategy is you can buy attention, that's called advertising, you can, you can also bug people one at a time for attention, that's called sales. Or you can go out and you can try to find members of the media, who might want to write or talk about you. That's traditional public relations. And there's nothing wrong with any of those three things. If advertising is working, you're spending money to generate attention, great. If having an army of salespeople to generate attention is working for you. That's great. If hiring an agency to do public relations for you to generate attention in mainstream media is working for you. That's great. But I believe over 15 years and eight editions of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, the better way is to create the kind of interesting information that will generate attention from people, because it's what they're looking for. That can be blogs, YouTube videos, social media posts, and it can be in the form of, of creating those concepts, in many different ways. But it's all about generating the kind of attention that will drive people to you by understanding buyers creating the content. So that hasn't changed at all. But what has changed are the tools. What has changed are the individual tactics that people can deploy. And I think that agency leaders need to realise that this idea of understanding your buyers really, really well, or your clients buyers really, really well. And then figuring out what is going to be the content that will be most interesting to them. And putting that out in a clever way. And driving people back is super important. I also think that every company, every organisation needs their own home base on the web. And that's typically in the form of a website. And that ought to be the home base in the centre of attention, because I don't believe that we can trust social networks anymore. You know, many, many people spent a lot of time and a lot of effort developing a presence on services like Vine, for example, it no longer exists, or Google Plus, for example, Oh, Google has a new social network, great. I'm gonna build a presence there. I said to myself, I probably did several 100 posts on Google Plus. They cut the cord, it no longer exists. However, when you have your own website, when you have your own real estate on the web, that's yours, you own that, that's your, that's the place you should be driving people. So, you know, social networks, fine. You know, think of that as a short term way or a way to drive people to your home base. But I do think it's essential to have a home base and I don't hear very many agencies talking about the importance of websites these days, because they're off Oh, we're gonna do a Tiktok campaign for you or you know, whatever it might be. And that's fine. But think about the basics. How are you gonna understand your buyers? What's your home base on the web? What's the content that's going to drive people into your process so that they become fans of what you do?

Robert Craven  40:12

That's lovely. I think we're pretty much out of time. But I'm going to squeeze one more question in if that's okay, which is. What do you find yourself saying a lot of the time, what are your kind of golden nuggets that you think you're paying, you're lying and trying to get into people's?

David Meerman Scott  40:31

Well, the one thing that I say all the time is how can you align your marketing with the ways that people buy? That's a simple statement. But you know, people sometimes scratch their heads because it implies that you have to know how people are going to buy has to imply that your marketing is actually aligned to something. And so, that's one of my favourite go twos.

Robert Craven  41:02

I love that. I love that. On that note, I'm going to say thank you very, very much for your incredibly valuable time.  It goes without saying everyone needs to go out and buy the book. And just finally, to thank you for being a really great guest. It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much.

David Meerman Scott  41:19

My pleasure.