I had a chance to catch yesterday morning’s keynote session featuring David Meerman Scott at the Search Engine Strategies New York conference, which continues today and tomorrow.
He is one helluva a speaker who made a cogent case for the “new rules of marketing & PR” by asking the audience five very simple questions:
- In the last one to two months — either privately or professionally — raise your hands if you’ve answered a direct mail advertisement from the post office.
- In the last one to two months — either privately or professionally — raise your hands if you’ve gone to mainstream media to research a product or service you might want to buy… magazines, radio, television or newspaper.
- In the last couple of months — either privately or professionally, please raise your hands if you’ve gone to the print yellow pages.
- In the last one to two months — either privately or professionally, raise your hand if you’ve used Google or another search engine?
- In the last couple of months — privately or professionally– in researching a product or service you might want to buy, have you tapped your online network — friends, family members, colleagues — and an answer came back to you that was on Skype, email, Twitter, LinkedIn, instant messaging or some kind of network and it was a URL to a website you visited?
The answers:
- One half of 1 percent
- 22 percent of the room
- Four percent
- 100 percent
- 85 percent
What Meerman Scott found fascinating is that these questions were answered exactly the same wherever (and to whomever) he spoke — from Estonia to Istanbul to Boston to New Zealand and elsewhere.
It begs the question:
“How many companies are still marketing using those early ways?”
If you have about 51 minutes, here’s the audio clip of his presentation. I had a chance to ask David a few questions about the PR biz, including which of the marketing disciplines might have the right stuff to succeed in the new world order. His answer may surprise you. Here’s a short clip of that chat.
Separately, I sat in on the search engine marketing session where I saw Backazimuth’s Bill Hunt, co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. with my friend, former client and sometimes colleague Mike Moran.
I had to ask him about the ins and outs of optimized news releases and the new tool he’s developed that should help PR people get a better fix on keywords that can “pull” in eyeballs. Here’s the audio clip or our brief exchange.
All in all a most enlightening day.