I recently completed an amazing book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott and it is a book that readers of BTB will certainly find useful. The book sets out to educate the reader about “how to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing and online media to reach buyers directly” and it succeeds in doing so.

Many business books tend to spend too much time on ideas and leave the reader with few actionable items. This is not one of those books at all - the entire third section is devoted to an action plan and walking you through the steps that will truly turn the words on the page into real results. His story of how is book got started, a free e-book on his blog, serves as a great case study alongside the many other case studies, including how McDonalds has been using blogging to connect with consumers.

The most interesting thing about the book is the way it is written - like a blog! You don’t have to start with chapter one, you can just skip ahead to what really interests you. If you want background on what a ‘blog’ is, then go to that particular chapter section, if not, skip it. I had already begun implementing some of the things the book encouraged before purchasing the book because I read about the ideas on his blog, WebInknow, and I have seen tangible results.

We took his advice of issuing news releases to reach consumers directly and used PRweb to send out a release regarding our merchandise deal with T.O.K. - it has been seen over 90,000 times in 2 weeks, ended up in national newspapers and on national radio in Jamaica and multiple websites (just google ‘realvibez t.o.k.’ to see the result of just one news release).

I also tapped into social networking sites like Facebook and stepped up my blogging. That resulted in a paid speaking engagement at Boston College’s Entrepreneurship Society this past Wednesday and we made the front page of Section 2 the following day in the school paper - Realvibez: Creating a Caribbean Vibe on the Web, potentially reaching over 10,000 people on the campus.

If that isn’t proof enough that this book is worth every penny, then I doubt I can convince you to check it out.

My Verdict: Get a copy ASAP and check out his blog at http://www.webinknow.com

Filed under: Book Review, Marketing Trends, Strategy