Review by Brad Shorr:

More than anything, The New Rules of Marketing & PR ties things together. The book provides an easy to understand yet comprehensive view of the new online marketplace–a landscape that can appear quite bewildering, even to marketing specialists. With so many options at our fingertips (literally), where do we start? Blogs? Podcasts? Public relations? SEO? Paid search? Viral marketing? The list goes on. To make matters worse, technology is changing and new tools are developing almost every day.

In the early chapters, David takes a high altitude look at online marketing options, showing us how they developed, why they’re important, how they work, and why they work. In later “Action Plan” chapters, he jumps into the trenches and shows us how to actually use the tools and implement programs. Throughout, he uses detailed case studies to illustrate not only the programs but the amazing results they can achieve.

But it isn’t just the latest and greatest technologies that are crucially important. Public relations, for example, has been around since Gutenberg but for the first time is practical for a small company. Traditional PR was cost-prohibitive and dependent on unreachable key media contacts. But in the new world–

“…your primary audience is no longer just a handful of journalists. Your audience is millions of people with Internet connections and access to search engines and RSS readers.” (Chapter 5)

Today, public relations may be the single most underutilized tool in the marketing arsenal.

Another “old” technology David brings us up to speed on is the corporate Web site. In fact, the three most important points I got out of The New Rules of Marketing & PR have enormous implications on traditional Web development.

Those key points are–

1. The most important New Rule is CONTENT. Design is important. Technology is important. But without extraordinary content, you’re doomed.

2. Interruption marketing (think spam and pop-up ads) has given way to consumer-driven marketing. Yippee! “The Web is different. Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.” (Chapter 1)

3. The starting point for any New Rule program is to create customer personas. If you’re going to have extraordinary content that motivates buyers to take action, you’d better know your customers inside-out.

David explains how these three principles should influence not only your corporate Web site, but every other online program you undertake.

Thankfully, David is understandable as well as instructive. One reason I’ve enjoyed his blog for over a year is his conversational, entertaining writing style. He makes learning easy (which is harder to do than you might think). Anyway, his book is just like his blog–illuminating and fun.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR presents the most complete picture of any book I’ve read. For the marketing specialist, it will fill in the gaps. For the generalist, it will open up a whole new world.

Review by Jill Konrath:

By embracing the strategies in this book , you will totally transform your business. David Meerman Scott shows you a multitude of ways to propel your company to a thought leadership position in your market and drive sales – all without a huge budget.

From my perspective, the best thing about this book is that everyone can gain value from it. There are so many places you can start applying these new rules of marketing and PR. For example, I’m an experienced blogger, considered an expert in my field and already have a strong online presence. Yet I’m immediately going to start applying the lessons in Chapter 14: How to Use News Releases to Reach Buyers Directly.

Here’s what else I like about this book:

1. The author includes numerous examples from a variety of businesses in different industries & sizes that have all used these strategies for success.

2. The book shows you multiple venues to reach your buyers directly. This circumvents the high costs of mainstream media enabling firms who are running bootstrap operations to compete with the big boys.

3. The “how to” guidelines on leveraging news releases in a web-based world are excellent. You’ll learn how to create news on a regular basis, capitalize on various distribution services, focus on key words/phrases in your writing that are used by your buyers, and incorporate social media tags.

4. The insights on optimizing a website’s online media room for search engines is another easy-to-implement technique with high payback.

In summary, I guarantee you that your investment in this book will be paid back many times.

~ Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies

Review by Bhavana Musuluri:

I’m stealing one of the often used words in the book to define the book itself – remarkable. This book is fantastic and easy to read. As you read each chapter, the authors take you through each step in successfully marketing your products. This book is not filled with theories, but it rather cleverly explains each winning strategy which is relevant in this day and age, and then sums up each chapter with a list of things to do to implement the strategy. The best part is that anybody who is willing to invest time and brains can use this book as a reference and start creating value to their company immediately and of course build on it overtime. The book shows new techniques that doesn’t require an old-school marketing guru with tens of years of experience. In fact, a person with a little bit of creativity can use this book to REALLY get customers and sell their products.

Couple of other things that I liked about the book are the particular examples (other organizations/blog articles/etc) that were provided and the cartoons – who doesn’t enjoy a chuckle every few pages?

Absolute bang for your buck and once you pick up the book, you will finish it!

Review by Neil Davidson:

This excellent book is aimed at the 99% of the business world who are faintly befuddled by the strange world of youtube and delicious that they find themselves living in. It’s aimed at plumbers, hairdressers, lawyers and oil company executives; at people in large corporations and small businesses alike who are dimly aware that their working lives are about to change – indeed, have already started to change in disconcerting ways – and who don’t know what to do.

The premise of the book is that the old marketing is dead or dying. Gone are the days where simply throwing money at print or radio advertising guaranteed succees. Instead, you need to engage your customers. Give them reasons to come to visit your web site, and once they are there give them reasons to come back again and again. Turn your web site into a hub, stuffed with remarkable blog posts, videos and interviews. As the authors put it (they have a pleasing way with words) “ten years ago, your marketing effectiveness was a function of the width of your wallet. Today, your marketing effectiveness is a function of the width of your brain.”

“Inbound marketing” is clearly – and explicitly – inspired by authors such as Seth Godin and David Meerman Scott. But where this book differs is in its emphasis on hands-on advice. Not only is it inspirational, but it’s also brimming with practical wisdom. Sure, it talks about the power of Twitter. But then it gives you advice on how to choose a twitter handle. Sure, it talks about the rise of the superstar blogger and the death of the press release. But then it talks about how to decide whether you need a PR agency and, if you do, then how you should hire one. Sure, it stresses that your employees will need to learn new skills if they are to survive in this new world. But then it talks about what those skills are, what steps your employees need to take to get them and how you can track how they’re doing. Each chapter contains a checklist of things you should do, right now, to start improving your inbound marketing.

This is no dry textbook. It’s full of anecdotes, some from the usual suspects (Whole Foods, Zappos and Barack Obama) but from others too: accounting software, a shutter manufacturer and a PR firm among others. It’s well written, and there are cartoons too.

Inbound marketing – get found using Google, social media and blogs is an excellent, mainstream introduction to new marketing. If you want to dip your toes into the cold water of social media then buy a copy. If you know all about social media then you almost certainly know people who need this book. Buy them a copy from Amazon. They’ll love you for it.

Review by James Nichol:

On page five, bullet point three: Mr. Levinson states, “Traditional marketing is geared toward big business…. The soul and spirit of guerrilla marketing – is small business: companies with big dreams and tiny budgets.” However that was not my experience reading this book. Instead he seemed to promote laborious and expensive marketing tactics. I thought I was going to be reading a book about low / no-cost, surprise attacks, launched in the dead of night with no warning. Instead what I read was kind of stale, old school stuff.

For example; Chapter 3, The Sixteen Monumental Secrets of Guerrilla Marketing, starts with the sentence, “If you’re a guerrilla, these sixteen secrets are not secret to you at all.” OK, then why am I reading this book? Then the secrets end up being more general philosophy rather than tactics, such as commitment, investment, consistent, confident, patient, assortment, subsequent, etc., etc. In my opinion, he spent too much time making things rhyme and not enough into research into successful low / no-cost product launches or common themes and marketing techniques that sky-rocketed the success of the Zero to Two-Hundred-Mile-an-Hour companies. That’s what I call a 600 pound Marketing GUERRILLA.

The chapter on MiniMedia Marketing was mildly interesting but nothing new as of the fall of 2007.

Then you have MaxiMedia and everything here costs some big bucks, sorry Jay I’ll pass..

I’m not going to say that this book is without merit; it has good stuff in it if you haven’t been in the sales and marketing business very long. It’s a book that the novice can learn a good deal from, but more and more the younger aggressive person learns most of these things on the go and has picked up 90% of this stuff in a year or two in the business. If you are just starting or are unfamiliar with sales and marketing; then by all means get this book and dive in. However, the title Guerrilla Marketing implies something completely different to me than a book of general principles and tactics on the subject of marketing.

Review by Andrew Shaffer:

This 4th edition of the small business marketing classic is completely updated and revised as of 2007. The new edition is as relevant today as its original edition was over 20 years ago. The added e-marketing tips (advertising, blogs, podcasts, etc.) are accurate and useful. If you’re a small business owner and have not read this book, you need to order it today. I just finished an MBA marketing class, and the theories that we studied are covered in Levinson’s book in plain English–I wish I had read it before the semester began!

Review by Jill Konrath:

John Jantsch knows what it takes to create marketing that sticks and ultimately leads to quantifiable results. His up-to-date advice shows small business owners numerous strategies they can implement to create a systematic approach to marketing. For companies selling into the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace, pay particular attention to these chapters:

(5) Produce Marketing Materials that Educate: Corporate decision makers today are turned off by self-serving promotional materials. This books points out numerous ways you can create high value, educational marketing collateral that will really make an impact.

(6) A Website that Works Day & Night & (12) Automate Your Marketing with Technology Tools: Most small business owners have no idea how valuable their website can be. Why not? Because they’re not doing the right stuff. In this book, you’ll learn the basics you need to know in order to maximize technology for business growth.

(10) Earned Media Attention and Expert Status: To crack into corporate accounts today, it’s imperative to become a thought leader in your field – even if you’re a one-person firm.

If you’re just setting up a company, this book provides an excellent overview of how to get your marketing machine in gear. If you’ve been in business awhile, but you’re working too darn hard for the amount of money coming in, this book will be a good refresher.

Finally, I’d like to add that John Jantsch practices what he preaches. Several years ago John invited me to be a part of his Duct Tape Marketing Blog which has numerous experts sharing their knowledge on small business marketing. When the blog received recognition from Forbes & Marketing Sherpa, he leveraged that to get even more media attention, which ultimately led to more opportunities for him to grow his business. I’d suggest you study his website and personal marketing initiatives to really learn how to implement these ideas.

Well-planned marketing can take your company to a whole new level with a lot less effort. If you haven’t pulled together your strategic plan or started implementing, it’s time!

Review by Manny Hernandez:

To say “Duct Tape Marketing” is a great book is an understatement. As an entrepreneur who has founded two small companies, I found John Jantsch’s approach to help customers to know, like and trust you more to be intuitive, yet very powerful.

He got my undivided attention from the point he proposed having you first identify your ideal clients (as early as in page 5) and asking you to fire about 20 percent of your past customers, if they no longer fit into the picture of your current business. Now THAT makes sense and it is SO powerful: I could recall the occasions when I was spending time pursuing projects that were not a good fit for the goals of our company, but we still pursued them (“Hey! It’s business!”). Since I read that section, I’ve felt more comfortable not pursuing distracting projects.

He then proceeds to walk you through the discovery and delivery of your marketing message in a way that speaks to the heart of those ideal customers you identified early on. The rest of the book is packed with tactics to get that message in front of your target audience and help them contact you and refer you.

These easily are the best 300 pages I have read since I became a small business.

Review by R. Chatham:

This book tries to cram too much into each chapter, often breezing over incredibly deep topics in a way that is only confusing.

For instance, one chapter on data analysis mentions linear regression but doesn’t speak at all to what it is. If I had not taking a Quant course recently I would have been completely lost.

This seems to happen the most frequently at the ends of chapters. It seems as if they cover all the main points and then Kotler et. al try to cram all their other little notes and tidbits into overly dense paragraphs just before concluding.

Also if you’re a student who has to take the accompanying tests created by Prentiss Hall, expect the questions to come literally word for word from the test, rather than asking concept questions. I felt like I was back in gradeschool.

On the plus side, the book constantly gives breakout examples of the topic being discussed as applied in real life to actual businesses. Where many texts would continually reference the same handful of examples, the companies featured in this book vary widely in size, industry, and other features, giving a good, broad look at marketing as a whole, not just in the US but globally.

Review by David Pasley:

This was a required textbook for my graduate-level Marketing class. The book is way too wordy. It appears that each successive edition simply adds on more and more shameless corporate plugs that are not at all enlightening. You really feel like you are being constantly marketed to. There is good information, but you’ll have to skim past a lot of fluff to get to it.

Review by Jeff Lippincott:

I loved this book. Over the past year or so I have read quite a number of tomes regarding social media and social media marketing, but none until this one have been written in a planner or workbook format. This one is well written, well organized, and full of content. It has 14 chapters split into the following four parts or sections:

I. The Foundation of Social Media

II. Month 1: Prepare for Social Marketing

III. Month 2: Social Media Channels

IV. Month 3: Complete Your Plan

Two books similar to this one on how to put together a business plan are: “16 Weeks to Your Dream Business” (ISBN: 9780071588362, and “Self Employment: From Dream to Reality” (ISBN: 1563709228). And a book similar to this one on how to put together a fundraising plan is: “The Fundraising Planner” (ISBN: 0787944351). The instant book being reviewed touches on the marketing issues of social media, and then devises a systematic approach to putting together a social media marketing plan customized to your small business.

Each of the 14 chapters ended with a summary section. I found it very easy to cruise through this book by first reading the summary sections and then tackling the rest of the book after having a pretty good idea of what was being covered.

After reading this book you will have devised a social media marketing plan that addresses (1) platform, (2) content, and (3) interaction. You will have decided whether to use Technorati, MySpace, Socialvibe, Flickr, Facebook, Friendster, Linkedin, and/or YouTube. Technorati is the tunnel through which to learn more about the blog or blogs you will create.

So if you want to tap into the power of the Social Web through connected networks and consumer-oriented media, then I recommend this book as one of the tomes you seek out and read in order to build your company’s social media marketing plan. 5 stars!

PS. Take a look at the Search Inside feature at Amazon for this book. There you can access the book’s Table of Contents and see exactly what is covered.

Review by Robert G. Johnson:

I had been on the waiting list of Amazon.com for over 3 months waiting for this book to be released and it is exactly what I hoped for. I’m actually only 108 pages through it now as I “peeked” at all the self help guides that the author has in the appendix. I want to jump right in and get it going but Dave’s advice to take your time and learn the hows and whys is so important.

I was not looking for a social commentary on social media but wanted to know the ins and out, nuts and bolts, on how to implement a successful marketable strategy and this book does it.

Only this morning I actually went to the blog and sent an email to the author, Dave, and was surprised that within a few minutes he had responded . Talk about getting more than a book!!

What is so engaging is the author is energetic, evangelistic in his zeal to help others, and willing to share to make this journey easier for others to follow. It’s a step by step guide for an emerging dynamic field which is affecting us now and will do so far into the future.

I’m glad this book exists and is so affordable and even happier the author is willing and able to help us along.

Bob Johnson

Review by Shashank Tripathi:

After 10 years, this still remains a classic work in the marketing field, and perhaps a must-read for anyone in business. And no, unlike many reviewers I do not believe that Ries and Trout have ever managed to redo the glory of this book in their Laws of Branding, Laws of Internet Branding etc. Don’t expect an excruciating marketing treatise with elaborate case studies and What-If scenarios. Expect instead 22 capsules of business wisdom, or “laws” of common sense marketing with some brilliant examples from the real world to prove them. In this, the book excels and is to date the briefest and best argued work I have come across. However, given the passion with which some reviewers comment about this book I am inclined to offer a caveat — please don’t base your career around it. Although I love thin, in-your-face books such as this (great reading, great examples to bounce off) they also have a fundamental flaw: the fact that they attempt to shove “laws” on to the ever-morphing scaffold of the business of marketing that does not lend itself easily to codification, much less of an “immutable” nature. It would be a cinch to come up with examples that go against each law in the book if you really wanted. For instance, (1) Law of Leadership (better to be first than to be best) can be argued against with the theory of disruptions and how first-mover advantages do not always materialize. Why is WebCrawler not more popular than Google? Because Google is (way) better. (2) The Law of Sacrifice (that talks about focus, as do a couple of other similar if not redundant laws, including, well, the Law of Focus) would not hold much fizz in the case of many very successful conglomerates, especially in Asian countries. Imagine a company selling everything from oil to fruit juice to IT services, and still being a top brand in a country. Examples abound in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan. (3) The Law of the Opposite that advocates the definition of your strategy by considering the leader’s (also redundant with the Law of the Ladder, which essentially says the same thing) can be argued by giving umpteen examples of companies that shot from being No.2 to being No.1, some times because No.1 filed for Chapter 11. In such cases, emulating the leader could have in fact been detrimental. Etc. Anyway, despite redundancies across the laws, and the possiblity of counter-argument against most of them, this is a ripper of a read for the business intent that it was written for, and 10 years after its publication still as charming as it first was. Highly recommended reading, but keep your discerning senses about you. Noteworthy: Law of Perception (also Law of the Mind), and Law of the Category.

Review by :

Trout and Ries are two of the most far-thinking individuals extant in the world of marketing. However, to get the most out of their later works (and, as well as this book, I highly recommend “The 22 Immutable Laws of BRANDING” by Ries and his wife), it is best to read them in the sequence in which they were written. If you don’t understand “positioning” you may very well not follow the analytical process which continues with these “sequels”, as evidenced by some of the negative comments from readers. First, one has to differentiate the process of “marketing” by which is meant the bringing to market, or distribution, of a product or service, and “marketing” by which is meant promotion and advertising. Microsoft and USA Today are not successful because of their advertising or promotions, but because of the manner in which their products are distributed. What these books deal with is how companies promote themselves, not distribution channels which which create an advantage in a given industry. The books deal with the establishment of an identity, a position, which will be good for years to come, not with campaigns which may increase sales in a given quarter. Why these books are so important is because, if one doesn’t understand the basic concept of positioning, and the rules which logically follow it, one could easily create campaigns (or develop products to be promoted under a brand name)which actually harm or destroy the company’s position in the mind of the consumer. Books by Trout and Ries should not only be required reading for those in promotion/advertising, but for all executives.

Review by Adam Troy:

I have been in network marketing for over ten years, failing miserably. I tried this company and that company. Wasn’t going anywhere untill I bought this book and used it.

This book should be called “How To Become Brilliant on the basics” and subtitled “How To Unleash Your Potential in MLM.” It sure did for me.

Before reading “Your First Year in Network Marketing”, I thought I would be lucky to get 100 people on my list. After reading what Mark said, I easily came up with a list of over 2,000 and the bst part is that those 2,000 know 2,000 who know 2,000 who know 2,000 and so on. I think it is true that if you know three people, you know everybodyelse in the world.

The affirmations were great and got me thinking bigger. The scripts were a great start, although I have midified them since then.

Overall a great book by Mark. I wonder how many other failed network marketers would do well if only they read (and applied) this wisdom?

Review by cassandra uhl:

If you are just getting started in Network Marketing, you need this book. I recommend this to everyone in my downline.I also recommend “Self Wealth” by Mark, “Self Matters” and “Life Strategies” by Phillip McGraw and “Turner, Turner, Turner: The King of Network Marketing” by Glenn W. Turner.