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 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 Drew McLellan:

Who would have thought you’d ever hear an engineer encourage failure? Well, author, engineer and IBMer, Mike Moran does in his new book.

This book does more than make the case for a more nimble and carefree attitude. In today’s supercharged marketplace, especially on the web, marketers cannot afford to wait for perfect. They need to track and react to the consumers quickly and adjust as they go.

Moran encourages listening and watching consumers and taking their lead. The book is an easy read, broken into manageable chunks of information. The best part, in my opinion, is the third section. Moran offers not only encouragement but suggestions on how to bring this new way of thinking into a corporate climate.

Well worth the time and money. I can’t imagine you could read this book and not do a few things better, smarter and more profitably.

Review by Stoney G. deGeyter:

I absolutely love Mike Moran’s take on Internet marketing. Do It Wrong Quickly is not about how to do Internet marketing wrong, it’s about how to not get caught up in having to do it right so that you’ll do something now. Doing something wrong is far better than doing nothing right. Doing something wrong quickly is far better than doing something right slowly. The bottom line is that you simply need to do something.

DIWQ is full of well-thought out internet marketing knowledge. Mike covers all the things that you should be doing (wrong, if necessary, but always quickly at first) to get your Internet marketing campaign up and running. While many of us that have been around Internet marketing for a few years may not need the refresher in how to do Internet marketing, we definitely can get something out of Mike’s book.

The concept of “doing it wrong quickly” is repeated throughout the book, not as a redundancy, but as a reminder of how we can simply start doing various aspects of Internet marketing without having to worry about doing it right right away. The Web changes that need.

Thanks to Mike, I’ve got a whole new philosophy. Just start doing. If I you do it wrong quickly, you can do it right later… Once you know what you’re doing to begin with.

Review by Robin N. Uncapher:

Will books be replaced by blogs? Social Media 101 is a blog in book form. While there’s some good information here, the book lacks narrative, mixes cliches with some worthwhile tools and serves up a lot of scattered information.

The longer I read Social Media 101, the more I wondered if author Chris Brogan had read a book lately and realized that what works in an interactive medium looks like a mess on the printed page. Readers of blogs find their minds wandering after 800 words. Book readers expect more than a bunch of ideas that flashed through someone’s head. Moreover book buyers expect a product that provides more value than something free. Much of Social Media 101 reads like a stream of conscious conversation. Brogan starts with “Above all else people,” gives us a few cliches and then moves on to “People like to be engaged.” As he skips from topic to topic the book gets worse. A chapter entitled Velocity, Flexibility, Economy includes a blurb on Google’s smart phone, Flexibility, a blub on various applications and Economy, descriptions of things like Skype which reduce the costs of many jobs. The fact that the author, publishers and editors all okay’d this (probably because the topic “Social Media” is such a draw) is pretty sad.

I know that everyone is dying to find out more about social media and what they can do with it. Unfortunately what readers’ need is a thoughtful, well organized tool that will help them put together a strategy. This book of tips won’t cut it. The author never bit the bullet and took the time to write a real book from the notes in his blog.

Review by Sacramento Book Review:

Chris Brogan is a social media genius, but unfortunately, the book is not. In fact, it seems to be nothing more than a collection of scratching-the-surface blog posts (not even the best ones, as far as I can tell) with no rhyme or reason as to why they’re included in the book. Along these same lines, there’s little, if any, logic to the organization of the book. Had Brogan presented a better framework or context into which to organize the posts, it probably would have been much easier to get some value out of them. Another problem in reading this book is that Brogan often refers to other Web sites, and while it’s easy to click over to those while reading online, it’s a disruption to do so when trying to read a book.

Those who want to give it a try, though, will find parts and pieces of Brogan’s social media values and beliefs on things like building relationships, branding, and strong communication.

Overall, this is a book that sure takes a lot of pages here to say very little. Stick with the blog, or if your curiosity kills you, consider finding the free version of this piece at the author’s Web site.

Reviewed by Allena Tapia

Review by Martin Reed:

Angela doesn’t promise you overnight success if you follow her advice. This proves her credibility. Indeed, she actually states that success will not happen overnight and that anything short of a long term commitment will yield mediocre results.

This book could easily have been a piece of propaganda arguing that all brands need an online community and that they offer nothing but huge benefits. Angela convinces you of the realities in this book, though. Besides repeatedly stating that communities take time to develop, she also covers some of the nastier sides of community building – abusive users. She’ll tell you over and over again just how much hard work community building is, and how you need to have personality, tact, an amazingly thick skin and a strong work ethic. I couldn’t agree more.

Here’s what I love about Angela’s book. It’s not just her advice and experience you are getting. During the writing process, Angela openly canvassed the opinions of others involved in community management. For example, in the chapter about how to accept and respond to criticism, Angela tells you what she does and then tells you what others do. The result is a book that is richer and more valuable.

Angela’s book isn’t full of theories, facts and figures. It’s not an academic work. It’s just full of advice, backed up with examples. Her experience shines through.

Angela knows that community managers work differently – they have their own opinions as to what works and their communities are unique. Angela doesn’t pretend that her book will make you an expert. She is honest – she simply tells you what has worked for her (and others) and offers you encouragement to go out and find what will work for your community.

Martin Reed

Community Builder

[...]

Review by Justin P. Fenwick:

Discovering the possibility in community and the work that it requires is a two fold approach not often taken. No wonder online communities fail. Angela Connor takes a look at both in her new book “18 Rules of Community Engagement: A Guide for Building Relationships and Connecting With Customers Online.” Instead of providing us a watered down pipe dream of community online, Angela takes you step by step through some of the work necessary to work towards growth and strength in your own community. It is both a humbling and exciting read; Angela expresses clearly the learning curve she is still on while managing a local online news community [...] of over 11,000 members. There is no ifs, ands, or buts about it, this work is new, unfinished, and never ending. “You can’t force community. You can build it, foster it, cultivate it, and shape it. You can nurture it, believe in it, and support the members who make it what it is on a daily basis. But you can’t force it” (pg. 7).

Reading though the book, I got a tangible sense of what I could do to manage an online community. I am reminded of the reality that this is real work that takes real time and without that – you have nothing. I appreciated Angela’s advocacy for both alignment with an organizations goals for having a community and some emphasis on advisory from the members themselves. Although I’d appreciate more on the latter. The most influential section was that on recognizing and respecting the culture of the community you manage. Culture, as she mentions, is something that is in some ways out of your hands. You have to take the time to learn and study the community creating itself in front of you and let that inform your work. Many lessons transfer offline, but not many examples in the book emphasize the opportunity that exists offline for further connection and development.

The structure of the book into short sections make it an easy read. Occasionally the stories skip around, like on page 76, “I recently found myself torn about whether or not to ban a longtime member who had been pushing the envelope and testing the limits for months…Once he began publicly mocking the rules and posting blogs challenging my authority, I had no choice. He later came back using one of several profiles he’d created which were apparently for the sole purpose of creating chaos.” We don’t hear how the situation was managed after that. Online communities, unlike physical ones, create a strong opportunity for anonymity and new identities. This stands as an issue unresolved.

This was a good read that left me with a new level of intuition afterward. This speaks to the approachable nature of the book. I didn’t feel an urge to take down notes like most books of this type but just read and absorb. As a offline community practitioner, its lessons serve well here too with a little bit of translation.

I’d recommend this book to anyone actively engaged in any online community setting either as a manager, designing, or as a top member looking to understand what they are working with. It’s where we will all find ourselves someday anyways, right? We all need a better understanding that for the first time in a long time, you have to deal with individual people. Angela helps us do that.

Great excerpt on the 90-9-1 principle (pg. 11):

1. If you want to increase quantity of activity in your community, it’s more effective to increase the total population who visit your site than to get current members to participate more (not that you shouldn’t do both, but the former will typically be more effective than the latter).

2. If you want to increase the quality of activity in your community, focus your efforts on that 1% who contribute the most.

3. If you want to find out what the total reach is of your community, be sure to count the 90% or so who are spectators as well as the 10% who are posting.

I love how the structure of an online environment helps bubble down some of the essentials of any community. I will carry these three in my back pocket as solutions: (1) Add people (2) Cultivate your best (3) Keep track of those impacted by or are on the sidelines of the community.

justin fenwick

[...]

creative community consultant