The other day my mother, who was visiting from northern Wisconsin, kindly offered to drop me off at a local bookstore with my laptop while she shopped for shoes. Unfortunately there was no WiFi available, so I used the hour and a half to browse the marketing section. I grabbed a stack of books that piqued my interest and settled down into a cushy chair. I picked up the first on the stack and dug in before discovering that I knew the author, noted thought leader David Meerman Scott–or knew of him, more like. During my two-year stint as a copy editor for EContent magazine, where he is a contributing editor, I had read all his columns. I tore through this latest book of his, The New Rules of Marketing and PR How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing, and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly, in about 45 mins. I’m usually a slow, deliberate reader but I had limited time to decide which one of dozen books at my feet to purchase, so I really didn’t have time to waste.
In one of the chapters toward the end, his notion that today PR and search engine marketing are one and the same intrigued me, and I wanted to remember that and include it on my site. I had never heard that sentiment before, but I guess that’s why he’s a thought leader.
I didn’t have a notebook or pen (or, I later discovered, enough cash to buy the book, even though it is affordable), so when I got home I revved up my laptop and dowloaded his free ebook with the same title and grabbed a snippet on the importance of search: “Particularly when your buyers search, they use the words and phrases important to them. Once you’ve built an online relationship, you can sell into the needs and potential solutions that have been defined, but you need to help them find you first.”
And then I Wikipedia’ed “thought leadership.”
