The new rules of Marketing and PR

I have been reading this book by David Meerman Scott a lot recently.  It explains how marketing and public relations used to be quite separate concepts but have blurred into a new set of rules which combine marketing and PR together in a new online world of communication.

Marketing - old rules

• Marketing simply means advertising (and branding)
• Advertising needed to appeal to the masses
• Advertising relied on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message
• Advertising was one-way: company to consumer.
• Advertising was exclusively about selling products
• Advertising was based on campaigns that has a limited life
• Creativity was deemed the most important component of advertising
• It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win new customers
• Advertising and PR were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies and measurement criteria

Public Relations - old rules

• The only way to get ink and airtime was through the media
• Companies communicated to journalists via press releases
• Nobody saw the actual press release except a handful of reporters and editors
• Companies had to have significant news before they were allowed to write a press release
• Jargon was okay because the journalists all understood it
• You weren't supposed to send a release unless it included quotes from third parties, such as customers, analysts and experts
• The only way buyers would learn about the press release's content was if the media wrote a story about it
• The only way to measure the effectiveness of press releases was through 'clip books' which noted each time the media deigned to pick up a company's release
• PR and marketing were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies and measurement techniques.

The new rules of marketing and PR

• Marketing is more than just advertising
• PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience
• You are what you publish
• People want authenticity, not spin
• People want participation, not propaganda
• Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it
• Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web
• PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. Its about your buyers seeing your company on the web
• Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. Its about your organisation winning business
• The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media
• Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content
• Blogs, online video, e-books, news releases and other forms of online content let organisations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate
• On the web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred