Could you create a World Wide Rave?

David Meerman Scott, best-selling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, is at it again. His new book, World Wide Rave, is a quick read with an important message. If marketers create helpful and interesting content, people will find it and pass it along. It’s great advice, but most marketers I know struggle to follow it. Some are willing, but can’t seem to come up with ideas that fit their business. Others don’t know how to persuade the boss. Some of you, need to hear how it’s working for others before you want to take a chance. If you could use some examples to prod you on, this book is for you.

I got hold of a review copy and read it cover-to-cover, which isn’t hard, because the book is short, well-written, and beautifully designed. It’s also loaded with ideas for what to try in your own business, based on stories told by successful marketers who’ve gotten the word out using their own World Wide Rave or who have handled an Internet crisis–either successfully or unsuccessfully.
Packed into its 186 pages, David brings examples from organizations as well-known as the Harvard Business School and WebEx, and other companies that I’d never heard of before reading this book.
There were so many times that I found myself nodding along when reading this book because I give the same advice myself. As just one example, David has a great section on using real, trained journalists to help you with your content development. It’s an important and thrifty tip, because journalism seems to pay less each year.
I’ve told even small businesses to do such a thing–you’d be shocked how easy it is to recruit a stringer at the local paper who is paid next to nothing. You can double her salary and let her walk around interviewing your sales people for customer stories, your product development team on what problems they are solving, and your PR people for the community outreach they do. If your business is really small (maybe just you), you can have the journalist interview you by asking a few questions about what your customers care about when you talk to them.
I have just one bone to pick with the book–that David is too down on ROI as a metric. Yes, he’s dead-on when he says that too many green eyeshade types stifle every new idea demanding ROI that they couldn’t provide you for any of the old stuff. It’s true and that’s dumb. But I think we should be striving to show ROI whenever possible–one of the nice things about the Internet is that it is much more measurable than older marketing methods.
But that’s just one small quibble with a terrific book. If you think you know everything about social media marketing, I bet you learn something. But more importantly, this is the little book that you can slip to your boss. If this doesn’t win over your boss, look for a new one.