Web 4.0: R U Ready?

Breakout session: Social media basics & core training

Serena Ehrlich, Social Programs/Viral Weaponry Leader at Startup Army

Serena’s interactive presentation style made this session of the PRSA-LA workshop on social media highly informative, but difficult to document. Thankfully, she uploaded her slides to docstoc.com, so you can see for yourself what she talked about.

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The New Rules of Marketing & PR

By David Meerman Scott

ISBN: (978-0-470-37928-8) This revised edition was published 2009 by John Wiley & Sons.

Take Away Message:

The Web allows real-time, many-to-many interactions between the public and the organization. Therefore, marketers need to think like PR pros and PR pros need to think like facilitators who engage the public in an ongoing dialogue.

REVIEW

Rules are tricky things. I tend to see rules as fixed, unchanging and rigid. So any book about rules, especially one about rules for marketing or PR where success usually comes by bending or breaking the rules is immediately suspect. But David Meerman Scott likes the rules he outlines in The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

Since the old rules, listed on page 12, guiding marketing and public relations are now obsolete thanks to the Internet, new ones are needed. I think for Scott, rules are designed to shape fair play. Since the game board has moved from analogue to digital, the rules of fair play must also change (and he presents new rules on page 25). Yet, rules have no meaning without authoritative enforcement, and the web remains a lawless frontier despite efforts to regulate and police online activity.

So why pretend? Scott needs rules to frame a more meaningful argument: that the professions of marketing (i.e. sales and branding) and public relations (i.e. image development and protection) are no longer distinct. Tactics that worked when television and magazines held sway are not going to be effective in the digital age. Scott’s rules serve to guide PR and marketing professionals through a new domain—he is a tour guide trying to explain the Wild West to Japanese tourists.

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Ten years ago, Neal Stephenson published an essay about the evolution of computer operating systems from a cultural perspective. The literati of the computer world consider this treatise, titled In the beginning there was the command line, essential reading. It is also a good starting place to think about the evolution of social media and collaboration tools, which are now as ubiquitous as operating systems. These tools may also be as poorly understood.

Stephenson’s argument: the open-source model to software development generates more reliable products. Why? The collaboration process that drives Linux, for example, is transparent, iterative and immediate.

At the midpoint of the essay, Stephenson compares Windows, Mac OS, and Linux to power drills. While the first two are Black & Decker and Stanley drills that serve most D.I.Y. types, Linux is a professional’s drill that is as ugly as it is stupid. The Linux user needs know the end goal and be skilled enough to maneuver the tool efficiently toward that point. Where we can be sloppy with our Goggle search terms and in our use of Windows or Mac OS, Linux needs precision.

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