David Meerman Scott on Making Marketing Great Again

Steve Wershing:       
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing, and I’m very excited about this episode. We have a guest I’ve been hoping to get on for a long time, David Meerman Scott, who left corporate communications ten years ago to start pioneering in this new idea of social media, a way of circumventing all of the traditional gatekeepers and reaching out directly to your customers and clients. Since starting that, he’s become something of a guru, and is a world-acclaimed speaker, and consultant and strategist in communications and social media. His first book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, has now sold over 350,000 copies in 28 languages, and since then he has nine more books to his credit.

In this episode, we’re going to go through a lot of information very quickly about some fascinating concepts that can help you promote your business to clients, including things like newsjacking, how to hijack the headlines to get people looking at your business, how to create a worldwide rave for what you do, and we’ll end with his new project, called Sonic Branding, how to create a logo essentially in sound, to become associated with your business.

I think you’ll really enjoy the episode. I enjoyed doing it a lot. There’s a lot of information crammed into this little 30 minutes. So, let’s get right to it. Without further ado, David Meerman Scott. David, thank you so much for joining us here on Becoming Referable.

David Meerman Scott:
Hey, it’s my pleasure. It’s always fun to speak with both of you.

Steve Wershing:
I’ve been a big fan of yours for a long time and really enjoyed listening to you at FPAB a year or two ago. I think so much has changed in the marketing world and that directly affects how advisors can get to meet new people. One of the most interesting concepts of yours is the idea of newsjacking, and how advisors can sort of get noticed by leveraging current events. Could you tell us a little bit about what newsjacking is and how advisors can leverage it?

David Meerman Scott:
Yes. Absolutely. What’s really changed in the world now is that buyers are in charge, and I think advisors know that. They can go to the search engines and search for something they’re interested in, they can ask their friends and colleagues on social network, so the challenge is how can you be in front of them at the moment they’re looking. One of the great ways to do that is this concept I call newsjacking, which is when you look for what’s going on in the news, and then you put your take on that news into the marketplace by doing a video, by doing a blog post, by pushing something out on Twitter or LinkedIn, you know, whatever social network you might be active in.

And then, especially for advisors who work in a certain geography, for example, I happen to live in Boston and my financial advisor is here in the Boston area, if you happen to have a lot of your business come from a certain geography, then you can reach out to the media, as well, in your local area.

So, the way it works is that when a story breaks, that’s important to your business, journalists are looking for somebody to quote in that story. Consumers are perhaps looking for a product or service related to what’s going on in that story. For example, if the US government were to suddenly change some regulatory aspect covering, let’s say, 40lK plans or SEP plans, or IRA plans, that you could then immediately write a blog post or shoot a YouTube video. And I’m talking like, right now, and push that out within moments after the regulatory change, advising people what that change means.

Now, that will do a couple of things. Number 1, it will show your existing clients that you’re on the ball, because you could email your take on that to them. But you can also then, use that, if you push it out through a social network of some kind, like either your own blog or YouTube or LinkedIn or whatever, then you have an opportunity to influence people who are just learning the news and saying, “Oh wow, what does that mean for me?” Same thing, what’s going on right now as we’re doing this recording is that interest rates have been creeping up, so what does that mean? Push your thoughts out into the world when the moment is right, and then the media may want to quote you and you will get noticed. But it’s a technique that most people don’t do and most advisors don’t do, because they’re on a schedule that they plan out ahead of time.

Read more