One of the most interesting sources of content covering product management and product marketing topics is a webinar series by Pragmatic Marketing. The series covers a myriad of topics related to product management on marketing more generally. One of my favourites is a recent Webinar held by David Meerman Scott on the ‘New Rules of Marketing and PR’. Scott has also published a book of the same title which I haven’t had the chance to read, yet.

Scott’s view on Internet marketing in general can be summarised with his belief that ‘You are what you publish’. So, for example, if you have a website that takes a long time to load just to show you TV commercials of the company, then you are slow and boring. If, however, you have a website that has cool content on racing bicycles, then you are cool and know your stuff about racing bicycles. Overall, the argument makes a lot of sense to me. Scott then gave the hilarious example of how IBM market their mainframe computers using YouTube: great stuff.

This general approach pervades much of Scott’s thinking. He extends it to areas such as press releases. For example, let’s say you publish one press release a month that contains a lot of marketing jargon. This means that a buyer has a low probability of finding this release accidentally via, say, Google and even if he found it, he would have a hard time understanding it. You are what you publish: can’t be found, can’t be understood. The opposite example was to publish releases much more frequently and to use actual buyer language in the release. This would then lead to a much better chance of somebody finding the article and then actually being able to understand it, too.

As an aside, Scott has also done some statistical analysis of the words used by PR/marketing specialists so frequently that they are essentially devoid of meaning. Top of the list of the words frequently used in press releases were: “next generation, flexible, robust, world class, scalable, easy to use” you get the gist. My personal favourite in that list is “enterprise class”.

Overall, I suggest you check out both the Pragmatic Marketing webinar series and Scott’s work, both are very intriguing.