Digital Marketing (and The Grateful Dead) Ft. David Meerman Scott

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Notes

The one and only David Meerman Scott joined Adam and Mark in the Data Basement to share how his data-driven journey helped him experience success. David is an Entrepreneur, Advisor, Keynote Speaker, WSJ Bestselling Author, investor, and Grateful Dead fan. He’s built a career on doing marketing differently, especially after experiencing companies doing the same old thing. He stands firm behind FREE content and wants younger marketers to do the same. Here are some highlights from their chat:

  • Facebook’s algorithm is dangerous because it’s incredibly polarizing; It’s responsible for dividing people based on their beliefs and is tuned to make people angry.
  • There’s no better time to use your middle name than now—SEO!
  • Facebook proves people spend more time interacting with content when they’re angry.
  • It’s essential to make names unique for online search—company names, book titles, children’s names.
  • David has written 12 books and delivered 500 speeches in 47 different countries on all 7 continents. He’s sold over 1M books!
  • David’s book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, published in 29 languages, is now in its 8th edition because the industry keeps changing.
  • Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead was written by David and Brian Halligan, Founder and Executive Chairperson of HubSpot.
  • HubSpot is projected to close to $2B in 2022. David is on their Advisory Board.
  • The Grateful Dead allowed fans to record their concerts. Fans could give cassette tapes away or trade them. This is an example of free content with no registrations. They built a community from free content.
  • Many B2B companies say they give away their content for free but put a registration form in front of it to get sales leads. That is not free; it’s a coercion technique. Giving truly free content is more effective.
  • David wrote his book “Fanocracy” with his daughter, Reiko Scott.
  • Newsjacking is the art of injecting your ideas and content into a breaking news story and generating tons of media coverage and social media engagement. You can take advantage of current events to promote your brand. “Newsjacking” is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.

 

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Transcripts

David Meerman Scott:

The Facebook algorithm is incredibly polarizing. It pushes, in this country, my country, the red team against the blue team, people who believe in the power of vaccination against people who don’t believe that vaccination or I don’t know what they think about vaccination, that’s evil, or whatever it is. And that divide is dangerous. And the Facebook algorithm is, I believe, responsible in many ways for that divide because it’s tuned to anger, it’s tuned to get people to spend time… And Facebook has figured out, that you spend more time when you’re angry interacting with content than when you’re not angry, and they sell more ads against content that is driven by anger.

Adam Kerpelman:
Welcome back, everybody. It’s The Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Mark Richardson:
I’m Mark.

David Meerman Scott:
This is David.

Adam Kerpelman:
Welcome back for the hang in the data basement. Thank you for joining us. And special thanks to our guest this week, David Meerman Scott. You are what I would call a man who wears many hats.

Mark Richardson:
Hats are worn.

Adam Kerpelman:
Author, entrepreneur, investor, advisor. Yeah, I’ll let you take it from here in terms of introduction and-

David Meerman Scott:
Yeah, sure. I’m David Meerman Scott, and I started on a Wall Street bond trading desk. I was terrible at it, but I loved the data that bond traders used. So I spent 15 years in the financial information business, companies like Dow Jones and Thompson Reuters, and got fired in 2002 from my job at Thompson Reuters. And a horrible job market, so I had to figure out what to do and ended up going out on my own. And since then, I’ve written 12 books and delivered something like 500 speeches in 47 different countries, all 7 continents, including Antarctica. And my books are in 30 languages and have sold just about a million copies in total. Some other data, probably 1500 blog posts I’ve written. And I particularly like Twitter; it’s one of my go-to’s. And 125,000 followers, something like that, on Twitter. So, I’m happy to be here to talk data, talk marketing, and maybe talk the Grateful Dead too. That’d be fun.

Adam Kerpelman:
… Yeah. Well, so the first thing I want to say, this is maybe just a fun one to chase right out of the gate from the data standpoint; you use your middle name in blog posts, introductions, and stuff like that.

David Meerman Scott:
I do.

Adam Kerpelman:
You said for SEO reasons.

David Meerman Scott:
Well, I mean, some people accuse me of being pretentious. And that might partly be true, but it’s not just because I use my middle name. So, more than 20 years ago, back in the 1990s, when search engines… And it was pre-Google, that Yahoo started to become important; I Googled my name, David Scott. David Scott, two very common names. I quickly found out there was a David Scott who walked on the surface of the moon. There’s a David Scott, who’s a member of Congress from the state of Georgia, still is a member of Congress from the state of Georgia. There was an Ironman triathlon champion named David Scott. So I was like, “That’s bad data.” And I needed to figure this out. So, I started using my middle name, which is Meerman. And it was one of the best business decisions I ever made because all my books are published under my full name, David Meerman Scott, got my website, and whatnot. Every speaking engagement I’ve ever taken, they referenced my full name.

David Meerman Scott:
So, it’s been a fabulous, fabulous decision to do that. And I see that mistake nearly every day when somebody writes a book, and they’re all excited about it, and they tell me what the title is. And I’m like, “Dude if you Google that title, you won’t get your book. You’re going to get all kinds of other stuff.” Or, they think of a company name. And they’re obsessed about making sure that they can trademark that company name, and sure that’s important, but I think it’s even more important to make sure that you can be found in the search engine. So, that’s something that I always share with people any product name, company name, and even your children’s names, figure out how you can make them unique in the world.

Adam Kerpelman:
We can put that in our data-driven parenting series.

Mark Richardson:
Exactly.

David Meerman Scott:
Data-driven parenting is, checking the SEO on your child’s name before you decide to give them that name.

Adam Kerpelman:
SEO on your child’s full name. The other trick is just to have a mess of the last name like I do.

David Meerman Scott:
That’s one approach. Yeah, that’s one approach. Or, I know some people with first names use alternative spelling. So parents who name their children use alternative spellings, putting wise in the place of eyes, and so on. That’s another approach I suppose you could use.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah, there are a lot of Mark Richardsons out there. So, I definitely throw the Allen in there.

David Meerman Scott:
There you go.

Mark Richardson:
Throw the middle name in there. And for yours, I mean, I think there’s a musicality too that Meerman allows you to enjoy. David Meerman Scott, there’s a really nice ring to it.

David Meerman Scott:
It works. It very, very, very much works. And it’s so funny because I started doing that 25 years ago. So, my college friends, my high school friends don’t know that… “What in the world is this Meerman thing going on?” Because they never knew my middle name. But everybody else who’s met me since, that’s just me, that’s who I am. So, there’s no better time to start than right now, if that’s something you’re thinking about.

Mark Richardson:
Was there a period of imagination or brainstorming around when you were moving from Reuters into your speaking and writing career? Take us through some of the thoughts that you were having, and what was it that made you want to strike out on your own versus going back into the big data ecosystem?

David Meerman Scott:
So, in the late-1990s, I was so fortunate that I had already spent 15 years in the real-time financial news industry. So, I knew how real-time news worked, and I knew how real-time data worked. I knew how bond traders used the information to buy and sell, and make money, make millions of dollars. Super, super interesting stuff. And so, when the web came around, my line in the sand was 1995; that’s when Netscape went public. So, that’s when I put the line in the sand that says, “Hey, this is when the web has become mainstream.” Even though less than 20 million people were accessing the web at that point. I’m like, “This isn’t new. This isn’t different. This isn’t unique. This is just a new way of looking at real-time data.” So I was fortunate that I already had that experience.

David Meerman Scott:
And, the companies I was working for, I’m like, “Let’s just create content to do our marketing. Let’s write press releases and put them out on the news wire, not just to reach the press but to reach potential customers. Let’s create a newsletter and post it for free online. Let’s create and publish information of value on our website.” And the marketers who I was working with and the marketers who were above me in various organizations that I worked for were all very traditional. And in fact, in one of the organizations I worked for, the biggest expense in the marketing budget was postage, which was used for mailing direct mail messages. And so, I decided I wanted to be an agent of change, and I just pushed, pushed, pushed to create this new form of marketing in the companies that I was working for. And I basically got fired for it.

David Meerman Scott:
And so, I said, “Well, this stuff works. I already know it works. It’s free essentially to create content on the web.” And so, I just started to write and speak about it. And, I started my blog very early, 2005. I started speaking about this topic back in 2002, when I first started going out on my own. And my first book came out 2005. So, it was all… My first non-fiction book, which was called Cashing in With Content, the first book about content marketing, came out 2005. And, it was dead obvious to me, but at that point it was still really a really hard slog to get people to think in this new way about marketing, because at that time marketing was about buying advertising, and the marketing was about trying to… And public relations was trying to convince members of the media to say nice things about you. And, yeah, those two things could potentially still work. But, I was all about, “Hey, just create cool stuff and the world will find you.”

David Meerman Scott:
And so, that was a bit of a hard slog to get people to fall in line around that. And I’m glad that I kept it up, because I wrote a couple of different books, but then a book I wrote called The New Rules of Marketing and PR came out in 2007 and the sun, and the moon, and the clouds all aligned in 2007. So you may remember 2007 is when Twitter started. 2007 was when Facebook went from only students to anybody could use it. 2007 was the first iPhone.

David Meerman Scott:
2007, these ideas really started to take off. And my book came out June, 2007. And, it caught the publisher by surprise, because we basically sold out the book in the first couple weeks. They went back for another printing, went back for another printing, went back for another printing. And, it ended up being six months on the business week, best seller list when it first came out. And it’s now in the eighth edition, which was published in May of 2022. So, I continually update it because things change. And it’s also published in 29 languages, which is remarkable that all of these ideas work in so many different languages. But people absolutely began to realize that, yeah, there is a different and better way to do marketing. And it is about getting yourself out there by doing interesting things.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, we call it hacking the attention real estate.

David Meerman Scott:
Ooh, there’s a good way to describe it. It’s also a good book title. I would imagine that you would own the SEO for that title.

Adam Kerpelman:
I’ll Google it right after this.

David Meerman Scott:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. I mean, hearing your story, the cool thing about getting to talk to you at this point is I feel like at this point, Mark and I should be thanking you for that 10 years of toil, because by the time that we both graduated college, I dropped out a film school, because I was like… I was the first wave to hit film school with digital cameras.

David Meerman Scott:
Oh, right.

Adam Kerpelman:
And so, we got there for the first day and they were like, “This is a camera.” And we all looked at each other and went, “This thing. We’re paying $80,000 a year for this. Forget it.”

David Meerman Scott:
Nice. Nice.

Adam Kerpelman:
So I bailed and started a marketing company. And then, immediately it was clear that digital was the edge, but the groundwork you did made it so that we could go sell packages of websites, and videos, and stuff, people on there… Us just knowing to go have a website as the way to break in when you barely have any money was the cheap real estate.

David Meerman Scott:
Well, what’s super interesting about this was very, very early some forward thinking professors started to adopt The New Rules of Marketing and PR in class. And, a book came out in 2007, there were professors in 2007. And, very quickly there were hundreds and hundreds of universities and colleges around the world who were adopting this book as the textbook for class.

David Meerman Scott:
And, if I can swing it, I would swing by a class and say a few words, answer some questions. And I remember, very early, 2008, I was at a university and they were teaching The New Rules of Marketing and PR in class, which was great. And this young woman came up to me and she was in tears and she said, “Oh my God, I’m so sad.” I’m like, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” And she said, “I’m a senior. And, I finally learned these ideas in this class. And, I feel like I’ve wasted my entire college education, because every other professor is teaching me how to do magazine ads and television commercials.” And I’m like, “Don’t worry. You got the grounding. You know about the new rules now. Just go out there and make it happen.”

David Meerman Scott:
But, I accused professors of malpractice. I said, “If you’re telling people that the only way to do this is to create TV ads, and do magazine ads, and do direct mail campaigns, you are guilty of malpractice and you should go to jail.” And, I was upset about it, because imagine these people… In some cases, it’s their money, they worked and they slave away, they work at Starbucks in order to save up to pay the tuition, or their parents are paying the tuition, or they’re taking out massive loans and they’re being delivered the wrong information. And so, it made me super angry. But, we’ve passed that now, because people recognize that online is super important, but there’s still a lot of schools that overwhelmingly teach the old rules.

Mark Richardson:
When social media was still treated like a dalliance and not a legit advertising venue.

David Meerman Scott:
Right. Yes.

Adam Kerpelman:
Which is still happening. Now it’s just TikTok.

David Meerman Scott:
It is still happening.

Adam Kerpelman:
That they treat as the-

David Meerman Scott:
Yeah, it is still happening.

Adam Kerpelman:
… The answer is to look where the kids are hanging out, not to ignore where the kids are hanging out.

David Meerman Scott:
Well, especially if your target market is kids.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah.

Mark Richardson:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
Especially.

David Meerman Scott:
Yeah. You think for a college professor, it would be pretty self-evident, but.

Adam Kerpelman:
The counter to that possibly is that all of the traditional, if we want to say it in a more generous way than old school, way of doing stuff is, “What helps me pitch my ideas up the chain inside of a giant organization right now?”

David Meerman Scott:
Right. Right.

Adam Kerpelman:
Because they want to hear it in terms that they understand that have nothing to do with analytics.

David Meerman Scott:
No, I totally get it. I totally get that you should have a grounding in traditional forms of advertising. And I’m not suggesting that that’s not the case, but that could be one class-

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, one class. Three credits.

David Meerman Scott:
… Where the textbook is Ogilvy on marketing… Or sorry, Ogilvy on Advertising, which is a great book. And then, you just get the grounding, get the fundamentals, and then move on to make sure that you understand how these new approaches work.

Adam Kerpelman:
So, nevermind the new book, I have a specific book I want to talk about, which I think you said it’s Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.

David Meerman Scott:
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. You got it. So, I co-wrote Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead together with Brian Halligan, my very good friend. In fact, I was at a Grateful Dead tribute band concert last night with Brian. Brian is the co-founder and executive chairman of HubSpot. And, I’ve been on the board of advisors of HubSpot since 2007. And, we’ve done some great work. I helped them grow that business from 0 customers to 140,000 customers. They’re going to do pretty close to 2 billion in 2022, which is a remarkable thing for a modern marketing sales and customer support CRM that’s grown so quickly. And the other co-author is Bill Walton, the NBA basketball Hall of Famer, who is probably the world’s biggest Deadhead, not only because he’s seven feet tall, but because he’s been to 850 Grateful Dead concerts.

David Meerman Scott:
And, all three of us noticed that the Grateful Dead did some really interesting things to build fans. And many of them were very counterintuitive. One of my favorite examples, and so this is an important concept that we’re still using today as data-driven marketing people is, they allowed fans to record their concerts. And, that was radical. It’s still radical to be able to… You could, and still can with the current iteration of the original members of the Grateful Dead, they’re now touring as both Phil Lesh and Friends and Dead & Company, those bands, you can still bring in professional level recording gear, there’s a power strip you can plug into, you can get a special seat behind the mixing board. And I don’t think they do the seats anymore, but they did during the Grateful Dead’s time. And, you could record the shows, you could make… Early days, it was cassette tapes and then MP3 files. You could give the cassette tapes away, or you could trade them with people. The only rule is that you’re not allowed to sell them.

David Meerman Scott:
And, this is how people like me became a fan of the Grateful Dead. It was with free content and no registration required. And, Brian, and I, and Bill Walton noticed that this and many other things that the band was doing was super interesting. Then we looked at how companies market today and the companies that we’re doing Grateful Dead style marketing tended to do better than the companies that didn’t. So, I’ll give you an example of that in our world today is many B2B companies when they do their online marketing, they say, “Oh yeah, yeah, we give away our content. We make it totally free.” But they put a damned registration form in front of it, because they want to generate sales leads.

David Meerman Scott:
So, if you’re offering a white paper and the white paper has a registration form where you’re asking for a minimum of an email address, but in some cases, name, company, email address, “What’s your budget for a product like ours? How many kids do you have? What’s your annual income?” Whatever you ask for, that is not free. That is a coercion technique. That’s like, going up to somebody in a bar and saying, “Oh, I think you’re really cute. And I’d love to date you. Give me your business card.” That doesn’t work. Well, maybe it works for some people, but it’s never worked for me.

Mark Richardson:
60% of the time it works every time. Right?

David Meerman Scott:
Yeah. So anyway, the idea of making content totally free, and then running the data to figure out what that provides, suggests that for many companies, that’s a way better approach than the coercion technique of dangling something for free, which isn’t actually free, you’re required to give something away ahead of it. It’s not your money, it’s your data, it’s not free. And so, that comes from the Grateful Dead. And, it was super fun to write that book, and get those ideas, Grateful Dead style marketing ideas out into the marketplace.

Adam Kerpelman:
So, the Dead are also responsible for a thing that I constantly bring up in the course of different marketing pitches, which is the posters.

David Meerman Scott:
Yes.

Adam Kerpelman:
Which is the thing that Pearl Jam, one of my favorite bands, replicated. I have a collection of Pearl Jam posters from shows that I’ve been to, because they always have a one off that’s a little more expensive than most people will pay for, but it’s one of 600.

David Meerman Scott:
Yes.

Adam Kerpelman:
And it’s always by some local artists and it’s an easy scheme to replicate as a content strategy. And I love it. And it feels special.

David Meerman Scott:
It does. And, the Grateful Dead did that very early on in the mid-60s, when they founded, poster artists like Stanley Mouse would come and they would design beautiful, quirky, interesting posters for each show. And then, people thought they were great and began to collect them. In the early days they weren’t selling them, they were just interesting advertising for the show. But, some of those early posters sell for tens of thousands of dollars now, which is-

Adam Kerpelman:
It’s even in galleries and stuff.

David Meerman Scott:
… I mean, galleries, right? Who would’ve fought, Jerry Garcia turning over in his grave, thinking about that. And so, they’re still doing exactly what you say that Pearl Jam does is, if you go to a Dead & Company show, almost always, there is a uniquely done poster with a local artist or an artist that is a numbered version of it. And, you can buy one at the show and they have one of those mailing tubes you can roll it up into and keep. And, some people even bring these interesting little slings that you can put over your shoulder to hold your poster as you’re dancing at the show. Other people buy multiple copies of the poster and you see them on eBay the next day. It’s a very, very interesting ecosystem.

Adam Kerpelman:
So I actually have an interesting thing that’s this maybe a bridge into the modern world from the Dead piece. You, as a Deadhead, which means that the band that you followed didn’t have restrictions on the MP3s for this stuff.

David Meerman Scott:
Yes.

Adam Kerpelman:
What was Napster like for you? That level of file sharing, did you jump into that as soon as it was available? Because it was a great way to get boot legs, or?

David Meerman Scott:
I did not jump right into Napster for a variety of reasons. I focused a lot on… Well, I bought CDs. And then, when the transition happened, I had some very early iPods, because I liked that format, the Apple format. And, it was easier for me. I’m not a tremendous techy type to be able to manipulate data. And I don’t like it. I don’t like spending minutes or hours to manipulate stuff. So, I like the way that apple set things up to make it easy. And so, in the early days when it was just the iPod, I could easily get my music onto the iPod device. And then, a little bit later when they created iTunes, that was also made super easy. And I didn’t mind spending 99 cents to get a song. And then, of course later with… I’m on Apple Music now. And, I really love that, because it’s small fee and I can listen to anything I want. I don’t have to own it.

David Meerman Scott:
So I did not do that whole Napster ecosystem. But, I give Napster credit of absolutely beginning that revolution, which is still playing out. And, what that means is that musicians now need to think about their business in a very different way. And their business isn’t just selling records like it was 20 or 30 years ago, their business is, “How can you build a touring machine? How can you do what Pearl Jam, the Grateful Dead, or Dead & Company now does, create merchandise that people really want to have? How can you build fans? And, use social networks and online content to engage those fans?” And, in the case of Dead & Company, they’re still allowing people to record concerts, but they’re also professionally recording concerts.

David Meerman Scott:
So, making those available through the various surface services. And I use iTunes, but then, also they do professional level multi-camera videos of every show that you can stream. In some cases, they make them free. In other cases, some of the shows are paid. But, what a great way to earn more income. And for a super-fan who wants to watch every show, even the ones they can’t be at, that’s a great way to be able to experience the band. And, one of the things that Grateful Dead has always done, and they were founded in 1965, so what is that? 50, whatever, 6 years later, it’s crazy, they don’t repeat set lists. Every song they play is played in a different way, it’s a jam band. So people want to see multiple shows. They want to go again, and again, and again. And, I think that that’s a interesting thing when it comes to marketing as well is, how can you mix things up? How can you build fans in a way that people want to come back and learn more from you?

Mark Richardson:
I think that’s super relevant to, I think, what we’re seeing in super-fan platforms like Patreon right now. It’s not enough to have people listening or watching your YouTube videos or listening to your stuff. But now, to really monetize your audience, you almost have to go to this deeper level of providing exclusive content, exclusive news, and opportunities to your audience, to really monetize because the music now is basically the giveaway. You don’t make money off the album.

David Meerman Scott:
Yes.

Mark Richardson:
Or the streams.

David Meerman Scott:
A 100%. A 100%.

Mark Richardson:
You make money on the tour tickets, the merchandise, or the memberships, these exclusive deals that creators and musicians are… I mean, there’s a lot of cool stuff that’s coming out of Patreon too. I love their business model.

David Meerman Scott:
I think there’s a lot of cool stuff that’s happening right now. And what it means is that all those bands have to do it yourself, DIY it. And, they need to figure out, “Okay, well, how can I truly be on social?” Rather than just have somebody from the label say, “Oh, we’re going to be in Cleveland. Buy your tickets here.” But truly, show us what you’re doing, make us a part of your lives. And that’s a way to build fans.

David Meerman Scott:
A book I wrote, it came out in 2020, is called Fanocracy, another title which I own… The SEO perspective, I own fanocracy.com. I wrote that book with my daughter, Reico, she’s a mixed race millennial woman who loves K-pop and is an emergency room doctor, which is way different than I am. And, we have a very, very different approach to this idea of fandom. Her favorite band is called Stray Kids, they’re a Korean K-pop band, and she’s going to see them in New York in a couple months. And it’s great, interesting music. It’s very different from the Grateful Dead, but they have built enormous fan bases, K-pop bands, it’s sweeping the world. It’s so interesting.

Mark Richardson:
We’re talking about evangelist and loyalty. I think, I look at K-pop as the pinnacle of evangelism.

David Meerman Scott:
It’s utterly fascinating. Utterly, utterly, utterly fascinating. She’s also a Harry Potter fan. I mean, so very, very interesting to see these different fandoms. And that’s why I wanted my daughter to work with me on this book Fanocracy, because I can talk about the Grateful Dead, but that band’s been around for 56 years. And, okay, so now she’s all of a sudden talking about K-pop, which is a bunch of 20 something dancing and it’s super interesting. I forgot what the question was though.

Adam Kerpelman:
The point of the podcast is to forget, so.

David Meerman Scott:
Oh, okay.

Adam Kerpelman:
We’re Good.

Mark Richardson:
The segue I wanted to hit… Sorry, unless you have something, Adam. You touched on Fanocracy. And I love coinages as a marketer, I love portmanteaus and weird spoonerism to make a new brand name. And you had a great blog post about making a company name memorable. And one of the things we touched on, searchability obviously, we talked about that earlier, but a cool word you leveraged in this blog post was newsjacking.

David Meerman Scott:
Yeah.

Mark Richardson:
So, I wanted to touch on that briefly and see if there was any examples of good newsjacks recently.

David Meerman Scott:
Sure. So, I did not coin the word newsjacking, it was actually used in Britain in the 1970s to describe hooligans that would go and steal newspapers from the newspaper vendor, go around the corner and sell them. But I adopted the word newsjacking to refer to how a breaking news story always breaks in the same way, it’s like a bell shaped curve. And, if a news story is breaking reporters, editors, and the general public is looking for more information on that news story. And so, if you create interesting content that is within your area of expertise and push that out there, that has potential to generate interest from the media, because you’re showcasing your expertise. And, it’s such an amazing concept, newsjacking, that that word that I popularized is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. And, when they wrote about it and put it in the dictionary, they put my name against it, which is cool.

David Meerman Scott:
So yeah, I mean, anyone listening in right now, I mean, I’m no one special, anyone listening in now, can create a word Fanocracy, or newsjacking are two that I’ve done, create a word. And in both of those cases, I own the URL. But, own a word that then becomes super popular. And then, if anyone does a search for newsjacking, I mean, guess who’s at the top of the search results? It’s just really a super cool way to do marketing.

David Meerman Scott:
And an example of that is, I’ve been doing a lot of writing about the social media company’s algorithms, especially the Facebook algorithm. I believe the Facebook algorithm to be the most destructive technology ever invented. I believe the Facebook algorithm is incredibly polarizing. It pushes, in this country, my country, the red team against the blue team, people who believe in the power of vaccination against people who don’t believe that vaccination, or I don’t know what they think about vaccination that’s evil, or whatever it is. And that divide is dangerous.

David Meerman Scott:
And the Facebook algorithm is, I believe, responsible in many ways for that divide, because it’s tuned to anger. It’s tuned to get people to spend time. And Facebook has figured out you spend more time when you’re angry interacting with content than when you’re not angry. And they sell more ads against content that is driven by anger. And I know it’s a superficial description. But anyway, when Musk made the run for Twitter, I was following it really carefully. And, he’s been talking a lot about free speech on Twitter. And so, it was a Monday, it was about a month ago, I forget exactly the date. But, it felt like Twitter was going to accept Elon Musk’s offer that he apparently made over that particular weekend.

David Meerman Scott:
So, I wrote a blog post that came out around nine o’clock in the morning on that Monday. And, the title of my blog post was The Right for Free Speech is Not the Same as… Oh no, Attention Elon Musk: The Right to Free Speech is Not the Same as the Right to Social Media Amplification. And that blog post blew up. It was remarkable because it was the right content at the right time. Seth Godin, the most popular marketing blogger in the world cited that in his blog post that particular day. I had outreach from the Wall Street Journal and a couple of other publications who wanted to interview me about the Twitter algorithm and Musk’s ideas around free speech versus algorithms and so on.

David Meerman Scott:
So, that’s the idea of newsjacking is that you think about how can you, everyone listening in to this episode, has expertise that will be in demand at some point in the future. And what newsjacking does, which is so interesting is, it takes what most marketers and PR people do, which is try to get attention when they’re ready, and instead flips it around and generates attention when the world is ready, when the world is ready for your expertise.

Adam Kerpelman:
Unfortunately, we’re out of time. I promised I would get you out of here. I have three more post-its in front of me of stuff that came up that I want to talk about. We didn’t even get to AI. And, we talked about the algorithms. I have a lot to say on the Facebook stuff.

Mark Richardson:
I wanted to talk about Antarctica.

Adam Kerpelman:
It’s all super interesting.

Mark Richardson:
That sound like a cool [inaudible 00:33:14].

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah.

David Meerman Scott:
Yeah. I did spend a week in Antarctic. I was on an expedition ship. I delivered a presentation on that expedition ship while it was in Antarctic water. So therefore, I am the only professional speaker I’ve ever met who’ve spoken on all seven continents. And, I went with Clark Expeditions, it was a fabulous, fabulous time. We camped on the continent one night. So I have slept in Antarctica. Went kayaking, it was just absolutely fabulous.

Adam Kerpelman:
So if people want to find you around the web, what’s the…

David Meerman Scott:
As we discussed at the top of the show, I am the only David Meerman Scott in the entire planet. So you can Google my name.

Adam Kerpelman:
Oh, Google.

David Meerman Scott:
You could also go to newsjacking.com, if that is a topic that interests you, or fanocracy.com, if that’s a topic, growing fans is a topic that interests you. On Twitter and some of the other social networks, I am DMScott that’s D-M-S-C-O-T-T.

Adam Kerpelman:
Okay, Seth. Well, thank you for joining us.

David Meerman Scott:
My pleasure. It was good fun.

Adam Kerpelman:
Thanks everyone for listening this far. This has been another episode of The Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Mark Richardson:
I’m Mark.

David Meerman Scott:
I’m David.

Mark Richardson:
Thanks for listening to The Data-Driven Marketer. Our show is produced by Jessica Jacobson and Dan [inaudible 00:34:44]. This episode was edited by Steve Kosh. The Data-Driven marketer is sponsored by NetWise, a Dun & Bradstreet company. Any views or opinions expressed in this episode do not represent the views or opinions of NetWise or Dun & Bradstreet.

 

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