New Rules of Marketing and PR

New Rules of Marketing and PR
David Meerman | 2007-01-01 00:00:00 | | 305 | Finances and Money
At the height of the dot-com boom, I was vice president of marketing
at NewsEdge Corporation, a NASDAQ-traded online
news distributor with more than $70 million in annual revenue. My
multimillion-dollar marketing budget included tens of thousands of
dollars per month for a public relations agency, hundreds of thousands
per year for print advertising and glossy collateral materials,
and expensive participation at a dozen trade shows a year. My team
put these things on our marketing to-do list, worked like hell to execute,
and paid the big bucks because that’s what marketing and PR
people did. These efforts made us feel good because we were doing
something, but the programs were not producing significant, measurable
results.
At the same time, drawing on experience I had gained in my previous
position as Asia marketing director for the online division of
Knight-Ridder, then one of the largest newspaper companies in the
world, my team and I quietly created content-based, “thought leadership”
marketing and PR programs on the Web. Against the advice
of the PR agency professionals we had on retainer (who insisted that
press releases were only for the press), we wrote and sent dozens of
releases ourselves. Each time we sent a release, it appeared on online
services such as Yahoo!, resulting in sales leads. Even though our advertising
agency told us not to put the valuable information “somewhere
where competitors could steal it,” we created a monthly
newsletter called TheEdge about the exploding world of digital news
and made it freely available on the homepage of our Web site because
it generated interest from buyers, the media, and analysts. Way back in
the 1990s, when Web marketing and PR was in its infancy
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