I found my way to the Grain Surfboards Facebook page (12,000+ likes) and the @GrainSurfboards Instagram feed (50,000+ followers). Grain Surfboards engages with fans and shares what’s new. Because fans are excited to be engaged, they naturally help spread the company’s ideas—without even being asked. On Instagram, for example, Grain Surfboards posts get hundreds of likes and many comments and shares. The team regularly posts images of the boards they are building, of customer-created work, and, of course, images of surfing enthusiasts shredding atop the company’s gorgeous boards.
In this book, you’ll learn how to use tools like Instagram and Facebook in your business too. Social networking platforms are easy, fun, and powerful to use. It just takes a minute or two to shoot a photo, manipulate it with the filters, and share it with your network. With Instagram, images and videos do the talking, so even writing-challenged people can create awesome content.
In about 10 minutes of research on the Grain Surfboards site, as well as their Facebook and Instagram feeds, I made up my mind to purchase one of their boards. But I did more than that. I signed up for the four-day class on building a wooden surfboard held at the factory in York, Maine. When I read this description, I just couldn’t refuse this empowering opportunity: “Four days in, beautiful board out! You’ll get right down to it in this four-day class, beginning on Day 1 with a board that has pre-installed (by us) frames, chine and one railstrip. You’ll pair up with another student to build the rails of your board in the morning and your classmate’s that afternoon. Spend the remaining three days completing, shaping and sanding your board. It’s fast, but it’s fun and in only four days, you’ve got a shaped and sanded board ready for glass.” Sign me up!
It was an fantastic experience to build my own board. Many others share my enthusiasm, and they tell the story of their Grain Surfboards workshop via the company’s Facebook page. These posts further spread the word about the brand. My story? Four days to a beautiful 6′4″ Wherry fish model board, which I left behind to be finished with a fiberglass coating. When I went back to pick it up, I signed up for a second course to build yet another board.
The company has me hooked. Grain Surfboards has built a thriving business and become number one in its marketplace. And the online content is a primary reason for its success. The company doesn’t resort to paying for expensive ads in surfing magazines. It doesn’t focus on trying to get retailers to carry its product. Instead, it reaches potential buyers directly—at the precise moment when those buyers are looking for what it sells.
I did a search on Google for “wooden surfboard.” Less than a half-hour later, I had my credit card out to book a class in another state! Had it not been for Grain Surfboards’ content-rich website, beautiful images, detailed process information, and happy customer showcase, I would have quickly clicked away to check out other manufacturers. Instead, I spent thousands of dollars, rewarding a company that had treated me with respect and invited me into the wooden surfboard world.
The web provides tremendous opportunities to reach buyers directly, and you will learn how to harness that power. What was science fiction just a few years ago is common, even expected, today. Take a moment to acknowledge how incredible it is that you can instantly create a video stream using that small device in your pocket and connect to a service like Facebook Live, Instagram, or Snapchat to reach thousands of interested people who pay attention to what you are broadcasting. Or you can have a two-way video conversation with a potential customer on the other side of the planet. For free! Your mobile device is much more powerful than what the creators of The Jetsons imagined decades ago. Each of us has the ability to reach almost any human on the planet in real time. You can publish content—a blog post, video, infographic, photo—to reach potential customers who will be eager to do business with you.
There used to be only three ways to get noticed: Buy expensive advertising, beg the mainstream media to tell your story for you, or hire a huge sales staff to bug people individually about your products. Now we have a better option: publishing interesting content on the web, content that your buyers want to consume. The tools of the marketing and PR trade have changed. The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg or bug your way into opportunity are the skills of interruption and coercion. Online success comes from thinking like a journalist and publishing amazing content that will brand you as an organization or person it would be a pleasure to do business with. You are in charge of your own success.
The New Rules
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 (PR) agency, hundreds of thousands per year for print advertising and glossy brochures, and expensive participation at a dozen trade shows per year. My team put these things on our marketing to-do list, worked like hell to execute, and paid the big bucks for it all 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. We were working based on the rules of the past.
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 and information companies in the world), my team and I quietly created content-based 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 at online services such as Yahoo! and resulted 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 The Edge, about the exploding world of digital news. We made it freely available on the homepage of our website because it generated interest from buyers, the media, and analysts.
Way back in the 1990s, when web marketing and PR were in their infancy, my team and I ignored the old rules, drawing instead on my online publishing experience, and created a marketing strategy using content to reach buyers directly on the web. The homegrown programs we created at virtually no cost consistently generated more interest from qualified buyers, the media, and analysts—and resulted in more sales—than the big-bucks programs that the “professionals” were running for us. People we never heard of were finding us through search engines. We had discovered a better way to reach buyers.
In 2002, after NewsEdge was sold to the Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters), I started my own business to refine my ideas and teach others through writing, speaking at conferences, and conducting seminars for corporate groups. The objective in all this work was to help others reach buyers directly with web content. Since then, many new forms of online media have burst onto the scene, including social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest, plus blogs, podcasts, video, and virtual communities. But what all the new web tools and techniques have in common is that they are the best way to communicate directly with your marketplace.
This book actually started as web marketing on my blog more than a decade ago. I published an e-book called The New Rules of PR,1 immediately generating remarkable enthusiasm (and much controversy) among marketers and businesspeople around the world. Since the e-book was published, it has been downloaded several million times and commented on by thousands of readers on my blog and many others. (To those of you who have read and shared the e-book, thank you!) The first edition of this book was much more than just an expansion of that work, because I made its subject marketing and PR and because I included many different forms of online media and incorporated years of additional research.
This book contains much more than just my own ideas, because I blogged the book, section by section,
