David Meerman Scott's Blog, page 71

I love that the new Kindle Matchbook will cost me thousands a year in royalties

This morning, Amazon announced an October launch of Kindle MatchBook, a new program that will allow people who have purchased print copies of a title to get the same title as a Kindle ebook for a nominal price, ranging from free to $2.99.

I figure this will cost me $4,000 a year. And I just love that fact(!!). Let me explain.

As an avid reader this is great news

I’m happy to have the ability to read paper books at home and then when I travel, bring the ones I am part way done with on my trips and to read on my Kindle.

For example, I am now reading the hardcover edition of Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration in preparation for my trip later this year to Antarctica. I like the paper version when I am at home, especially with books like this one that have maps and photos. But this weekend I’m on the road, so I’d love to have this book, which I already own, on my Kindle. In the past, I’ve sometimes double-purchased, but not always. Now, with Kindle MatchBook, I’ll get many more books in both formats.

As an author, I love this even more

I’ve gotten dozens of emails from the readers of my books who want to have both print and digital of the same title. They tell me they own the print version and ask if there is anything I can do to get a free digital version for them.

Alas, no. There is nothing an author can do. The online booksellers like Barnes & Noble (Nook), Apple (iBook), Amazon (Kindle) and the like, working with publishers, control pricing and distribution.

As an author, I want people who purchase my content to have access to it in any way they want. I suspect many authors will complain because the think an approach like this will take money out of their pockets because people willing to pay full Amazon price for both a Kindle edition and a print edition will now pay less. Actually, that’s true!

The benefits of happy readers exposed to your books who might by your next one far outweighs the downside financial aspects.

In the case of my bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing and PR which has sold more than 300,000 copies over four editions, I guess some 20% of copies sold since 2007 are digital. The percentage of digital editions vs print keeps increasing over the years so those selling now are likely higher than 20%.

Here’s some math: If a (wild guess here) quarter of my digital sales for The New Rules of Marketing & PR are people who also own print, that means 15,000 copies sold to people who already paid once for the content. At, say. a "typical" 20% author royalty on a $9.99 ebook we’re talking $30,000 royalties over seven years for people who have already purchased once, which is about $4,000 per year that I’d give up under this scenario.

Yes, I am thrilled to make my most avid readers happy in exchange for a few dollars less in my bank account. Because I know, as a reader myself, that happy content consumers come back for more. I’ll certainly make more in the long run on future book sales than I’d lose by getting people to pay twice.

Thank you Amazon for Kindle MatchBook.

This is a lesson the music business forgot

Let’s remember the challenges facing the music business as the world goes from CDs to digital music. The music business is in turmoil because executives did the wrong things in response to digital music, like sue teenagers.

Rather than clamp down and live in the past the music executives, instead we authors, publishers, and booksellers like Amazon need to put customers first.

But I do not have enough time

It’s just an excuse for inaction.

“But I do not have enough time to start a blog.” (I’ve heard this one hundreds of times.)

“I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I do not have enough time.” (This one is a classic.)

“But I do not have enough time to exercise.” (Okay, then.)

Of course you have enough time! You just need to prioritize.

Hey, you know what? It’s totally cool to just say no to blogging, or writing a book, or starting an exercise routine, or any other of the many things you think you “should” do.

But if you really want to do something, it is really simple to find the time. What are you spending time on today that you could eliminate?

For example, stop watching television.

Were you the first to see Miley Cyrus twerking this week because you watched the VMAs live? Do you follow Game of Thrones or Downton Abbey? Do you catch all the Boston Red Sox games? Then you have time.

According to Nielsen, the average American spends 158 hours each month watching television(!!). That's 1,896 hours per year. Damn. That would be enough time for an awesome book. You want a six-pack? Exercise instead of watch TV.

It’s your choice. You can do anything you want.

The New Rules of Sales and Service

For the past decade, I’ve been evangelizing the new rules of marketing and public relations and so have many of you.

Prior to the Web, generating attention meant buying expensive advertising or convincing the media to write or broadcast about us. But now we’ve got a better way, generating attention by publishing information on the web so people find it while searching with Google and other search engines and discover it because people share on social networks.

Over the past decade the biggest challenge in getting these ideas accepted has been fear. People are reluctant to change. There has been a huge disconnect in what people actually do as consumers and what they focus on as marketers and entrepreneurs.

Even though nearly everyone turns to search engines when they research products and services and they ask their network of friends, colleagues and family members for advice, many still insist that their target market is "different". These fearful marketers who are resistant to change still invest an inordinate amount of time and money on traditional interruption advertising. They still focus on traditional pitching based media relations. They are using the old rules to try to generate attention.

But many of us have made tremendous progress in marketing and public relations. If you’re reading this, thank you for being a part of the revolution.

First marketing & PR and now Sales & Service

At the same time, the ongoing communications revolution has profoundly affected how sales and service is done. Now, people research products and organizations they might do business with directly rather than relying exclusively on traditional B2B and B2C salespeople and processes.

Just like the way that online content is the primary driver for successful marketing and public relations, online content is quickly becoming a dominant driver for sales and service as well.

However, most organizations are still using traditional selling and service models that were developed decades ago.

From my perspective, sales and service is about five years behind marketing and public relations in adopting the strategies of reaching buyers directly with content.

The traditional B2B sales model is broken

Early in my career, I worked as a sales representative at a Wall Street economic consultancy. Back then the salesperson had the information and therefore the power in the relationship.

If the buyer wanted information about how the product worked, they needed to come to me. If they wanted to negotiate a discount they had to come through me. If they wanted a customer reference to speak to, they had to come through me. If they wanted to talk to the founders of the company, they had to come through me. I was involved from the very beginning of the relationship and most of the leverage was with me, the sales rep.

But now, because of the tons of information on the Web, the salesperson no longer controls the relationship. Now, the buyer can check you out themselves. They can find your customers and read about what you do on their blogs. They can reach the founders directly via Twitter and LinkedIn. Buyers actively go around salespeople until the last possible moment and then come into negotiations armed with tons of information. Now our buyers have the leverage.

But most sales organizations are built and run as if it were still 1989. The traditional B2B sales model is broken.

Brian Halligan, HubSpot CEO, agrees

Over a few beers, on several sun-soaked days this summer, I had opportunities to explore these ideas in detail with Brian Halligan, HubSpot CEO. HubSpot is an all-in-one inbound marketing software company that helps companies get found. Like me, Brian was also a sales rep early in his career and he rose to run large international sales teams. And like me, for close to a decade Brian has evangelized new marketing through his writing and speaking.

“The way people shop has really changed,” Brian says. While marketers have been first to adapt to the new realties of the Web, delivering information that helps them get found, Brian agrees that salespeople and sales management are reluctant to change.

“Sales teams are resisting the inevitable change and they need to get over it and lean into it and embrace it,” Brian says. “A good example of that is how so many companies today still don't publish their pricing on their website, which is just kind of ridiculous. I think you just need to get over yourself and change the way you think about selling and really change the whole process.”

Brian sees the skill sets of successful salespeople as quite different than when we were bag carrying sales guys years ago. “Rather than your cold calling ability, it's much more about how smart you are and how you can solve buyers problems and have a real conversation with them,” he says. “The world of sales is changing in a very positive way. As leverage has shifted to the buyer because of the Web and social media, vendors need to get their act together and embrace it to really delight customers. The friction associated with customers telling the world about how happy or unhappy they are has been dramatically lowered. Delighting customers has a much bigger impact today than it ever has because it's so much easier to for people to spread the word that they are happy.”

Content drives sales and service

Much like the way that content – blogs, information-rich sites, videos, images, social networking, and the like – has quickly become an essential part of marketing and public relations, now content is coming to the forefront of the sales process and the service model too.

As buyers move through the sales cycle, they self-select information that will help them, perhaps a blog post here, a webinar there, maybe an ebook to read on the train ride home. Salespeople can’t hoard this information like they used to because its all available on the Web, so the smart ones have transformed themselves into a sort of information broker, serving up the perfect content to each buyer at the right time.

On the service side, once someone is signed up as a customer, information delivered at the right moment makes for happy customers who renew existing services and buy more over time. And happy customers talk up companies on in social networks.

While marketing is the provision of content to many potential customers, sales and service are now about the provision of content to buyers one at a time based on their needs.

Introducing Signals, a HubSpot Company

Today at the INBOUND13 conference, Brian and HubSpot cofounder Dharmesh Shah introduced a new platform called Signals. This is a new tool for salespeople from a new company being run as a startup within HubSpot.

You can get a free version of Signals here.

Signals, HubSpot’s first offering beyond the marketing space, is a Google Chrome based notification tool that tells sales and service representatives when and how to engage leads and customers, showing real-time notifications based on “signals” from emails you’ve sent, your website, your CRM, and social media interactions.

“We started HubSpot to replace annoying, interruptive advertising with inbound marketing: marketing people love,” Brian says. “But the customer experience doesn’t end with marketing. Today's buyers behave differently, and that means you need to transform how your organization not only does marketing, but also how you approach sales and service. We believe that people on the front line of sales and customer service deserve tools that make their interactions with customers, prospects, and leads more relevant and effective.”

Signals is an application that sits on top of your other apps such as your Browser and email client. “When a prospect opens your email, you’ll get a signal that will pop up,” Brian says. “When that potential customer clicks on a link, you’ll know that they clicked on the link. And it pops up and tells you when they're on your site.”

Signals also extends to social networks like LinkedIn so you might get a signal that your potential customer just changed their job title on LinkedIn, valuable information that you can use in the selling process.

“The Signals product is designed for the sales rep, not for the VP of sales,” Brian says, citing the many sales teams that use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms optimized for sales VPs to manage sales reps rather than for sales reps to engage customers. “Signals is designed not to manage salespeople but instead to enable that sales rep who gets involved much later in the process and who is dealing with a potential customer who has a lot more knowledge than he ever had. It enables the salesperson to have good set of conversations and to move them down the funnel in a much more efficient way.”

Get Signals

Brian Halligan presenting at #INBOUND13 on August 20, 2013

Time to transform sales and service

Brian and I see tremendous parallels between the world in 2006 when he founded HubSpot and I was writing The New Rules of Marketing and PR and today.

Seven years ago we both started evangelizing the ideas of Inbound Marketing that are used by thousands of organizations today. But back then it was new. And it was scary.

Now it is time to transform sales. It is a new world and it will be scary.

I’m very interested in your thoughts on the transformation of the selling process. Please leave a comment or shoot me an email.

I’ll be writing about these themes in the future and am looking for examples of organizations and people who have made this transition. Please let me know if you've got a story to share.

Disclosure: I am marketer-in-residence and a member of the advisory board at HubSpot. Brian Halligan is a friend and we wrote a book, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, together.

Make your client look good

On the speaking circuit, the audiences I’ve addressed have suffered through some terrible introductions of me.

It’s a bummer for an audience, anticipating a keynote speaker, to suffer through a bumbled intro. It makes the people who organized the event look unprepared. And as a speaker it means I’ve got to pump up the energy, because I’m starting on an audience downer.

I’m sure you’ve been in the audience for such a thing. You know, a company executive wants the privilege of making the introduction of the keynote speaker. The event planner writes up a few paragraphs and because they are “busy,” the executive looks at it for the first time as they stroll to the podium. The executive then proceeds to mispronounce things and stumble over words. For example my middle name, Meerman, trips people up (it rhymes with “beer man)”.

While it is no fun for the executive to stumble on stage, I especially feel for the event planner. They have spent months organizing just the right program, picking speakers, and orchestrating the event minute-by-minute only to have the beginning flubbed.

So after having thought about this problem, I created a short introductory video that the event planner can choose to be played immediately prior to me walking out onto the stage.

Direct link to David Meerman Scott keynote speaker introduction on Vimeo

Make my client look good

My clients are the event planning committees that choose to hire me as a speaker. As I considered the trouble I frequently encounter with introductions, I realize that poor introductions make the event planners look bad. Well, I figured that’s a problem I might be able to solve.

The video saves the conference organizer from having to find someone to do the intro but I created it so that it is still possible to have someone talk about me prior to running the video. This is important because some conferences have sponsors for keynotes like mine and part of the sponsorship includes the opportunity to introduce me. The way this might work is the sponsor says something like: “I first read David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR five years ago and I learned...” In other words, the sponsor could still talk about my ideas and then immediately following that, the video introduces me.

Make your client look good

How about you? What small additional service can you provide for free to make your client look good?

Thanks to my speaker coach Nick Morgan and to Shana Bethune and Dave Jackel of Shave Media who worked with me on the video.

The Best Way

Over the weekend, I drove from my home near Boston to New York City to pick up my daughter who had been there for a summer internship. I’ve driven the roughly 225-mile trip a bunch of times and have worked out a pleasant, non-stressful route I like, much of it on parkways that do not allow commercial vehicles rather than interstate highways.

This trip we wanted to stop along the way to have lunch with my brother and his family, requiring a detour. So I fired up the GPS system to help me navigate to meet up with them at a place not along my usual route.

The fastest way

The GPS gave me the fastest route: Via the Cross Bronx Expressway and Interstate 95. But for me, this route would be terrible!

Wikipedia says the Cross Bronx Expressway “is one of the main routes for shipping and transportation through New York City… known for its extreme traffic problems; on a typical day 175,000 vehicles travel on the six lanes of highway.”

Competing with eighteen-wheelers on a New York City superhighway? No thank you!

My GPS was optimizing for time. But of course, that’s only one consideration.

The most enjoyable way

I ended up using Google Maps on my iPhone to pick a route using the West Side Highway, Henry Hudson Parkway, Hutchinson River Parkway, and Merritt Parkway. These are all much quieter passenger car only roads that meander through heavily wooded areas. It was a pleasant trip with no stress.

My route took two minutes longer according to the GPS.

So which is best?

“The Best Way”

This got me to thinking about “the best way.” In everything we do, there are always different factors to weigh when considering any course of action.

I’ve often found that what the “experts” say is best is not the way I prefer. Going my own way has helped me enjoy life and spend time with those who are important to me.

How about you? Do you take the “best way” or your own way?

Working for a passionate entrepreneurial CEO

No boss is perfect. Each has strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve found there is a great difference between hired CEOs and founder CEOs. I’ve worked for both. The choice of which one to work for is an important career consideration.

Entrepreneurial founder CEOs

Founder CEOs are people who are incredibly passionate about the companies they are building.

I have a deep respect for anybody who is able to create a vibrant enterprise out of nothing. Imagine the feeling of success in building an organization that supports 100 or 1,000 families and whose products and services benefit many more? Wow!

I’ve learned a great deal by working for founder CEOs and highly recommend that you can learn a lot too.

What an entrepreneurial boss expects from you

Founder CEOs work long hours and expect the same from those who work for them. They have an incredible passion for their enterprise and expect the same from those they employ.

Working for a founder CEO is usually different than working for an established enterprise with a CEO who is a hired, professional manager.

As Seth Godin says in his blog post today Choosing to be formidable: "No one has all the answers. No, we want someone who is magic about to happen." Founders have already proven they can make magic and we are gravitated to them.

While being a part of that magic can be an amazing experience for an employee, there is a downside. Many founder CEOs believe their opinion is right for every business decision. Many are reluctant to delegate or to take the opinion of others in the organization.

People who build large enterprises from scratch are like parents raising a child. The founder sees the enterprise from the very first day grow into a living, breathing, thriving enterprise that can stand on its own. What an accomplishment! But it is tough to let go.

Some parents call their kids at college every day and make decisions for them well into their kids’ adult years. The same happens with entrepreneurial CEOs who look over your shoulder at every decision and second guess every choice you make.

That’s why so many venture capitalists and or boards must eventually replace founders with a hired CEO to continue the growth of companies.

By all means grab that opportunity to work in a growing enterprise run by a founder CEO. But if you are smothered and unable to make decisions on your own, you might need to move on.

About Your About Page

In my experience, most “about” pages on blogs and personal websites suck.

That’s okay if you want to be anonymous. But if you are writing a blog or creating a site to promote your ideas, then you need a great about page.

I'm particularly amazed when someone writes a terrific blog but fails to say who they are at all because there isn’t an about page! Or they say a little, but it has no relationship to the content of the blog: “I’m a Sagittarius and love the Boston Red Sox.”

Many people don’t even have their name on their blog.

Your about page is an essential element of personal branding. Don’t ignore the opportunity to tell the world about you.

Your personal brand

You should include a photo (of you, not your dog), a bio or some personal facts, and contact information.

Often when people visit a blog for the first time, they want to know about the blogger, so it is important to provide background. This is very important for corporate blogs where you should tell readers who you are personally as well as your affiliation with your employer.

It is usually best to avoid the templates that blogging software comes with to create your about page because it has categories that you probably don’t want to use.

Third person or first?

Here is what my about looks like now.

I’ve changed my own about page a bunch of times from the more familiar first person: (“I am a marketing strategist...”) to the more formal third person (“David is a marketing strategist...”) and back again.

My about page too long so sometime soon I hope to find time to edit it for brevity... But that's the point of this post, its so easy to put off working on an about page. But it is important to take it seriously.

Your about page is your virtual calling card. Make it work for you.

BIG media and small media

My friend Biagio Carrano points us to an interesting quote from Marcelo Bielsa, an Argentine football (soccer) coach who has managed football clubs and also the national teams of Argentina and Chile.

Bielsa, known for his lengthy press conferences after matches where he answers every last question posed to him even if it takes many hours says: “Every section of the media should get the same attention from me, from the capital’s most prominent TV channel to the smallest newspaper in the provinces.”

BIG media and small media

I frequently witness media relations professionals discriminate towards large, famous media. They spend inordinate effort pitching big media and ignore the little guys.

I’ve been inside strategy meetings where people will talk for an hour about how to reach a particular Wall Street Journal reporter. Yet the same people in the same meeting reject requests from independent bloggers for an interview.

Yes, I know that time is valuable and sometimes it is impossible to help every reporter and blogger with their stories. But I also know that the little guys break news and in many markets have influence way beyond their raw numbers.

I’ve seen both sides of this. I’ve scored a 15-minute interview with the CEO of General Motors. And I’ve been turned away by tiny organizations of a dozen employees. Go figure.

photo credit: Alejandro Vasquez Nuñez via photopin cc

How Boeing used real-time communications during the 787 Dreamliner reputation crisis

Imagine your newly launched product, one that hundreds of millions of people around the world are aware of, suddenly has safety issues forcing the product out of service with customers and disrupting tens of thousands of people’s lives. That’s the communications challenge Boeing faced when the 787 Dreamliner encountered battery problems early this year.

Airlines around the world had been eager to take delivery of the new plane because it is Boeing’s most fuel-efficient airliner. Regular readers of my blog may recall that I attended the Boston launch event and wrote about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and airline passenger choice.

Battery fire problems

When several 787 Dreamliners suffered fires on board in early 2013 related to its lithium-ion batteries, the U.S. NSTB and the Japan JTSB launched investigations leading to a grounding of the world’s commercial 787 fleet.

Boeing was quick to take a strategic approach by creating real-time content to share freely through digital channels and social media to educate and inform constituents around the world.

I had an opportunity to connect with Gary Wicks, who manages much of the digital communications activities for the Boeing Commercial Airplanes unit to learn how he and the team used real-time content to keep constituents up to date on the situation.

“This was an unprecedented situation for us,” Gary says. “No one expected the airplanes to be grounded. So we looked at who are the key audiences? Who do we need to communicate with? It was certainly customers, employees, and third-party experts who were being asked to comment on this situation, but also the flying public and government officials.”

Real-time content

Gary and the team created content to help clarify issues through factual information. For example, a page about the 787 Electrical System includes basic information about airplane power and details on the 787 systems - in text, print-ready graphics, and video. They used their Twitter feeds, including @Boeing and @BoeingAirplanes to get the word out.

“Our best content is providing information that only we can provide,” Gary says. “It has to be compelling and all that, but we try to give a look into the problem that no one else can. We keep that in mind when we developed videos or infographics, because we wanted to make sure this is a look at what we’re doing from our perspective. “

Interestingly, many media outlets took content directly from the Boeing site and used it in their stories. “It was shared widely,” he says. “It was picked up by The Wall Street Journal, for example. A lot of our content was just taken straight from our site and put into other media like GeekWire and AV Week.”

Social media amplification

The Boeing team quickly learned that people amplified the #dreamliner story on social media, especially Twitter and Facebook. “There is a great deal of interest and conversation about it,” Gary says. “So we embraced that. We have a story to tell and we have information that we can provide that will help clarify because, believe me; there was a lot of misinformation out there.”

They noticed there were a lot of questions raised via the social channels about what the batteries actually do. “We needed to explain the batteries in a manner that is easily sharable, is understandable for a wide set of audiences,” Gary says. A page Batteries and Advanced Airplanes was created for this purpose.

Continuing information delivery

Once government officials deemed the planes airworthy, Boeing ran a live social media chat with Mike Sinnett, 787 chief project engineer and Capt Heather Ross, flight test pilot. The chat was broadcast as video from Ustream and people could engage via the #787chat hashtag.

“We’ve had a loyal fan base for this airplane,” Gary says. “ And we wanted to give them an opportunity to engage directly with us. The great thing about tools like Ustream and live chat is it’s so affordable now to do these kinds of events and the technology works. We wanted to take the opportunity to talk about the battery solution but also talk about what’s next for this airplane. There were 5,000 or so viewers and the comments on it have been really positive.”

An interesting content app launched after the crisis is the real-time 787 flight tracker. Using Google Earth and data drawn from Flight Aware you can select a 787 flight and track its progress in an incredibly visual way.

Lessons learned

As I followed the 787 Dreamliner battery crisis unfold, it was clear that most media and members of the public were giving Boeing a fair listen. Sure, batteries catching fire on your plane is a serious matter and people were vocal. But because Boeing communicated well, and in real time, the public was also understanding about the glitches that need to be ironed out in any new product launch.

787 battery fire crisis timeline

Jan. 7, 2013: After landing and passengers and crew departing, a 787 experiences an APU battery failure; the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) launches an official investigation



Jan. 15, 2013: A 787 experiences a main battery failure in flight; the flight crew diverts and conducts a safe landing; Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB) launches an official investigation



Jan. 16, 2013: FAA issues Airworthiness Directive suspending commercial operations of 787 fleet, global regulators follow suit



April 26, 2013: 787 airworthiness directive restricting 787 flights is lifted, clearing the way for 787 flights to resume on airplanes that have been retrofitted

Image: All Nippon Airways Boeing 787-8 (JA801A) at Okayama Airport via Wikimedia Commons

Write, design, and publish an ebook in three hours

My friend Edward Boches is part-time chief innovation officer at Mullen and also Professor of the Practice, Advertising, at Boston University College of Communication. He worked with the super-smart students in his Strategic Creative Development class to write, design, and publish an ebook Get out of your minivan and into our spaceship in just three hours.

“Three hours,” Edward says. “That’s how long it took to conceive, write, edit, document, draw, and design this book. OK, the finishing touches went a little over the third hour. But the point is, this book isn’t about talking. It’s about creating. Or as we like to say ‘making shit’. It’s also about speed, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, decision making and expressing one’s self. Yeah, that’s what we do here.”

Direct link to Write the Book in Three Hours: Mini-Case on YouTube.

There are a lot of things to love about this ebook.

It was created quickly.

In a typical corporate environment, such an ebook would require endless meetings, revisions, and approvals and would likely take months to create. The students did this in three hours.

It was a collaborative effort.

The students figured out how to organize themselves to complete the tasks and everyone had a job. In a corporate environment, I often see situations where one or two people do all the work and a dozen offer their opinions but do no work. This true collaborative approach is refreshing.

There are some great ideas here.

It is encouraging to see what people who are entering the workforce can do. As a result, I am enthusiastic for the future of marketing. I learned a lot about how young people think about advertising by reading the book.

The ebook should help students in their job search.

As I’ve said many times, web content sells all sorts of ideas, including people. What’s better for a new graduate? To send a dusty old resume? Or a link to this ebook and other content they have created? As a member of several advisory boards of companies like HubSpot, I always like when the people getting hired are those who prove what they can do via content rather than say what they can do via a resume. Now many companies are hiring this way.

Get out of your minivan and into our spaceship from edward boches

To the BU students of CM527: Great work! You have exciting careers ahead of you. Keep doing work like this and you will thrive. Find a first job where they value the ideas like in your book. Don’t start your career at an organization living in the past.