World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers That Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories

Fantastic concepts, thoughts and ideas! This book helps show the direction all marketing professionals need to consider--Conversation Marketing. World Wide Rave illustrates some of the key objectives for companies looking to participate in the market conversation. At Idiom Strategies, a conversation marketing agency, we outline the five key objectives as: 1) Listen to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalize what you hear to improve your business. 2) Speak to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others. 3) Care about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs. 4) Share your experiences--positive and negative--and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines. 5) Build relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.

For many marketers, the holy grail of digital advertising is the YouTube video that "goes viral" - generating thousands, if not millions, of views for little, if any, cost. The challenge, of course, is that finding just the right piece, or having your "community" build something on your behalf is never easy. Nor does it guarantee success. But David Meerman Scott's recent book World Wide Rave, actually covers some of the things that you need to consider. It's full of practical examples and ideas for you to riff off - all with the aim that you create your own "world wide rave". There are some great examples of how some daring folks have put their reputation on the line to test the social media waters. From Disney through to a local dentist, David shows that you don't need to be big to have an impact - or to generate serious sales/business outcomes using social media. He reinforces that while influence can be useful, world wide raves are about trust - about igniting the potential of your story in the words of someone else. And the best thing is, is that the book comes with recommendations that get you started. It could be the best investment in marketing that you ever make.

I have been an avid reader of David Meerman Scott's blog for some time. I even have an Outlook task set so that I can remember to have my once a week look. As such, you won't be that surprised that I would be a fan of his latest book, World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories. For all of us who look to promote ourselves on the web better, and that should be everyone who isn't driving an ice cream truck - and some of these guys could use an idea or two - this book is an excellent starting place. Get your education here! We all need something, some tool to bring our market to us. But more than that, we need to get them speaking about us in a positive manner and passionately spreading the word about our goods and services in a positive way. Your mind is this tool. Not in any esoteric way, but in a very practical and real way. David Meerman Scott shows us how everyone is looking for expertise and the best way to draw people to you is to share that expertise. Each and every one of us have something unique to offer and by offering this freely people (the market) want more and more and will be willing to pay. David Meerman Scott provided many examples in the book of creating World Wide Rave but the one great example that really touched a nerve with me in the book had not so much to do with marketing online but rather a whole marketing philosophy. And it came from what most people would consider an unorthodox place. The "free giveaway" mentality is the Greatful Dead. First of all, the author and I split when it comes to his love of all things Dead - I have never really been that much of a fan but I have loads of friends who are among the faithful. David tells how the Dead have one of the greatest marketing systems going by simply allowing their fans to make bootleg copies of their numerous shows as well as taking pictures and video taping the experience. The author even listened to the concert he just attended on his drive back home. The Grateful Dead even incorporate this totally into their marketing plan! One can buy personalized photo albums of the experiences. By allowing the fans to make the bootleg copies they, the fans, share the copies and preserve their fond memories of the experience. And they share the experience with other fans and even those who had never been introduced to the band in the past. The author is very passionate about his subject and throughout the book he urges the reader (yes, you!) to get started on creating your own World Wide Rave. One bit of advice that he did add that I thought was very interesting but extremely astute was that the reader should get on Twitter and keep everyone updated on what they are doing in real time. So if you want to know even more about creating your own World Wide Rave, get on Twitter and start following @dmscott. And while you are at it, tell him that @garydale sent ya!

Let me just begin this review of David Meerman Scott's "World Wide Rave" by saying that I admire and respect the innovative concepts that David teaches. If you are in marketing or communications or public relations or, especially, the leader of an organization, today's world has gotten to be too competitive, too fast-moving, and too smart for you to cling to many of the tired old tenets of traditional outreach. You must ignore the old rules of advertising and PR, David writes ... and I agree completely. Success comes from people wanting to share the more credible information and stories they hear about you with their friends and colleagues. Conventional wisdom, as it is applied to marketing and promotion, is broken and far less effective in today's online world. "World Wide Rave" is, I believe, one of the most important books about marketing in the Internet Era that I have read. The author is a man with deep credentials and perspective, and who, himself, has created world wide rave for his new approaches and ideas to marketing, and for his books. David explains that we must "lose control," that we must understand that creating visibility in today's online world means releasing control of old approaches, like promoting messages, and capturing sales leads. The old PR agency idea of counting press clips is antiquated and silly in today's world. We can measure success but no longer through outdated business school Return on Investment (ROI) calculators. Nobody cares about your organization or your products, David writes. What people care about are themselves and ways to solve their own problems. In order to have people talk about you and your ideas, he writes, you must resist the old urge to sell or hype your products and services. Today's style is rather one of finding "triggers" that stimulate attention and harness the power of the digital revolution. Rave is finding ways to get people talking about you. "World Wide Rave" is filled with practical examples and guidance on how anyone can create world wide buzz about their organization or products or themselves. And, the best part is that we are living in an age when we have the ability to create rave ... or, a splash of significant awareness ... at little or no cost. As an author and journalist, myself, who has studied and consulted on evolving trends of image-making and getting attention for many years, I would rank David Meerman Scott's "World Wide Rave" as one of the distinctive, trend-setting works, in the same category as Blanchard's "The One Minute Manager," and Beckwith's "Selling the Invisible." After reading the 194 pages, I sat back, and thought, Wow!"