The World According to Meerman Scott

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I had a chance to catch yesterday morning's keynote session featuring David Meerman Scott at the Search Engine Strategies New York conference, which continues today and tomorrow.

He is one helluva a speaker who made a cogent case for the "new rules of marketing & PR" by asking the audience five very simple questions:

1. In the last one to two months -- either privately or professionally -- raise your hands if you've answered a direct mail advertisement from the post office.
   
   
2. In the last one to two months -- either privately or professionally -- raise your hands if you've gone to mainstream media to research a product or service you might want to buy... magazines, radio, television or newspaper.
   
   
3. In the last couple of months -- either privately or professionally, please raise your hands if you've gone to the print yellow pages.
   
   
4. In the last one to two months -- either privately or professionally, raise your hand if you've used Google or another search engine?
   
   
5. In the last couple of months -- privately or professionally-- in researching a product or service you might want to buy, have you tapped your online network -- friends, family members, colleagues -- and an answer came back to you that was on Skype, email, Twitter, LinkedIn, instant messaging or some kind of network and it was a URL to a website you visited?
   

The answers:

1. One half of 1 percent
2. 22 percent of the room
3. Four percent
4. 100 percent
5. 85 percent

What Meerman Scott found fascinating is that these questions were answered exactly the same wherever (and to whomever) he spoke -- from Estonia to Istanbul to Boston to New Zealand and elsewhere.

It begs the question:

"How many companies are still marketing using those early ways?"

If you have about 51 minutes, here's the audio clip of his presentation. I had a chance to ask David a few questions about the PR biz, including which of the marketing disciplines might have the right stuff to succeed in the new world order. His answer may surprise you. Here's a short clip of that chat.

Separately, I sat in on the search engine marketing session where I saw Backazimuth's Bill Hunt, co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. with my friend, former client and sometimes colleague Mike Moran.

I had to ask him about the ins and outs of optimized news releases and the new tool he's developed that should help PR people get a better fix on keywords that can "pull" in eyeballs. Here's the audio clip or our brief exchange.

All in all a most enlightening day.