ep. 59 - David Meerman Scott: Author & Expert On Real-Time Marketing & Sales Strategy
Bio
David Meerman Scott is a master of the new rules for growing business, spreading ideas and generating attention in our always-on, Web-driven world. Advance planning is out – speed and agility are IN! Scale and media buying power are no longer a decisive advantage. Instead, Real-Time is the mindset -- and content matters – you are what you publish! Those who can be fearless and put away old strategies and tactics in favor of a new way will reap the rewards.
Transcript
ep. 59 - David Meerman Scott: Author & Expert On Real-Time Marketing & Sales Strategy
Gail Davis: Today's guest on GDA Podcast is David Meerman Scott. David is a marketing strategist and author of ten books, including three international bestsellers. He's an advisor to emerging companies and a professional [00:01:00] speaker on topics including marketing, leadership, and social media. He has delivered presentations in 41 countries and on all seven continents, including a presentation to our industry conference that I attended recently in Las Vegas. In addition, David has been a Wall Street bond trader, a male model, a deadhead, he collects artifacts from the Apollo space program, and has a lunar module descent engine in his living room. He's done [00:01:30] TV commercials, acted in the movie American Hustle, and was even in an opera, with [La Scala 00:01:35] no less. Well, thank you for that background and welcome to GDA Podcast, David.
David M. Scott: Thanks, Gail. It's awesome to be here.
Kyle Davis: The first question that I have to ask, because we've had someone try to pull this one on us before, how was speaking in Antarctica?
David M. Scott: Speaking in Antarctica was fantastic, actually. I did [00:02:00] a presentation on the expedition ship that I went down to the continent on. We were in antarctic waters, so it definitely qualifies.
Kyle Davis: That would qualify, because I think the last person we Skyped in.
David M. Scott: No, man. I went. I was there for a week, and it was the best trip I've ever done. In the introduction, you said I've spoken in 41 countries. I've visited 102 countries, and the best place in the world that I've ever been [00:02:30] was by far Antarctica, because it's so unique and so interesting. It really is truly like a different world, because it's so unusual compared to what we're used to. I had the good fortune to be able to deliver a presentation on the expedition ship to some of the other people who were going down there with me in my expedition, and it was really fun.
Kyle Davis: Before we jump into the topic and talking about your book and everything else, what has traveling in general taught [00:03:00] you, if anything, with regards to marketing and being able to connect with people and everything else?
David M. Scott: A great question. I actually lived in Asia for 10 years. I lived in Japan for seven years. I lived in Hong Kong for two years. I was in Australia for about six months, and traveled extensively throughout the Asia region, and since then have traveled all over the world. What's great about it is I realized ... I know this is a cliché, [00:03:30] but the world is a small place. I think that, as a speaker, I'm able to understand that if you have a smile on your face and deliver your presentation in the way that you would normally do, but use examples from local parts of the world, that it goes a really, really long way.
I think that our politicians here [00:04:00] in our country should have a requirement that they spend time outside of their own country, because I think there's so many people that are just trying to be us versus them, and USA number one, and we're the best, and this sort of thing. I think that the people around the world, we're a heck of a lot more similar than we are different, and I think that's a lesson we should all learn. You learn that from traveling, and even moreso by [00:04:30] living and spending a significant amount of time, a year or more, in a country other than your own.
Gail Davis: When we were in Las Vegas last weekend, I really, really enjoyed your presentation, and I love the part when you described how people make purchasing decisions and how people market, all about the planning of your trip to the Antarctica. I don't know without the visuals if it's possible to share that with the listeners, but it's such a great story.
David M. Scott: It is. [00:05:00] I wanted to go to Antarctica ever since I was little. I was, I don't know, seven or eight years old, and I thought, "Wow. That's so cool." I remember looking at a globe and looking at the bottom of the globe and saying, "Wow, I don't know anyone who's ever been here. This is so cool," and the old World Book encyclopedias and checking it out and I really want to go to Antarctica. I kind of filed it in the back of my brain as something I wanted to do, and ... I think it was about five years ago [00:05:30] or so, I started to think, "Shoot, I've got enough money, I've got enough time, it's now easier to do than ever before, there's about 30,000 people a year who travel to Antarctica." On one hand, it's not very many, but on the other hand, there's enough that it's not so exotic as it might used to be.
I said to my wife, "Hey, let's go. This would be great," and she flat-out said, "No." I had to convince her to go. [00:06:00] So I do what we all do. I went to the search engines. I went to Google, and I typed in "antarctic travel," and I needed to gather information, so I could convince my wife Yukari to go with me. The most famous company I found which can help you to get to Antarctica is National Geographic. On their homepage, they had a button that said, "Request a reservation," as if I'm ready to reserve a trip to Antarctica with National Geographic, [00:06:30] but I wasn't. I was just trying to gather information. I was like, "Wow, that's kind of obnoxious."
Then I found another company who could get me to Antarctica, and they had a big form that I had to fill out before they would give me the good information on their site. They wanted me to become their sales lead and have a salesperson to follow up, so I didn't do that either. Then I found a company that right on their website, it says, "We're the cheapest. We can get [00:07:00] you to Antarctica cheaply." I'm like, "No, no, no, no. Don't go to Antarctica on the cheap trip." It's two days sail from the bottom-most city in the entire planet, which is in Argentina, so there's no way I'm doing that.
Then I found a company called Quark Expeditions. That was the company that had the best content, and they were educating me, informing me, and giving me the information I needed to know. Talk about a long [00:07:30] sales cycle, it took me probably three or four months to convince my wife. I kept trying to break her down and break her down, and she finally admitted to me the main reason why she didn't want to go. She was afraid that she would throw up going across the Drake Passage, this notorious body of water. I had to figure out how I could convince her that this isn't so bad, this trip.
Quark Expeditions, the same company, [00:08:00] showed me a blog post written by a doctor about how you can take medications to cross the passage and not throw up. They had a YouTube video about what it's like to cross the Drake Passage. They had some information on the site about what it's like to cross the Drake Passage, information about the ship itself and how the stability systems on the ship work. It was amazing amounts of data and content, and that's what pushed us over the top, [00:08:30] was the fact that they had the best content.
Also, interestingly, I connected with the CEO of Quark Expeditions, his name is Hans, on Twitter and on LinkedIn, and we ended up chatting about this. He's actually the one who invited me to speak on the ship. That was what got me there is their content. My wife and I ended up in Antarctica, because that was the company with the best content. I use that story frequently [00:09:00] in my presentations, because I think it's emblematic of the way that everybody today ... It's you, it's me, it's people who are looking for what we do, people who are looking to hire a speaker, people who are interested in perhaps hiring a consultant. Whatever it is, buying a product or service, they're all going to the search engines and using social networks to answer their questions, so it's the company with the best content that wins.
Gail Davis: I definitely want to dive into the way people buy [00:09:30] and the importance of content, but before we leave the Antarctica, tell our listeners what you did while you were there.
David M. Scott: I did a whole bunch of awesome things, but the three most awesome ... I know which one I'm going to tell you last, but the three most awesome things I did. Number one, every day we went kayaking, and it was fantastic, because ... There were a few times where we would be kayaking ... And we went with a group. There was about four or five people that wanted to kayak every day like we did. [00:10:00] Every morning, we'd get up and we'd put our gear on and we'd go kayaking, but a couple of times, we ended up going around a small island or around a really large iceberg, so that we were blocked from seeing the ship. When you can't see the ship, and you're in Antarctica, there is absolutely no sign of humanity. There's no airplanes above you, there's no power lines, there's no [00:10:30] houses, there's no nothing in Antarctica, and it's so ... And we were far enough away we couldn't hear the sounds of the ship. It was so unbelievably remote.
One other little quick story. There's always ice floating in the water as you're kayaking. If you find a piece of ice and it's perfectly clear, it means it's more than 10,000 years old. We would find small pieces of perfectly clear ice, and then we'd [00:11:00] pull it out of the water and suck on it to drink water. "Oh, cool. Sucking on 10,000-year-old ice cubes." Then, if we found a football-sized piece of ice, which we did a couple of times, we used bungee cords to latch it under the kayak, bring it back to the ship ... Of course, it doesn't melt because it's cold ... Bring it back to the ship, and then bring it to the bar on the ship, and they would make martinis with 10,000-year-old ice. How cool is that?
Gail Davis: Awesome.
David M. Scott: The second [00:11:30] thing I did only one night was we went camping. We actually camped on the antarctica continent. The third thing I did is I jumped into the Southern Ocean. I put on my swim suit and jumped in, and it was really, really freaking cold, but I did it, I jumped in.
Gail Davis: That's the story I wanted you to tell. I thought that was so cool, so impressive.
David M. Scott: It was amazing. I knew I wanted to do it. I planned it early on in the trip, so I had [00:12:00] a chance to psych myself up. The water is really cold. It's 32 or 33 degrees, something like that, just above freezing. It was really, really cold. Because I was thinking about it over the course of a couple of days, I was able to psych myself up, and it really wasn't so bad, but if I had accidentally fallen into that water, I don't know if I'd be talking to you right now, it'd be so traumatic.
Kyle Davis: I think you would have made it work. Going back to [00:12:30] content and what it is that you talk about. In this day and age, we're switching away from brick-and-mortar society more to an online or digital-first initiative. Like you mentioned with this Quark company trying to help you with your expedition to the antarctic, you were talking about how content is what allowed you to make that purchasing decision. Can you describe or tell people at least the very base level, [00:13:00] how important content is to attracting buyers and then to really closing the deal?
David M. Scott: I think it's the most important thing there is. I'm really lucky. I had a headstart on this, because as you said in my introduction, my first job was on a bond trading desk. We traded bonds based on information, and this was before the web. It was before we all had access to real-time information, I had a chance to use it. When I was [00:13:30] based in Asia, I was working for a real-time news business company. I worked for companies like Dow Jones and Reuters, so I had this opportunity to learn how content is used by professionals to make decisions prior to the worldwide web starting in 1995, so I had a headstart.
I applied the same ideas to marketing. We all do that. We all think, "Okay, I need [00:14:00] to buy," whatever it is, a new set of golf clubs, or, "I need to buy a new surfboard," or, "I need to book a hotel in San Francisco," whatever it is. We go to Google, we go to search engines, or we tap our network of friends and family members through social networks, and that's how we make decisions these days.
The challenge becomes, if you're a seller of a product or service, how can you have the sorts of content that will, number one, [00:14:30] drive people into your organization to take a look at your products and services, but then serve as a way to sell and drive people through your selling process. I think it's all driven on having, number one, content that's created especially for your buyers. I think the biggest mistake that organizations make is they create content that's egotistical, it's all about themselves, rather [00:15:00] than creating content that will be interesting for the sorts of people who will want to reach them. That's a very, very different approach.
Then, number two, you need to think, "Okay, what is the right kind of content for us to create?" It's interesting, because right now, we're creating a podcast, which is a great example of content that can be used for marketing purposes. There's video. There's text-based content in the form of, say, blog posts. There's social networking feeds, Twitter and Facebook. [00:15:30] There's Facebook live, which is live streaming video, which is a great way to create content. A guy I remember at the IASB convention, Tony DeMilio, pulled out his iPhone and shot a live stream while I was on stage, and that goes out to people instantly ... And photographs and infographics. These are all forms of content, and that's what drives people into your organization, because just like [00:16:00] the way that I ended up getting myself to Antarctica and spent $20,000 with Quark Expeditions to get me there, that's how we all make decisions, big and small, about the companies and products and services that we choose to buy or do business with.
Kyle Davis: When you're talking about content and the media types that you're putting out, whether it be a photograph through Instagram or a video through YouTube or a written blog post or an audio podcast [00:16:30] like this, do you feel that sometimes people are quick to rush and put something out, and maybe with that, not really focusing on the quality of the content that they're putting out, or do you think that people are still kind of having a hard time understanding this? I'm talking more for the novice companies or companies that really haven't through about what their digital strategy is at present.
David M. Scott: I [00:17:00] think there can be a quality issue, but I also think it's really important to understand that, sometimes, it's absolutely imperative that you put it out quickly and you may not be able to make it be perfect. I think there's a dual path there, but the first thing to think about here is that every organization needs a home base, [00:17:30] either a website or a blog or both, but somewhere that you own. I think that one of the mistakes that organizations make, kind of gets to your question, is that they spend too much time creating content on the social networks. They'll do a great job creating stuff on Facebook, but that's a closed system. If you do a Google search, Facebook posts don't come up.
Facebook is important, LinkedIn is important, Twitter's important, and depending on your [00:18:00] audience, those sorts of networks can be important for you to create content around. Ultimately, it's essential that every organization has a home base where they own the content real estate, so a podcast, a blog, a video channel, all of those are good ways of creating content where you own the real estate. You could post it onto YouTube, but then you imbed those YouTube videos into your own site. Ultimately you want some of [00:18:30] the search traffic to go to you.
I do think that, because many people have become comfortable with social networks, that some of the challenges that you suggest are true, is that some people just don't spend too much time creating the content, and they don't properly think about what they're creating, because they're used to dashing off a Facebook post really quickly. However, it is very, very important to understand the concept of [00:19:00] real-time marketing.
That's something I've been talking about now for a very long time, and it's specifically something I call newsjacking. Newsjacking and real-time marketing is all about absolutely creating content instantly. It's almost the opposite of what you say. It's not creating content on the fly because you're kind of lazy, but it's creating content on the fly because you have to get it out right this moment. If there's a news [00:19:30] story that breaks that's in your area of expertise, then creating a real-time blog post or video stream or tweet or whatever it might be can be a fantastic way to get noticed, because the media is looking for people to quote on a breaking news story. Or, if there's a product that can be sold around it.
For example, as we're recording this podcast, [00:20:00] within less than 24 hours of us recording this podcast, Donald Trump fired FBI director Comey. That's pretty interesting if you're, for example, a speaker that speaks on topics related to, say, justice or related to, say, the FBI. All of a sudden, you should be creating real-time content and pushing it out there. If you're a speakers' bureau that represents somebody like that, you've got an opportunity to [00:20:30] create content. If somebody has a book that they wrote about the FBI, there's a perfect opportunity to create real-time content, because right now, the world's media is absolutely focused on the fact that Trump just fired the FBI director, so they want more information. "Oh my gosh, has there ever been an FBI director that was fired before?" I don't know the answer to that, but somebody does.
If they create that content right now and push it out [00:21:00] in the form of a blog post or video or an infographic or whatever it might be, they have an opportunity to get unbelievable media coverage and unbelievable opportunities to, for example, if they're a speaker, get booked to speak a whole bunch of time over the next couple months. Or if they have a book out, to sell thousands and thousands of copies of that book. I know it's a really long answer to a very simple question, but I think on one hand, people tend to do dash-off content, because they're so used to social networking and [00:21:30] they need to be careful, but on the other hand, there are opportunities where it's essential that that content gets out really quickly, and that's when a news story is breaking around your area of expertise.
Kyle Davis: When you're looking at something like newsjacking and/or real-time marketing ... Let's say there's an event, and let's use one of our previous podcast guests, Herb Meyer, who was a big guy in the CIA under Reagan, taking that podcast for instance, the moment [00:22:00] the Comey news broke ... I'm just using this as a hypothetical, because I know I didn't do this, but this is something I've done before at previous companies, where you just, boom, you hit it. It goes to Twitter, maybe you reframe a new blog post, you embed it in your site, you promote, promote, promote, promote, promote in hopes that it gets traction based off of whatever the trending hashtag might be, and it drives traffic back to the site.
David M. Scott: Absolutely. I'd call that content curation, but it's content that already [00:22:30] exists on your site, or it could even be content that exists somewhere else. When it exists on your site, it's great, because you've already got it created, it already lives there, it's already in your library of content, and you're just pulling it out. Maybe that podcast was recorded eight weeks ago or three months ago, whatever it is. I started my blog in 2005, 12 years ago. I've got 1,500 blog posts I could pull, [00:23:00] and I frequently do. If something's interesting, "Oh shoot, I wrote a blog post about that a really long time ago." Actually, it's funny, I go to Google to search my own blog. I'll look for something that, "Oh, yeah. I wrote a post about that." Then I'll push that out on Twitter or on LinkedIn or another social network, because it's perfect for that exact moment. So, yeah, perfect.
Kyle Davis: When you're looking at content that's being put out, whether it's copy or visuals, [00:23:30] video, photographs, et cetera, infographics even, in your opinion, what's the best use case for each one of those type of media types?
David M. Scott: I think the first thing to think about, and most organizations don't, is based on the sorts of buyers that you're looking to sell to, [00:24:00] does it make sense to use a particular media type. For example, a real simple example would be, if you're in the real estate business, photographs are essential. A realtor might make use of an Instagram feed, for example, for that reason. Somebody who's got a business that's data-driven, infographics, which are visual representations of data, can be a really good way to do it. That's the first way to think about it.
The second way to think about it is [00:24:30] that we, as humans, have different skills around content creation, and we should be gravitating to the things either that we're good at or that we enjoy or both. I actually like to write. I've written ten books. I've written 1,500 blog posts. I write. I'm a writer. My natural inclination when something is happening is to write, is to create a blog post [00:25:00] or a tweet or something. However, right now, we're recording a podcast, so this is audio-based content, and clearly, at GDA, audio is important. Some people really like making videos, some people really like doing photographs.
The second thing to consider is what do you enjoy doing, what are you good at, where do your skills lie? If you don't like to write, nobody is going to [00:25:30] be able to force you to create a blog, because you're just not going to want to be into it, because you don't like it. There's got to be something that you can do in terms of content creation, because it might be shooting a video or doing a podcast or photographs, whatever it might be.
Kyle Davis: My final question in all of this new-age marketing stuff ... This is just more for, basically, your brand and how you put it out. I use design. You can also use user experience or user interface for [00:26:00] a number of these individual sub-components. How important is the look, the feel, the flow of everything that you do and how it's branded to fit your brand?
David M. Scott: I actually think that's essential. I think there's a number of elements of branding. Branding is kind of an overused word, but branding includes the visual component. Is it attractive, and importantly, is it consistent? Do [00:26:30] you use a consistent set of fonts throughout your site? Do you use a consistent set of colors throughout your site? Is the logo attractive and fitting? There's the visual component.
There's also your word choice. We were talking earlier, before we started to record, that there are some speakers who use the F-word sometimes. As you're writing, is that a word that you would use? I'm not [00:27:00] sure I've ever written in anything that I've put out publicly, a swear word. I don't think I have. I might have let it slipped once or twice. That's part of my brand, I don't do that. There are other people, it's a part of their brand that they do do that. In my case, I try my best not to use cliché, gobbledygook words like cutting edge and mission critical and innovative and words like that. There's the [00:27:30] verbal aspect of branding, the words that you use. I'm a speaker, and lots of speakers probably listen to this podcast, and what you wear is part of your brand.
Here's an important element of branding that very few people think about. I think it's the last great branding opportunity, and that's sonic branding, branding using music. I actually [00:28:00] just formed a sonic branding studio. It's called Signature Tones. I founded it with a professional musician by the name of Juanito Pascual. Juanito and I created this sonic branding agency to create sonic logos and original music that companies use in their branding. A sonic logo is a four-to-eight-note signature that companies use. For example, [00:28:30] Intel Inside is a sonic logo. The NBC chime is a sonic logo. We're recording this right now on Skype, and when you called me, the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Those are things that you instantly recognize. Any company can have a sonic logo.
I've now got a studio that creates those. Anybody can have an original song, so that when you're, for example, recording a podcast, your podcast can be branded with original music. [00:29:00] Your videos can be branded with original music. Speakers can have walk-on music every time they come on a stage with original music. There's all sorts of elements of branding. I'm a huge rock fan, so I've become ... I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, for example. I've become fascinated with the intersection of music and marketing, and this idea of sonic branding, I think, is a very much overlooked aspect of branding that can really help companies.
Gail Davis: [00:29:30] I certainly didn't want to end this podcast without asking about you being a deadhead, so maybe you might want to elaborate a little bit more on that.
David M. Scott: Did you see how I eased into that, Gail?
Gail Davis: Trust me, I had it written down. We weren't going to hang up without that.
David M. Scott: I've been a fan since I was about 16 years old. The first time I saw the Grateful Dead, I was 17 years old I think. I've seen either the Grateful Dead or the bands that followed the Grateful Dead after Jerry Garcia died in 1995, [00:30:00] I've seen over 50 times. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead with a good friend of mine named Brian Halligan, who's the CEO of a company called HubSpot, and Bill Walton wrote the foreword to the book, the world's biggest deadhead, not only because he's seven feet tall, but also because he's seen the Grateful Dead 750 times. How crazy is that?
What we identified, and why we wrote this book, is that the Grateful Dead created [00:30:30] a set of fans and created essentially a social network before Mark Zuckerberg was even born, based on the fact that they used really interesting marketing techniques. For example, they allowed their fans to record their music, and they were one of the very few bands that allowed that, and they were the only one in the beginning. Every other band said, "No recording gear." The Grateful Dead said, [00:31:00] "Sure, why not?" Then when people recorded the music, then they shared, initially it was cassette tapes, and then later on, mp3 files they shared. That then drove people into the music, and they said, "Well shoot, I want to go see a concert too." So the Grateful Dead became the most popular touring band in history.
Gail, I have the coolest speaking gig on Sunday. As we're recording this, it's four days from now. I'm going to be speaking at Phil Lesh, who's the bassist for the Grateful [00:31:30] Dead, I'm going to be speaking at his restaurant just before he speaks in the dedication of his solar panels on the top of his restaurant. One of my clients built the solar panels up there, so I'm going to actually have a speaking gig at Phil Lesh's restaurant, and I'm going to speak just before Phil Lesh, which is kind of remarkable. If I had been-
Gail Davis: I was going to say, "Life is good, isn't it David?"
David M. Scott: If I had been able to tell my 16-year-old [00:32:00] self that I would be speaking at an event with Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead, I would have said, "You've been smoking something." Anyway, the Grateful Dead is a really interesting band to look at from the marketing perspective, which is what we did with that book. I do a full-blown Grateful Dead speech for an hour, but I usually throw in a Grateful Dead riff in all of my speeches, because I think it's so interesting.
Kyle Davis: It [00:32:30] didn't go unnoticed that you put emphasis on the dead-ication. I just thought I'd bring that up. One final thing before we wrap this up. I know that one of your recent books was The New Rules for Sales and Service. We've talked a lot about marketing, but I'd also like it if you could just, for a moment, maybe shed some light on that and what businesses can do better to improve both sales and service going forward.
David M. Scott: Sure. When we were talking about marketing, we [00:33:00] were talking about how content is great marketing. I also think content is also great sales and great service. Here's the difference. In marketing, content is reaching many people at once. So a YouTube video or a podcast can be sent to reach hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people at once. However, I also think that sales is [00:33:30] about content, but it's about content curation, one buyer at a time. For example, that same YouTube video or that same podcast that reaches many people at once can be used at any point to be sent to one person at a time, curated, and can serve as a sales tool.
I think that sales has been too much around interrupting people and trying to convince them [00:34:00] to buy something. Whereas the new rules of sales and service that I talk about in that book is around ... I also have a speech around that topic ... Is around how can you reach people when they're ready to buy? It turns the equation around. It's not a selling cycle, it's a buying cycle. How can you create the right content at the right moment for a single buyer and drive them into your buying process and use content [00:34:30] as the way to get them to the point where they're ready to sign a check or pull out their credit card?
Kyle Davis: I know one of the things that we did when I was working out in Silicon Valley is, on the sales team, we had ... I'm trying to figure out what they're called, but it's basically collateral keepers. It holds all the collateral that you may have on the products and services that you hold. That way, you can then curate, you can choose, a la carte, the best [00:35:00] of the best, and send a tailored package or specific collateral that's designed to meet and exceed the goals or needs of the client that you're sending it to. It's easy to pull from, easy to insert in an email, easy to send. All we were really doing is just recycling content that our marketing team had been putting out for ... To use Square as an example, what the marketing team had been putting out for three or four years, but finding the newest, most up-to-date collateral [00:35:30] and being able to tailor it to a specific client.
David M. Scott: Yeah, exactly. I would go further to say, tailor it to that existing client at the right moment, both in the buying process, and also in the right moment based on what's going on in the news. If there's something breaking in the news that's important for that client to know, you can find the right blog post or the right video or the right podcast that was created, and then curate that content right at that moment. Then, based on [00:36:00] what the individual buyer is doing, and you can actually even see where they are on the website, you could then say, "Okay, well now is a perfect time for me to send them a link to this particular white paper," or whatever it might be. That's what I believe is the best way to sell today. Buyers are very savvy, they're very clever. They don't go for the old school kind of interruption and beat-you-over-the-head kind of approach. However, they welcome [00:36:30] receiving the right content when they're ready to buy.
Kyle Davis: They welcome value, and they welcome receiving the right content, and it's not about recycling the same pitch deck and just replacing the logo or something else like that. To further bolster the point that you just made about sending relevant content that's kind of news-worthy and salient, one of the things that we did at Square and some of the other payment companies because of financial changes, with let's say chip and pin, for instance, with credit cards, [00:37:00] we would send articles from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times saying, "Hey, chip and pin is coming. Are you ready for the liability shift?" This is outside marketing or outside articles written by these giant things, but it helps us better position ourselves, and it also provides a value, because we're informing our clients about a change in liability.
David M. Scott: Yeah, that's exactly right. Did you work at Square, Kyle?
Kyle Davis: I did. We can [00:37:30] talk about this offline.
David M. Scott: It's a great company. I've been using it myself. I'm a stockholder.
Kyle Davis: Yeah. You and me both. Thank you Jack Dorsey.
Gail Davis: To wrap this up, I want to just comment on two things. One activity that I really enjoyed in Las Vegas, when you spoke, Davis, is when we had a group activity and you ask each one of us to take a current event and how could we, real-time, tie in and leverage that, or newsjack. [00:38:00] What was amazing to me at the end of that were all the ideas that cost absolutely nothing. It was just about everything that we've been talking about here, but I just saw it live, in a room with over 100 people, where when you take your content, and with speed and agility, it's not really a big marketing or media budget, it's very easy and cost-affordable to implement. That's a huge takeaway I had from your presentation.
David M. Scott: Thank you for saying that. It really is eye-opening for [00:38:30] people to see that, because many people think that a marketing strategy takes weeks and weeks and weeks to figure out, and we did it in 10 minutes. I actually got some emails from some of the people who were in the room who actually executed on those ideas. I don't know if you remember, but there was the crew from Australia, and they represented a speaker who was an Australian government official, and so they created a real-time blog post [00:39:00] talking about Donald Trump's first 100 days, what this particular speakers was going to talk about, and pushed that blog post out in real time, which is amazing.
Gail Davis: It was really cool. I think the other thing I just wanted to share is that your energy on stage is just outstanding, but more importantly, I love how you really inspire people to take action and overcome fear and doubt in trying a new strategy or trying a new tactic, and really looking at the way [00:39:30] that people buy and how it's changed. I think there's really something there for everyone as they look forward on their marketing strategies.
David M. Scott: Thank you, Gail. I appreciate that very much.
Kyle Davis: Cool. I think this is a good place for us to wrap up. If you'd like to book David Meerman Scott and have him come speak at your next event on all things marketing, sales, service, newsjacking, real-time marketing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera-
David M. Scott: The Grateful Dead.
Kyle Davis: The Grateful Dead, how could I forget. He'll come in with a case of Cherry Garcia for everybody [00:40:00] to enjoy and maybe some cool ties as well. You can do so by contacting GDA Speakers at 214-420-1999 or by going to gdaspeakers.com. To listen to today's podcast, more transcripts, books, et cetera from David, you can get all of that at gdapodcast.com, and we'll have all that available. With that being said, David, thank you.
Gail Davis: Thank you, David.
David M. Scott: Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Gail. This was fun.