David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of the hit book World Wide Rave. His previous book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR is an award-winning BusinessWeek bestseller and is being published in 24 languages.

He is a recovering VP of marketing for two publicly traded technology companies and was also Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the world’s largest newspaper and electronic information companies.

David has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Hong Kong and has presented at industry conferences and events in over thirty countries on four continents.

Clients include: Cisco, HP, The New York Islanders, NASDAQ Stock Market, the Government of Ontario, McKesson, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, SAP, Google, Digital River, Hill & Knowlton, Hanley Wood, Dow Jones, National Investor Relations Institute, Milken Institute Global Conference, America Credit Union Conference, TS2, Giant Screen Theater Association, Realtors® Conference, and many, many more . . .

Affiliations: Board of directors of Kadient, board of advisors of HubSpot, previous board of directors at NewsWatch (sold to Yahoo Japan).

Who is David Meerman Scott?

At the height of the dot-com boom, I was vice president of marketing at NewsEdge Corporation, a NASDAQ-traded online news distributor with $70 million in revenue. My multi-million dollar marketing budget included tens of thousands of dollars a month for a public relations agency, hundreds of thousands a year for print advertising and glossy collateral materials, and expensive participation at a dozen trade shows a year. My team put these things on our marketing to-do list, worked like hell to execute, and paid the big bucks because, well, that’s what one did as marketing and PR people. These efforts made us feel good because we were doing something but the programs were not producing significant, measurable results.

At the same time, drawing on publishing experience I had gained in my prior position as Asia marketing director for the online division of Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the largest newspaper companies in the world, I quietly created content-rich marketing and PR programs on the Web.

Against the advice of the PR agency professionals we had on retainer (who insisted that news releases were only for journalists), we wrote and sent dozens of releases ourselves. Each time we sent a release, it appeared on dozens of online services such as Yahoo!, resulting in hundreds of 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 online newsletter called TheEdge, with articles about the exploding world of digital news. We made it freely available on the home page of our Web site because it generated interest from qualified buyers.

Way back in the 1990s when Web marketing and PR was in its infancy, I ignored the old rules, drawing instead on my experience working at publishing companies, and created thought leadership strategies to reach buyers directly on the Web.

Guess what? The homegrown, do-it-yourself programs we created at virtually no cost consistently generated more interest from qualified buyers than the big bucks programs that the “professionals” were running for us—and resulted in millions of dollars in sales. People we never heard of were finding us through search engines.

Wow. I had stumbled on a better way to reach buyers!

In 2002, after NewsEdge was sold to The Thomson Corporation, I was fired. My ideas were a little too radical for my new boses. So I started my own business to refine my ideas, work with select clients, and teach others through writing, speaking at conferences, and conducting seminars for corporate groups. The subject of all this work: Reaching your buyers directly and driving more revenue.

Since then, many new forms of social media have burst onto the scene, including blogs, podcasts, video, virtual communities. and Twitter. But what’s the same about all the new Web tools and techniques is that together they are the best way to communicate directly with your marketplace.