Social Media Reading Sampler: Book Excerpts by David Meerman Scott, Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, Ann Handley, C.C. Chapman, Scott Stratten

Follow David on Twitter dmscottDavid Meerman Scott s book The New Rules of Marketing PR opened people s eyes to the new realities of marketing and public relations on the Web Six months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list and published in 26 languages from Bulgarian to Vietnamese, New Rules is now a modern business classic Scott s popular blog and hundreds of speaking engagements around the world give him a singular perspective on how businesses are implementing new strategies to reach buyers.He is also the author of the hit book World Wide Rave and three other books His Web Ink Now blog is ranked by AdAge Power 150 as a top worldwide marketing blog.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, and Hong Kong He currently lives in the Boston area.Satisfied audiences include Cisco, HP, Microsoft, 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 .Affiliations Board of advisors of HubSpot, board of advisors of Eloqua, board of advisors VisibleGains, advisory board of the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, board of directors of Nashaquisset, previous board of directors at NewsWatch sold to Yahoo Japan and Kadient merged with Sant.David writes for Huffington Post.I didn t plan on becoming a marketing strategist on purpose I came upon it accidentally.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 interest from qualified buyers than the big bucks programs that the professionals