#oh look you can edit tags now... bet this is only on web

[soupy-sez]

DOCTOR WHO :: S02E11, Fear Her

[minniemixe]

Beauty And The Beast

Gangster AU

Stray Kids Fanfic

Chan x Reader

Other Appearances: GOT7 BTS

Genre: Smut, Fluff, Angst

Warnings: Mention of rape, family drama

Beauty and the Beast Masterlist

Chapter 6

“What happened to your hand?” Moon’s mother asked pointing towards her bandaged hand as the two sat in the lounge, Moon cuddled up next to her mom “Oh this, nothing big, I was walking down the stairs and slipped, there was glass in my hand, it broke and I cut myself” she told. “I can bet you were running down the stairs. Sweetheart how many times have I told you to be careful on stairs, huh?” the older lady dotted “I’m fine mom, it’s just a cut” she looked up at her mom smiling, the mother kissed her daughter’s head, hugging her tighter, “MMhhmm, I missed my baby so much” she said repeatedly kissing her cheeks   “I missed you guys too, sorry for not contacting you much and visiting sooner” Moon replied, snuggling closer in her mom’s chest. “I’m still surprised you visited. I thought you’d be busy with your work, we’d have been happy even if you just frequently contacted us telling us you’re okay” she spoke “You’re not wrong, I am quite busy with my work, I was also surprised when my colleague asked me if I wanted to visit” she replied “Colleague?” her mother asked “Ah yeah, he had some work in this area so he asked me to tag along, saying I could visit you guys while he ran his errand” Moon replied “When is he returning? Why don’t you ask him to stay for dinner?” her mother said “He said he wa-” Moon was cut off by the doorbell “Is that him?” “I don’t think so, he said it would take him two or more hours. It hasn’t even been an hour yet” Moon replied, getting up to check. When she opened the door, Chan stood there with a bouquet of roses and a gift bag in his hands.

“Oh hey. Back so early?” Moon asked letting him in “Ahh yeah, I got done earlier than expected, so thought why not visit your parents” he said “Ofcourse, I’m glad you did, Mom was asking about you. Oh by the way, introduce yourself as my colleague, that’s what I told my mom” Moon said as the two made their way to the living room “Hello ma’am, I’m Chris, a colleague of your daughter's. These are for you” Chan introduced himself, handing the roses to her. “And this is for- where’s your dad?” he asked, looking around “Oh he’s not home, I’ll take that” Moon replied, taking the brown gift bag from him “Oh My God, this is so sweet of you, you didn’t have to do this” her mother smiled at Chan. "I couldn't visit empty handed for the first time" Chan reasoned, bowing politely "You didn't come empty handed, you brought my daughter with you" Moon's mother smiled patting Chan's back who smiled sheepishly in return. “So, Chris, I hope you’ll be staying for dinner” Moon’s mother asked “Ofcourse, I’d love to” he replied politely “Well, make yourself comfortable, I’ll go make dinner” her mother said walking out of the living room. “Wait mom!” Moon called out running after the older lady “Yes hunny?” she asked turning around “Can we have pizza? I really missed homemade pizza” Moon said playing with her fingers “Sure baby, anything you want.” the older lady replied kissing Moon’s forehead. Moon jumped up and down excitedly hugging her mother, “Thank you Thank you Thank you” she said repeatedly. Her mother laughed, cooing at her daughter affectionately “C’mon, lets make you some pizza”, walking towards the kitchen, with Moon skipping behind. Chan saw the whole interaction, smiling to himself about how cute and happy Moon looked. Her whole aura had changed, Chan loved every second of it and hoped that he’d get to see it more often. Chan too followed the two ladies, to the kitchen, opting to help the two. “Can I help with anything?” Chan asked entering the kitchen “Oh no honey, make yourself comfortable.” Moon’s mom answered “Please ma’am, I insist” he said “You can cut the vegetables, I’ll stir fry them” Moon said before her mother could say anything “I’ll make the dough, you guys get started on the topping” her mother said “Should I make the sauce?” Moon asked “No, I made pasta yesterday, so there’s plenty of sauce. I made extra yesterday” the mother replied, disappearing into the pantry. “Where is your father though?” Chan asked, folding his sleeves, Moon’s eyes focused on his veiny arms “Earth to Moon. Are you still here?” Chan snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, snapping her out of her thoughts “Oh huh? What?” Moon said “I asked, where is your father?” Chan laughed at her bewildered expression “Don’t know, don’t care. He left the moment he saw me” Moon shrugged. Chan didn’t know what to say so he just began at his task, glancing at Moon who was taking out the pots and pans. “You okay?” he asked, not being able to control the urge “Why wouldn’t I be. This isn’t the first time. I’m used to it. I don’t give a shit anymore” Moon said “What about your mom? Does she never confront him?” Chan asked “As if he’d listen. Besides, I don’t want mom to get involved, the man is unpredictable. The last thing I want is my mom to get hurt at the hands of that monster” Moon said washing the chicken “I’m -” he stopped mid sentence seeing her mother return to the kitchen “Sweetheart, please grate the cheese after you’re done with the topping” her mom said, getting started on the dough “Sure Mom” she smiled "So Chris. What line of work are you in?" Moon's mother initiated a conversation "I'm on the management side ma'am" Chan replied "Oh but isn't that different from hers, last I talked to her, she was in the web developing department” she asked pointing towards Moon “Ahh yes, but it’s a small system so there isn’t much with departments and stuff” Chan said “Oh I see” “Yeah, there are like 13, now 14 of us, each of us with a different role” “Mom, remember the client I had to meet out of town, that’s him, I edited a few things for him, and since it was up to his satisfaction he offered me a job” Moon played along “That’s nice. What is it that you guys do, like as a group?” the mother questioned “Well, it’s a lot of different things, we design websites, we do shipping for different online shopping mediums, photography, videography and event planning and management” Chan answered. Moon was impressed with how quickly he came up with something so believable “Well that’s nice” the older lady smiled. The conversation went on with random topics. “Oh I almost forgot. Baby your friend has been visiting a lot lately. He asked where you lived but I didn’t know where, but he kept coming back saying, he just wants to see you since it’s been so long. He even came yesterday” Moon’s mom told “Mark? But I met him a few weeks back” Moon said confused “No, not Mark, I think his name was something like Alan?” Moon’s mom said “I don’t know any Alans” she replied brows furrowed “No, I think it was something like Andrew or Andy?” the mother said “Andre?” Moon said grimacing “Yeah yeah, that was it” her mom’s face lit up “If he comes again, tell him I have nothing to do with him, never did, never will” Moon scowled “Why, was he a bu-” her mom started when the doorbell rang “Mavis?” Moon asked looking at her mom “But she’s in UK and she’s not returning until late tonight” her mother answered going out of the kitchen to check “Who’s Mavis?” Chan asked “My little sister” Moon answered. Moon’s mom walked in with a man beside him, who’s face instantly lit up seeing Moon. “Princess!!” he exclaimed, running towards her hugging her tight. Moon harshly pushed him away, slapping him hard across the face. “I’m not your fucking princess. Get lost. I never want to see your face ever again. Stay away from me, stay away from my parents.” To say Chan and Moon’s mom were confused about everything would be an understatement, their faces were contorted in utter confusion, looking from each other to the two, expressions bewildered. “Wha-” the man started “NO, NO Andre, I don’t want to hear it. And don’t even try to play dumb, you completely ruined my life, and I’m not exaggerating and you know that very well. I don’t want any explanation, I don’t want an apology either, I just want you out of here.” Moon said, her voice cracking “Please give me a second chance” Andre pleaded “Get lost before I kill you. Don’t test me, I really will kill you” Moon gritted “Hunny what is this about. At least hear the kid out.” her mother said “No mom, I can’t stand him” “Excuse me, Mr Andre, I think you should leave. I’ve never seen my girlfriend this stressed. I trust she has a very valid reason for it, so leave with respect while you can” Chan smirked “You may not want to hear this, but I really like you, I have, ever since highschool. And I’m not saying this because I want you to break up with him, but because I want you to be safe. He’s not what you think he is, he’s a gang leader” Andre said, the three’s eyes went wide and Moon’s mother let out a loud gasp. Moon wasn’t having any of it and his remark only angered her more. Grabbing the knife from the kitchen top, she lunged forward, “THIS AGAIN. YOU FUCKING BASTARD. I’M GONNA KILL YOU”. Chan quickly moved forward to stop her while her mother just stood there rooted to the ground, completely shook. Andre laughed maniacally, smirking at her. “What do you mean again?” Moon’s mother asked “Oh she doesn’t know?” Andre smiled like a lunatic “I SAID LEAVE” Moon shouted “But I think she deserves to know, look at her, are you really going to keep it from her?” Moon thrashed around trying to get out of his hold, but to no avail. What was supposed to be a nice reunion between Moon and her family, turned into something unimaginable. “If you’re not going to talk. Let me, your mother seems really confused and she deserves to know.” Andre spoke again “There is nothing to know about, get lost” Moon said through gritted teeth “Aww, are you really going to make your parents think you died in a car crash when in reality someone slit your throat or shot you in the head?” Andre questioned “What is he talking about?” her mother asked “Nothing mom, he’s just blabbering, this is what he does. This is exactly what he did in highschool” Moon answered “It was to protect you” Andre said “Protect me? You twisted sick creature. You completely turned my life upside down and you have the audacity to say that. Get out before I kill you” Moon said, Throwing a knife at him, he moved to the side and dodged it. “You’re going to regret this.” Andre said, turning around to leave. Moon released a breath and leaned on the kitchen top, burying her head in her arms while her mother rubbed her back. “Sorry mom, the whole day is ruined” Moon said lifting her head “No, no Sweetheart, don’t apologize, it isn’t your fault” her mother said “Here take this” Chan said, handing Moon a glass of cold water “Thank you” she said taking it from him “What was all that about? And what does he mean by Chris being in a gang, and is he your boyfriend? Were you really going to kill him?” Moon’s mother bombarded her with questions “Hey hey Mom, calm down, let me explain, he’s just getting in your head, take a deep breath, everything is alright” Moon said rubbing her mom’s arm to calm her down “Okay, but you better be honest about every single detail” her mom said “Yes, let's put the pizza in the oven first, we’ll talk while it bakes” Moon replied After putting the pizzas in the oven, the three gathered in the living room. Moon took a deep breath before speaking. “Back in highschool, he was my classmate. An annoying one at that. He would follow me around, complimenting me, giving me flowers and all that stuff. He confessed to me numerous times and I’d turn him down everytime, saying I wasn’t interested. He was a delusional psychopath, he’d always tell me I didn’t give him a chance because of Mark, seeing how close I was with him. He’d always try to pull stupid stunts to ruin what Mark and I had. And one time he took it too far, I have no idea what he had planned but whatever it was, it backfired, it didn’t affect him as much as it affected me. He went abroad two weeks after the incident while I suffered. The only explanation he gave was ‘I just wanted to keep you safe’ because apparently Mark was also in a ‘gang’. He ruined my entire life and for that I’ll never forgive him” Moon explained “What could he have possibly done to make you hate him this much, and if this is about your highschool life being difficult, don’t you think you might be exaggerating” Moon’s mom reasoned “I really didn’t think I’d ever have to tell you this” she sighed “It’s already out of the bag, might as well tell the whole thing” her mom said “Remember the sports day? The one that determined whether I got the scholarship to the college or not?” Moon asked “The one you couldn’t play in because of the mishap?” her mom questioned “Yes that one. But everything that happened that day was a lie” Moon replied “What?” she asked confused “I did go to the locker room to change into my uniform, but everything that happened inside was different from what I told you, or anyone for that matter. The only people who know what actually happened inside were Andre, Mark, Jaebum, Jinyoung, even I don't know. And the event that lead to what happened in that room, that only Mark, Andre and I know” she spoke “If it was something this big, why would you keep it from us?” her mom said. Moon took a deep breath before she started explaining "It's complicated, I was 15 and everything happened so quickly I couldn't handle it. When I did finally get around to telling you, well you know what happened" Moon said looking into her mother’s eyes. The older lady sighed, knowing exactly what her daughter was talking about

5 Years Ago

"I have practice after school today. I can see you tonight if you want" Moon spoke into the phone "When are you gonna get free from that?" Mark asked on the other line "Not sure, probably by 5:00 or 5:30, maybe after, maybe before. Why, something important?" She replied "Nah, just wanted to hang out, we can go out tomorrow as well, you'll be tired anyways" he shrugged "You're not wrong, I'm not even gonna bother walking back home, just gonna call an Uber" she laughed "Why? Isn't your mom picking you up?" He questioned "Not today. She said she and dad have some work so they won't be able to pick me up. It's no biggie anyways, I understand, especially with renovations going on, they have a lot on their plate already" she answered "I'll pick you. I'm free, plus it's safer" he said "Is that supposed to be a pun?" Moon laughed "How?" He asked confused "Free? And safe" Moon quoted the words "Oh, totally unintentional. And I want you to be safe" Mark laughed catching on to what she was insinuating "Well, no need, who knows when I'll get free anyways" she said, heart fluttering at his words "Too late, I'm already on my way" he said "Dude, my practice hasn't even started yet" she laughed "Yeah well, I haven't got much to do so might as well watch you practice. See you in 5 Bitty" Mark said "See you. Bye" she said ending the call. "Who was that" Andre asked, suddenly appearing out of nowhere "What the hell! Stop sneaking up on me and it's none of your business" Moon replied walking away

"Mrs Smith, can I talk to you privately" Moon asked her coach, who was currently instructing a few girls "Of course, girls would you please excuse us" the coach replied "It's about the application" Moon started "Oh sweetheart, I'm so sorry about that, I mixed up the applications. Yours was perfectly fine and congratulations, it got accepted. Now all you have to do is pass the audition. Coaches from the top colleges will be here on the final day. Practice hard, I know you can do it. Good luck" Mrs Smith patted Moon's shoulder "Are you serious. The application for scholarship was accepted? Oh my God, I'm so excited. I didn't think I'd get accepted" Moon said enthusiastically "Don't underestimate yourself. You've got great potential, give yourself more credit. Now get to practice, you have a scholarship to win" the coach cheered Moon giggled and walked away thanking the older lady. On her way back from the lockers she spotted Mark, Moon ran up to him and hugged him tight shouting enthusiastically. "Woah there little lady, why so hyper. Did you eat chocolate again?" Mark laughed "Okay so, oh my God, I'm so happy right now" she kept jumping up and down. "I can see that. So tell me, what's the good news" he laughed "Remember the application I told you about, the one which had some problems with it, guess what, my coach accidentally mixed mine with someone else's. I just found out mine got accepted. Now all I have to do is get a perfect score in my games and I'll get the sports scholarship" Moon told enthusiastically. "Bitty, that's amazing. See I told you everything will work out, you were stressing for no reason. I'm so proud of you, I knew you could do it" Mark exclaimed hugging her tightly, swinging right to left. "Not just yet, I still have to play in the finals and then pass the entrance test. The competition is tough, so I'm kinda nervous" Moon said "You. Are. Going. To. Do. Great." He said shaking her with every word. Moon laughed at his actions, smiling brightly at him. "Now get to practice, I'll cheer for you" he said turning her around and pushing her forward, Moon laughed running towards the ground with Mark following behind. "Alright girls, take 5" the coach called out. The team walked towards their benches to get a rest for a few minutes. “That was a good game. But you girls can do better. Nattalie, you have to work on your goal blocking strategy. Ruth and June practice on your kicks. The rest of you, you’re still lacking good positioning” the coach said. The girls nodding along to what they were being told “In the next game I want you all to change the positions, understood” the couch asked “Yes coach” the girls shouted in sync

“Weren’t you playing badminton?” Mark asked Moon, handing her a bottle of water, after another football game “I am, I’m playing both��� she replied, gulping down the entire bottle “One game doesn’t scratch your itch?” he asked folding his arms “Nope, you know me. Need to play every single game. Life’s too short to play just one.” she replied “Why didn’t you try out for all of em?” he said sarcastically “According to rules, one person can participate in only two sports, otherwise, I would’ve” she replied “You are one of a kind Bitty” he laughed, patting her head

“Number 5, I need you to come with me, we need balls for the dodge ball” the coach called out to Moon. “Yes coach” she called out, walking towards the older woman. “Have you decided on any majors yet?” the coach asked Moon as the two entered the storage room “I haven’t got anything planned to be honest, I want to be an athlete so this scholarship would be a great boost for me. I guess I’ll see as I go along” she replied placing the needed stuff inside a basket “That is great. From the years of watching you grow, I know you have great potential. I wish you all the luck in your career.” she smiled at her student “Thank you ma’am” Moon smiled as the two exited the room “It’s stuck” Moon said pulling on the door “That’s weird, maybe something is stuck from the inside” the coach said. Moon went inside to check but saw nothing near the door that could be causing it to jam. “There’s nothing here” she replied. She tried opening it further but it wouldn’t budge. Pushing the door harshly, it moved a little, making a creaking noise. “It’s easier from the inside since I have to push, I’ll close as much I can from the inside, slip out and then pull the rest” Moon said “Let me help you, I’ll pull from the outside and you push” the coach said “No no, it’s alright. You go ahead, I’ll lock up and come back” Moon said “Are you sure?” the coach asked “Yes, it’s all good” she replied “Here are the keys.” she said, handing the keys to Moon and walked away. After 5 minutes of pushing the door, she was able to close it enough for her to easily slip out. She put a foot outside but before she could get out, someone shoved her inside and slipped in right after her. He harshly pushed the door and closed it from the inside. Moon looked up to see Andre standing right above her. “Finally. I have you all to myself” he said and leaned over her, Moon’s breath hitched as she tried to think about ways to escape. Kicking him in the leg as hard as she could, she ran towards the door, she tried to open in but it was jammed after opening just a little bit. Before she could pull on it more, Andre grabbed her by her hair and yanked her back, making her fall on the ground. “HELP!!! SOMEBODY HELP!!!! MARK!!!!” she screamed out. Pushing the door and closing it once again, he moved towards her and spoke “No one can hear you. We’re on the other side. Your precious Mark isn't coming to save you.” he said straddling her waist and pinning her arms above her head “STOP!! PLEASE STOP!! AAAHHHH” Moon sobbed “And when I’m done with you, he won’t even want to look at you, he’ll be so disgusted” he said kissing down her jaw to her neck. “PLEASE STOP, ANdRE, STOP IT” “Just like that, keep screaming my name” he said groping her.

“Okay boys team, you’re up.” the coach announced. The team got up from their benches and walked towards their coach. “1, 2, 3, 4 - where’s Andre?” the coach asked as she was counting the members “He said he was going to the toilet, it’s been five minutes now” one of the team members replied “HAS ANYONE SEEN ANDRE?” the coach turned around and announced. Hearing the announcement, Mark started looking around, having an uneasy feeling when he didn’t see Moon or Andre. Getting up from his spot he went towards the coach and asked about her “She and I went to get some sports equipment from the storage room, the door was stuck so she stayed back saying she’ll close up and get back. Why? She isn’t back?” the coach asked “No” Mark replied “Could you go check on her, see if she needs help with the door, and if doesn’t close, just tell someone from the admin and bring her here” the coach said Mark nodded his head and ran towards the storage area. Being an alumni, he was quite familiar with the building and didn’t have much difficulty getting to the storage room.  As he got closer he could hear Moon screaming, assuming she was stuck inside he fastened his pace, but what he heard next made his blood oil with anger and started running. Kicking open the door his fists clenched in anger at the scene in front of him. Moon was sprawled on the ground, her shorts halfway down, shirt riding up her chest and Andre on top of her groping her in the most inappropriate of ways. “You fucking bastard” Mark gritted and pushed him off her. Moon quickly scrambled to the side, fixing her clothes she curled in the corner sobbing harshly, her body shaking uncontrollably. Mark grabbed Andre from the collar of his shirt and pulled him up. Throwing him against the wall, Mark threw a punch to his face, making him stumble. Mark kept throwing punch after punch until Andre was lying on the ground. Mark was about to kick him when he kicked his foot under Mark’s, sending Mark stumbling back. Taking the opportunity Andre got up and ran out of the room. Mark wanted to follow after him but decided against it taking a look at Moon’s figure.   Getting closer to her curled up figure, he gently touched her shoulder. “AAHH, NO PLEASE, NO-” she started thrashing around, “hey, hey, hey, it’s me, it’s just Mark” he spoke soothingly “M...Ma….Maa…” she stuttered, eyes glossy, cheeks tear stained, face completely red and body shaking uncontrollably. “Yeah it’s just me, I’m here, I’m not gonna hurt you. I got you now, everything’s alright” he said wiping away her tears. Letting out a sob, Moon threw herself at Mark, wrapping her arms and legs around him, clutching onto him for dear life. “I...I..di...didn’t..th...thi….think...an...anyone wa..was gonna co..come” She spoke trying to calm herself “It’s okay, I’m here now. I’m not gonna let anyone hurt you” He said, rubbing her back, trying to get her to stop shaking. The two sat there in silence, Moon releasing deep breaths occasionally. “You better?” Mark asked as Moon loosened her hold on him and pulled away “Mhhmm” she nodded getting off of him and standing up, her legs still feeling wobbly “C’mon, we have to tell your coach.” Mark said, grabbing her hand, and pulling her out of the storage room but Moon stood there rooted to the ground “It’s no use” she said pulling him back “What do you mean? You’re not walking away without taking action, I’m not gonna let you. The bastard needs to be punished” Mark said harshly “You think I don’t know that. We’re gonna tell the coach, then what?” she retorted “The school admin takes action, that’s what” “How do you plan on proving him guilty? There are no security cameras in this room.” she folded her arms “What about the hallways? If we can catch him going in th-” “Come with me” she cut him off, dragging him with her. “Look at that” she said pointing towards the broken security camera “Ho-” he started “It broke this morning, A bunch of boys were throwing around balls and ended up kitting the camera, It’s supposed to be fixed tomorrow. Andre knew this too and took the opportunity. There's no point in telling anyone” she sighed hanging her head low, tears streaming down her face “I’m sorry. We’ll get him back, I’ll make him pay for ever laying a finger on you. I promise you that” Mark said hugging her small figure closer to him “Teach me, teach me how to protect myself. What if he does it again, and you’re not there” Moon said, lifting her head “I’m not leaving your side, ever. You don’t ever have to worry about me not being there” he said wiping her tears “But I still want you to teach me, I don’t want to depend on anyone” she said, taking in a deep breath, finally calming down “Okay, whatever you want. But what are you going to tell your coach. You look horrible” Mark questioned “Let’s go, I know what I have to say” she said walking away, with him following behind

“Number 5. What happened, you were gone for more than 20 minutes” the coach asked when Moon handed her the keys “I was trying to close it from the inside, when it closed and got stuck, I kept banging on the door since I didn’t have my phone, Mark opened it from outside” she lied “You look sick, your face is all red, are you sure you’re alright” the coach asked concerned “Yes, I just get claustrophobic in tight spaces, that’s all” “Oh, explains a lot. Leave the practice early today. Get some rest” the said “No ma’am I’m fine, I can practice” she said “Don’t tire yourself out, get some rest, There is a week till the final day, you’ll have plenty of time to practice. Go home today, rest up, get better and we’ll practice tomorrow. I don’t want one of my top athletes to pass out from exhaustion.” the coach said sternly “Yes ma’am” she replied and walked away to gather her things

“You’re coach is right you know, you don’t have to tire yourself” Mark said, starting the car “It’s just, you know how it is. This scholarship may be my only chance to get out, and I don’t want to risk losing it. Being completely honest with you, one of the reasons I didn’t want to tell anyone about what happened with Andre is because I don’t want it to hinder my scholarship. Yeah it’s because there isn’t sufficient proof to prove it was him. I could pursue it, but that would just take my focus away. I don’t want that” Moon explained “I wish you weren’t so hard on yourself all the time” he said “I wish the world wasn’t so cruel to me” she whispered looking out the window. Mark didn’t have much to say to her, knowing she indeed went through a lot on a daily basis. He just sighed and kept driving in silence.

The next went smoothly, Moon would practice after school, and after practice she would learn self defence with Mark. As promised, he didn’t leave her side.  It was the final day and everything was going smoothly. Moon’s football team won with a good score, and she was really ecstatic especially since she kicked the winning goal. Going into the girls locker room she began to change into her badminton uniform. After getting changed, she sat on the benches to put her shoes on. Halfway through Andre entered the locker room. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? THIS THE GIRLS LOCKER ROOM, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED HERE” Moon shouted at him “Relax girl, I’m just here to grab something for June from her locker. I asked coach before coming inside” he replied “Where’s coach?” she asked “In the ground” he smirked at her. “But don’t worry. I’m not gonna do anything” he added before walking away. Moon quickly took out her phone, texting Mark, who immediately replied

Moon: Mark please come to my locker room Mark: Why? Everything okay? Moon: Andre, he’s here. He says he’s here to get something, but I don’t trust him Mark: Take a deep breath Bitty, I’m on my way. Moon: Please hurry

Putting her phone aside she quickly got to putting on her shoes. Chugging down her water, Moon quickly got up to run out. But as soon as she stood up, she started feeling dizzy and light headed. She looked down at the water bottle and cursed, realizing it was drugged. Releasing a laugh, Andre walked over to her. “Staaayyyyy awaaayy” Moon slurred, pushing him away. All the self defence tricks she learned now useless as her movements were very delayed “C’mon we have to get out of here before your boyfriend shows up” Andre said, dragging Moon’s intoxicated self with him. “Booyfrieend, I wiiiiish~” Moon giggled, completely drunk “As if that matters anyway. You’re mine now” Andre whispered. Reaching for the door. Mark was quick and smart. Knowing Andre was going to do something, he didn’t come alone. Pulling Moon towards himself, he pushed Andre towards Jaebum. “Take care of him, I’ll take her out”. Nodding his head Jaebum dragged Andre away. Picking Moon up, Mark walked inside. Sitting her down on the benches, he went to her locker and started rummaging through it. Silently thanking the Gods when he found a juicebox in her locker, he went to her and took her phone and texted himself

Moon: Hey could you bring me a juice box, I don’t feel so good

After sending the text he removed the previous conversation and manipulated the text time to make seem as if it was sent 10 minutes ago. Taking out his phone, he texted Jinyoung.

Mark: Bring Bitty’s coach here in 5 minutes Jinyoung: Why? I thought you’ll keep it under control Mark: Shit went down big time. We can’t get her out quietly now Jinyoung: Fuck Mark: Just text me when you reach near the locker room

“You look hot” Moon suddenly said. This caught Mark off guard as she was simply giggling to herself all this time “Say what now” he asked bewildered “Don’t act like you don’t know. You’ve always known how I liked you. I never said anything. But for some reason I feel like confronting you about it” she said walking up to him. Mark sighed “Bitty, this really isn’t the time. You’re intoxicated. Let’s talk when you’re sober” he said “No, I wanna talk right now. I’m completely sober. You’re the one who needs to man up. You never tell me you like me but your actions say otherwise. Either tell me you don’t feel the same and that your actions are platonic or be honest with me. Stop leading me on” she slurred stumbling. He grabbed her shoulders to steady her, before he could say anything his phone went off

Jinyoung: On our way, two minutes max Mark: Stall her till I come out. I have a situation Jinyoung: You’re kidding? What even is going on? Mark: Don’t have time to explain

“You’re being a real jerk here” she poked him “Gosh I can’t believe I’m gonna do this”  he whispered before kissing Moon. she was caught off guard but nonetheless kissed back. He felt horrible for taking advantage of her like this but he knew he didn’t have much time. Putting two fingers on her neck, he pressed on her pressure point until she fainted in his arms. Lying her on the ground, he took out his pocket knife. Apologizing to the unconscious figure he made a small cut on her temple. Letting a little blood pool on the floor he dipped his fingers in it before smearing it on the side of the bench. Once he made sure everything was in place. He picked her up princess style and walked out of the locker room. “Oh my lord. What happened?” Moon’s coach asked looking at her unconcious figure in Mark’s arms “I’m not sure. She texted me she wasn’t feeling well and that she wanted me to bring her juice. I did as told, but when I called her she didn’t pick up so I went inside the locker room. She was unconscious when I got there. I think she hit her head on the benches because there was blood on the bench’s corner.” He lied “Coach, we should tell everyone she won’t be playing. Mark will take her to the hospital” Jinyoung said catching on to Mark’s lie “Oh yeah yeah, please call me as soon as she wakes up, Jinyoung, you tell her parents, I’ll make the announcement” the coach said walking away “Tell aunt and uncle what I told the coach. I’ll take her to your apartment. Make something up and make sure they don’t ask to go to the hospital.” Mark warned “If she hit her head, she needs a CT scan” JInyoung said “No, she didn’t hit her head, she was drugged, I had to make her faint to get her out, made a little cut just to make up a story” he explained “It’s 2:00 right now, I can stall them until 6:00, 7:00 max” Jinyoung sighed “That’s plenty of time.” Mark said, turning around and walking away from him.

Head bent over the toilet bowl, Moon threw up. Her stomach emptied and the more she hurled the more her throat burned. Mark returned with a glass of water, he kneeled down next to her and rubbed her back. “Any better?” he asked as she looked at him “Water.” she told him. Mark handed her the glass and she chugged the whole thing down in one go. Handing him the glass back she stood up. “Do you have a spare toothbrush?” She asked flushing the toilet “Yeah, here” he handed her the new brush from the cupboard. Moon started brushing her teeth and Mark left the toilet giving her privacy.

“I made some hangover soup,”  Mark said as Moon walked into the kitchen. “Can I get something for a headache? I feel like someone is hammering my head” Moon said clutching her head “Yeah, here you go” he said handing her a glass of water and two pills “Thanks” she said popping the pills “So, what happened? All I remember is drinking water which happened to be drugged. After that, it’s like I blacked out. And what happened to my head?” she asked, touching the bandage on her temple. Mark was internally relieved that she didn’t remember anything. He really didn’t want to talk about the kiss “When I got there, you were totally wasted and were being dragged out by Andre. Thankfully we got to you in time. JB took care of Andre, while I got you out.” Mark said “Wait. I was wasted, please tell me I didn’t say anything stupid” she asked “You were just a giggly mess. Drunk you is like a 3 year old kid with candy” he laughed, handing her the bowl of soup. “Oh. how’d you get me out without anyone noticing? And what about my parents?” she asked taking a spoonful of the soup “Well, I strangled you until you passed out and then took you out” he shrugged. Moon’s mouth went wide open as she dropped her spoon in the bowl. Mark laughed at her expression before continuing “You have pressure points in your neck, I pressed on it and you were out cold. I made a little cut on your head, made your coach think you fell and hit your head. Voila perfect escape plan. Although I am really sorry about your head” “Nah, it’s cool, it’s better than being seen drunk. Especially since i’m a minor and it was an important day” she casually waved him off. Mark and Moon went over the plan one more time, before he dropped her back at home. “Wanna come inside, I’m sure they’ll wanna see you” Moon said unbuckling her seat belt “Yeah sure, let’s just get it over with” he said exiting the car with her.

The following week became a living hell for Moon. She lost her scholarship and her coach referred her to the school psychologist. After a few sessions, it was concluded that Moon was mentally unstable and should avoid extra curricular until she was better. Moon knew very well that she was mentally disturbed and knew exactly why, but her coping mechanism was different and she hated talking about her problems. So to avoid confrontation, she did everything she was told by the psychologist. The problem got bigger and bigger and Moon decided it would be better to just drop college altogether. After graduating from high school, Moon became interested in online games and started developing love for computers. Starting with freelancing she built up her skills with time and forgot about her highschool life and dreams.

End Of Flashback

By the time Moon finished explaining, the pizza was cooked and now the three sat there in silence and ate the pizza. “Did you really hate us that much to not bring up such a big thing?” Moons mother asked “At first I felt it wasn’t important and I just wanted to forget it, so I avoided talking about it. After the sports day, I wanted to tell you but I needed some time to accept it. Then the whole thing with the psychologist took place and when I tried to talk to you about it, I knew it was too late, Andre was gone and I couldn’t really do anything. You know how I can get, just like dad I too can get hot headed, and when I bought it up things didn’t exactly go as planned so I gave up” Moon casually answered “I’m sorry. We couldn’t be there when you needed us the most and you had to go through that all by yourself” her mom said “Why are you apologizing? You did nothing wrong” Moon said “I was hard on you sometimes. I couldn't protect you like I should’ve” “You did more than you could, I’ll always be thankful for that.” she said tightly hugging the older lady. “This must be really awkward for you. First time meeting your girlfriend's parents and all you get is drama” her mom said looking at Chan “Girlfriend?” Moon questioned “He did say he was your boyfriend” “I was planning to tell you after some time, we just started going out” Moon blushed “It’s completely alright ma’am. I was somewhat aware of Moon’s relation with her father, so you don’t have to worry about that.” he smiled politely.

“Thank you so much for having me ma’am. It was really nice to meet you. You’re an amazing chef. Thank you once again, I really enjoyed your company.” Chan said as the two were now getting ready to leave. “Oh you flatter me Chris. It was amazing to meet you too. And please, don’t call me ma’am, just call my Aunt” her mother said patting his back “Thank you” he smiled shyly, his ears turning red. “Bye mom” Moon said, hugging mom one last time for the day. “Bye sweetheart, visit again soon” her mother said “I will, ba-bye” she said waving at her, getting inside the car

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The next morning Moon woke up earlier than expected. Finishing her morning routine, she went downstairs to the kitchen to whip something up for herself. Entering the kitchen, she was met with Bree and El preparing breakfast. “What’s for breakfast today?” she asked the older girls “Toast and egg. You want orange juice or mango?” Bree answered “Mango” she smiled, getting herself a glass of water “Hey guys” an unfamiliar yet recognizable voice spoke “NAY!!” Moon shouted turning around “SUNNY” Nay said with the same enthusiasm and  embraced Moon tightly “What are you doing here?” Moon asked as the two pulled apart “I should be asking you. No contact for a year and you’re in a gang.” Nay said “Yeah, long story” Moon smiled sheepishly “Your dad?” she raised a brow “Something along the lines yeah. What about you?” Moon questioned “Well you know my hoe-ish tendencies. Gotta sell my drugs somehow” she shrugged “Why am I not surprised” Moon laughed “Because you know me so well” Nay said swinging her arm around Moon’s shoulder “You girls seem close” Bree said “Been besties since high school” Nay replied “Speaking of highschool. How’s Madzi, what’s she been upto lately?” Moon asked, the two girls taking a seat on the bar stool near the counter top “Oh you don’t know?” Nay said “Oh no, I don’t like that tone. What’s going on?” Moon said “Well, it’s a long story. She was in a relationship an-” Nay started “Woah, I’m gonna stop you right there, was it an abusive relationship. Tell me where she is, I swear to God I’m about to kill someone” Moon cut her off “Slow down tiger. I like how you’re so feisty yet the tiniest of us three. Where do you store all that anger” Nay said, causing Bree and El to laugh “Ha ha, but for real, you know how I get protective over her, she’s the youngest amongst us” “Yeah yeah I know. Anywho. She was in a committed and happy relationship, but her parents found out.  Being homophobic, they were completely against their daughter being in a relationship with a woman. Things did not end well. She was forced to marry someone and break up with Didi. A month into her marriage, she found out that her husband is in a gang. And the last time I talked to her she didn’t sound really good” Nay explained “Didi from computer class? The cute shawty.” Moon asked “Yeah her. They made such a cute couple” “Literally everyone knew the two were whipped for each other, but neither of them said anything” “They were meant to be. The two met in a nightclub a few months after highschool. Both were drunk, guess it was the perfect opportunity.” Nay told “Can’t we do something about it? I mean you’re probably involved with more than one gang, maybe team up and get her out” Moon said “I checked. But her Gang has very strong alliances, so we can’t do anything” “Well, let’s just hope the universe has mercy on her” “Yeah well, there's not much we can do anyway” “So you tell. How’d you get into the whole drug business?” Moon asked “Well, Madzi, Didi and I started it about two years ago. We wanted to ask you but you were having issues of your own with your father, so we thought best to give you space. We didn’t think we’d succeed but damn was it fun once we got there. Didi and I are still in the business, Madzi however, well I just told you” Nay answered “What did you guys call yourselves?” “Stonewhores” she grinned “I- I’m not even gonna ask” moon said making her laugh “Alright girls breakfast is ready. Moon, go upstairs and get everyone”  Bree told “Yep” the younger girl replied and went up the stairs Knocking on everyone's door she did as she was told. “Hey, Min have you seen Innie? He’s not in his room” Moon asked Seungmin “I think he went to Channie’s office.” he replied “Oh okay, I’ll check, thanks” she smiled at him walking towards Chan’s office She knocked twice, waiting for someone to open the door “It’s open” Chan called from the inside. She opened the door and stepped inside. Chan and Jeongin seemed to be in the middle of some serious discussion. “Am I interrupting something?” she asked looking at their serious expressions. “No, it’s okay, we’re done. What brings you here?” Jeongin asked “Oh, Bree’s calling everyone downstairs for breakfast,” Moon said. Jeongin moved closer to Chan and hugged him “Thank you.” he said pulling away “I trust you, Don’t let me down” he said patting his back “I won’t” he said walking out of the office “What was that about?” Moon asked confused, looking at Jeongin’s disappearing figure. “He came to tell me about Him and Anessa. He said they like like each other and want to go out, came to ask for my permission” Chan answered “That’s so sweet and cute of him. You know he looks up to you a lot” Moon replied “Yeah I know. He’s a good kid, that’s why I didn’t object” Chan said, the two walking out of his office. “It’s cute, he even asked me to talk to Felix” Chan chuckled “What for?” “Seungmin and Liv also have a thing for each other, but they’re both afraid to tell Felix because of what happened when El and Woojin started going out. It’s like Romeo and Juliet” Chan answered “I don’t think so, in my defense Romeo and Juliet were dumb and dumber” “It’s a classical romance novel, what even woman” “I think if Seungmin ever came across liv’s unconscious figure, lying next to sleeping pills, his first instinct would be to try to wake her up or take her to the infirmary, not take the pills and kill himself. Whereas Romeo was a dumbass who thought that Juliet was dead, he didn’t even try to wake her up, just straight up took the poison and comitted suicide.” “I never knew you were into reading classical romance” he teased her “Oh please, it was compulsory in high school. I’m more into violent, gore, kinky, bloody kind of shit” “Kinky you say” “From the whole list, that’s what you picked up?” “I only hear what I wanna hear” he laughed As the two reached the kitchen Moon grimaced when she saw Hyunjin slap Nay’s ass. “Get your dirty hands off my baby” Moon said slapping Hyunjins back “What’s your problem?” he said “You just harassed my best friend, I’m not gonna stand here and watch” “Uhh babe, he didn’t harass me” Nay said “WHAT!?!?! Him? Seriously of all people, why him? Girl you could do so much better than him” Moon made a disgusted face “Well I’m offended” Hyunjin said overdramatically “Oh boi, she’s the best” Han laughed “What’s wrong with him?” Nay asked “Everything” Moon replied, everyone now seated on the dining table “But he has a nice dick and he knows how to use it” Nay shrugged “Ewww Nay, I’m eating” Moon pretended to throw up. Everyone just watching the two with amused expressions “I’m sure he’d be delighted to show you” Nay smirked “No thank you, I’d rather get stabbed by him again” Moon said “I can stab you with my  dick” Hyunjin chirped “Oh boi, bad move” El whistled “Why?” Hyunjin asked “Her boyfriend does not seem happy” Woojin said looking at Chan who had an unreadable expression “You do that and I chop it off” Chan said “Wait what? When did you two happen” Felix asked “Yesterday” Bree answered “Who confessed?” Han asked “Chan made the first move” Moon replied “Yess. Hwang, pay up.” Hyunjin grumbled and took out a $50 note from his wallet and handed it to Han “Come to papa” Han said kissing the note “You guys were betting on us?” Moon exclaimed “Only about who was gonna confess first” Han shrugged “Well, nobody confessed, which means both of you lost. So thank you very much for the money” Moon said reaching forward and took the money from his hand “But-” Han pouted “Too bad for you” Minho laughed “So Moon, How was your visit to your parents house” Liv said changing the topic “Oh it was great” she replied “Your mom and sister must’ve been happy to see you” Anna chirped “Well my sister was out of country so I couldn’t see her, but I met my mom and it was amazing” Moon smiled “When is she returning, I’ll take you to visit her” Chan said “Last night. Can we go this afternoon” Moon replied “I have some work this afternoon. You can take my car, but if you want to go with me, we can go tomorrow” Chan said “Oh it’s okay, I can go by myself” she replied “You sure?” “Yeah”

Moon rang the bell about three times but there was no answer. It was 4:00 in the evening and a Sunday so she couldn’t be at work. Not wanting to wait anymore she took out the spare key she always kept with her and unlocked the door. “I’m coming, I’m coming” her sister called out when Moon walked inside her apartment “Sis!!” her sister ran towards Moon and hugged her tight “What the pleasant surprise, and I see you still have the key” she giggled “And I see you still haven’t given up on your habit of sleeping around” Moon said taking in her appearance “C’mon sis, stop being such a party pooper” she said walking into the kitchen “Mavis. You know I don’t have any problem with the way you live your life, but please, this isn’t exactly safe. There are so many dangers, what if someone creepy takes advantage of you while drunk, or what about an STD. you have to be careful” Moon sighed “Sis, I understand your concern but don’t worry, I’ve gotten out of the habit of sleeping around with anyone. It’s just one person now. And no strings attached” “Well that’s good to hear, and I hope you use protection, because God knows where he’s been” Moon said “He too only sleeps with me, and yes, we do use protection if that’s what your worried about” Mavis said “Babe, should we order takeout?” a voice called out “He’s still here?” Moon asked “You’re the one who came unannounced” Mavis shrugged “Babe, I aske-” he stopped mid sentence when he saw Moon “YOU!?!” Moon’s eyes went wide wide

[bluebellhairpin]

The Girl Who Knew The End {2}

Lullaby Of Woe

Thorin Oakenshield X Fem!Reader

Chapter One // An Uninvited Guest

Chapter Two // (You’re Here!)

Chapter Three // “I Was With Child” 

A/N: Some people wished to be tagged if I continued this story, so here we are I guess. - Nemo

Song: ‘Lullaby of Woe’ by Marcin Przybyłowicz 

Summary: After a few days journey, the Company stopped at the place you recognise as the place where Balin tells the story of how Thorin gained the name ‘Oakenshield’. This eventually leads you you telling a story of your own, one that gets Thorin really thinking about how he ought to be treating you. 

Series Masterlist

Masterlist  

{Edited 24-02-2020}

You had been traveling with Thorin and the Company for a while now, both yours and Thorin’s temper flaring a good handful of times already, the Company were starting to quietly bet on how long it'd take for your bickering to turn into banter, then to turn into full-blown make-out sessions. The tension sure was building towards and end like that.

You had stopped for the night, resting under a rocky crevice, Thorin was set to start on first watch with Fili and Kili before you took over with Dwalin and Ori. You decided to stay up with them, the story Balin would tell would be one you decided you'd rather not miss. 

As Balin started the story of how Thorin gained the name Oakenshield, the dwarf in subject wandered off to face the cliff. You watched, as everyone did, and found yourself standing with the rest of the company out of respect for your leader and king. You knew orcs, they'd caused you pain, physical and emotional; they'd left scars - physical and emotional - on you too that wouldn't go away. 

You’d always respect Thorin for what he went though - even if he was a jerk. 

As Thorin joined the group back from the cliff face he previously stood on, you got another ‘revelation’.

Your head hurt when major events of the films occurred. You walked over to the cliff where Thorin once was, looking over around the place the small groups of orcs were. You had to swallow the bile rising is your throats at the sight of the flashing eyes of their wolfish steeds; the same ones that cause you all that pain. 

You looked back at Gandalf, of which had sensed your revelation and was keeping a keen eye on you since. Your face had gotten paler, Gandalf was worried, but he’d come to understand that the revelations you got couldn't be shared.

No matter what happened, you could never share what was to come. 

“My (y/n), you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Bofur said from a way across the camp. Unlike Gandalf, the Company didn’t yet fully understand the lengths of your revelations, so you had to make up reasons as to why you suddenly looked so shocked, ecstatic, or somber. 

“Oh i-it’s nothing Bofur. I just remember something from my world.”

“Must’ve been something’ pretty scary. A tale of sorts?” Bofur proded, some of the other Company soon turned to face you.

“Oh no, it was just a… Um, a lullaby.” you said, racking through the leftover knowledge in your mind for an excuse that would be believable. Of all things, you had to say a lullaby. 

“Lullabies aren’t generally scary.” he said, taking a puff of his pipe smugly, thinking he caught you. 

“This one is. It’s meant to get children to stay inside at night.” You said, turning your head away slightly to curse yourself at weaving a web that you might not get out of.

“Huh, what’s it called?”

“The Lullaby of Woe.” you said slowly, remembering a more scary lullaby from a game you played once. 

“Sounds morbid. And fake.” Thorin said, now having taken his place near Fili and Kili again. You narrowed your eyes at him. You’d give him fake. 

“I would sing it for you, but you’d hardly be grateful if I did.” The Company went into light uproar, not having anything but Balin and Gandalf’s stories, and Bofur’s songs  over the past couple nights, a lullaby from you - even a scary one - sounded like a nice change to them. 

“Oh please (y/n). I’ll even sit in front of Uncle if you want, then you won't even have to see him.” Fili offered with a smile. 

“Sounds nice Fili.” You laughed, the company now gathering in their sleeping packs to hunker down and listen to your lullaby.

“Wolves asleep amidst the trees, bats all a swaying in the breeze, but one soul lies anxious wide awake, fearing no manner of ghouls, hags and wraiths.” 

You started, carefully singing as your eyes traveled over the group, seeing some already stiffening at your sung words. 

“For your dolly Polly sleep has flown, don't dare let her tremble alone. For the witcher, heartless, cold, paid in coin of gold. He comes he'll go leave naught behind but heartache and woe. Deep, deep woe.” 

Thorin watched you as you sang, your lips moving with purpose, you paused in your singing with such wispy grace, he wondered if the lullaby might be a summoning song instead. What if you were actually here to kill them? To lure them all in with your sweet song? Thorin shook his head. 

Gandalf knew many people, but none were like that, not even you.

“Birds are silent for the night, cows turned in as daylight dies. But one soul lies anxious wide awake, fearing no manner of ghouls, hags and wraiths. My dear dolly Polly shut your eyes, lie still, lie silent, utter no cries. As the witcher, brave and bold, paid in coin of gold.” 

You slowly stood, walking around the camp as you sang, making your voice echo off the rocks, the sound richoching down the cliff and across the valley into the ears of the still waiting Orcs. They were chilled at your song. 

As far as they knew you were speaking of your own story, the witcher was you, and as far as your sung words said you weren’t afraid of anything horrible, even them. 

“Send one more word to Master, the Dwarf scum travel with a powerful being. Let him know this now so he can prove to that pathetic King that he can kill such ones with ease.”

“He'll chop and slice you, cut and dice you. Eat you up whole, eat you whole.” 

You sung the last word with force, letting your words rattle poor Dwalin’s unsuspecting ears. The dwarf shot up from his sleeping position to then face your laughing face with a scowl. 

“Lass, I’d never do that again if I were you.” he warned, only making you laugh more, Fili and Kili almost in stitches at the look on Dwalin’s face when you scared him moments before. Even Thorin, having been watching you still from when you started singing, cracked a smile. 

“Trust me Dwalin, there are much worse things than a Lullaby to be scared of right now.” You said, a breathless laugh escaping you as you patted his shoulder and moved back to your own sleeping space. 

“You could say that again (y/n).” Gandalf said quietly, nestling himself back into a sleeping position before tipping his hat over his eyes. “You can say that again.” 

Thorin looked over to watch you as you also settled down, he kept looking between you and the fire to try and make it look like he wasn’t staring. After that song, that lullaby, it was almost as if he saw you in a new light, like one switch of many was suddenly turned on inside his mind which enabled him to really see you. Sure, he’d seen you before, but only superficially, not like this. 

It suddenly occurred to him that you had a life back where you came from, a family, friends, maybe even a lover or children. You’d been through hell to get to Bilbo’s that night, only for him to treat you like you were nothing. Now he felt pretty bad about it, regretted it even, and felt the strange need to make it up to you. 

He didn’t really know how. He didn’t know what you liked. Mahal - he wasn’t going to apologise - he figured you wouldn’t appreciate that a whole lot. He thought about getting you something Dwarrowdam’s liked - but you weren’t a dwarf, so the chances of you liking what he’d find you were slim. He then seemed to be hit with an epiphany; you wanted to go home, the place you’d be sent back to once your purpose (whatever it was) was fulfilled. 

He’d help you fill your lot in your sudden change of life, he’d help get you home to where you wanted to be most, with the people you wanted to be with them most.

Surely you’d forgive him after that, even without an apology.

Series Taglist: @thorins-queen-of-erebor  @pigeonsbones @captainrainbowpanda

[yukipri]

YOI Future!Verse ABO AU, Visual Headcanon Web Charts #01

So I always wanted to make one of these. Turns out my headcanons for the most part are WAY too wordy for these things and uh, they’re a bit of a mess >.>;; BUT I hope nonetheless that they’re somewhat fun to read even if barely legible, it was fun to make ^ ^;

1. Super basic relationship chart of the core members of the lovely poly family in this AU.

2. “Adults Think,” the color of each adult indicates their feelings towards the person to whom the arrow is pointing.

3. “Kids Think,” the color of each OC kid indicates their feelings towards the person to whom the arrow is pointing.

There’s obviously a lot more to it than what could be crammed in the lil text boxes, but a gist and pretty much the first things that immediately popped into my mind regarding their interactions. 2 and 3 also mostly show their thoughts while the kids are younger, which will change a bit as they grow up, to be covered in a future post.

*Recommended you right click view image to see full size bc the text is tiny oops

Because the text is so illegible, text only versions of charts 2 and 3 beneath cut, all elaborated quite a bit because I’m so rambly oops:

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IF YOU ARE NEW TO THIS AU: It’s Yuuri-centric polyamory in an ABO setting, Yuuri’s married to four mates (Victor, Yurio, Phichit, Minami) and they have OC kids.

BASICS of this AU

INTRO to how ABO works in this AU

OTHER POSTS (comics + illustrations) in the Future!Verse ABO section of my YOI Masterpost.

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Please keep ship bashing out of the comments/tags. Don’t like, just skip <3 Thank you.

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PLEASE DO NOT REPOST, EDIT, OR OTHERWISE USE MY ART WITHOUT MY EXPLICIT PERMISSION. More detailed rules available on my Rules & FAQ Post.

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Yuuri thinks:

Victor: Vitya I love you but there are some things I REALLY wish you wouldn’t encourage with the kids, I don’t care if you could do it when you were younger it’s terrifying!!

Yurio: Yura, how does it feel now that the kids all think you’re older than me? NO don’t use this as an excuse to call me baby-faced!!

Phichit: PHICHIT please knock some sense into the others, you’re my only hope!--NO don’t just sit back and laugh! I was counting on you!

Minami: Kenjirou, you’re my student and husband NOT my butler, I can get my own bags thank you very much.

Yasha: Darling you can wear whatever you want but PLEASE wear SOMETHING under that dress the old ladies at the park will never look at me the same again

Shura: You don’t need to try so hard to be a rebel, and you also don’t need to spoil Yasha so much. Just tell him no, he’ll deal.

Arisa: Darling it’s amazing that you can do that and I’m so proud of you but please don’t hack the neighbor’s security system again, it’s very hard to explain to them that my toddler was just stretching her intellectual curiosity.

Yuuji: Yuuji, your smile warms my weary soul and I’m sure you’ll inevitably be a little trouble maker too but let me be in denial a bit longer.

Victor thinks:

Yuuri: It’ll be fun, they can handle it, please don’t look at me like that, I’m (pretty) sure they’ll be okay...

Yurio: You may seem like the more responsible parent but you’ll always be my cute bratty student. Now that my seniority is less obvious though, I’m comfortable making you indulge my own brattiness too. what do you mean you were always forced to indulge my brattiness

Phichit: You may act like the most reasonable parent but I see through you--and I’m proud. We’re startlingly alike if I’m honest. Let’s conquer the world.

Minami: You may be a bratty puppy but I rest easy knowing you’re always be Yuuri’s side. Couldn’t ask for a more loyal or dangerous watch dog. Don’t worry I do think of you as human, really.

Yasha: Trust me, I know how fun it can be to tease your brother but take it easy sometime, yes? I love you having fun but it hurts my soul to see Shura have red eyes so often...though yes I do admit that’s cute too OTL

Shura: Sweet child, come here, did Yasha make you cry again? Daddy will give you all the hugs. Don’t run away just because Yasha’s in my other arm!

Arisa: I feel like your adorable eyes are judging me...and guess what, they’re still adorable!! It’s okay, you can judge me all you want! *HUGS*

Yuuji: I have dropped the dishes so many times because it looked like you wanted a hug...I can’t help it...you’re like, a super mini Yuuri...

Yurio thinks:

Yuuri: OI Katsudon, I made this new food thing, try it, am I better than Phichit yet? YEAH NO I know I won’t ever be a better all rounder than him but...what, it’s really good? W-W-WELL OF COURSE IT IS I KNEW THAT HA HA HA *flees*

Victor: I’m mature enough now to recognize what a brat you can be, not that I didn’t already know but--HEY DON’T LAUGH THAT WASN’T PERMISSION

Phichit: Okay FINE I admit I need your help...stop looking so smug! Yes, ugh, fuck that’s clever, alright I know (fuck it’s worse because he’s genuine and never follows up with “I told you so”)

Minami: YOU HAVE SOME NERVE CALLING ME YOUR RIVAL JUST BECAUSE YOU WON GOLD OVER ME TWICE, it was all thanks to Yuuri! NO I’m not being overly conscious of you as a competitor, ugh FINE I admit your skating really impresses me but FUCK YOU

Yasha: Brat, did you just...make me run around the house five times for no reason at all?? UGH I’m not even mad, I’m too tired and too used to this, it’s my own fault for falling for it every time...

Shura: What do you MEAN “I bet you cried a lot when you were a kid too,” don’t say that to me while CRYING like ugh FINE will it make you feel better if I said I did??? Please stop crying I don’t want you to cry OTL

Arisa: Risa, I don’t want to suspect you, but I have a hunch you might be the one putting the twins up to mischief and I think you’re still too young and I want to think you’re as pure and innocent as you look but...dare I trust my instincts on this...

Yuuji: YUUJI YOU EASE YOUR FATHER’S WEARY SOUL how are you so pure you seem to make my adult exhaustion melt away...

Phichit thinks:

Yuuri: Perks of marrying your BFF: know just the perfect amount to pamper and also to tease. And also know all the deepest darkest secrets you’re too embarrassed to tell your other mates. Shh it’s okay they’ll never hear it from me ;D

Victor: We had some rough moments early on but you’re a good guy, Victor. I recognize our compatibility. Let’s conquer the world together and present it to Yuuri.

Yurio: I’ll look after you, not-so-lil Russian, you leave your troubles to me. I know how vulnerable you can be and I see you as my own now.

Minami: Kenjirou may act like a super groupie but he has it together better than most of us. I trust him to still prioritize Yuuri even in situations where the rest of us are emotionally compromised, which gives me the confidence to go full offense.

Yasha: Oh, you say someone’s picking on Shura at school? Okay, so here’s what you do, and here’s how to pin the blame on someone else because we wouldn’t want Yuuri to be called to school yeah?

Shura: Your brother’s picking on you again? But you don’t want him to stop either? Well then, how should we solve this? Oops is he a future masochist to Yasha’s sadist...

Arisa: I see what you did there, very clever, I’m proud! But if Yuuri found out he’d have a heart attack, so let’s not do that again, okay? Here’s something even more difficult for you to try to figure out...

Yuuji: Yuuji sweetheart I know making Victor drop dishes is funny but Yuuri likes those dishes, one last time ‘kay? You can make him do other things equally amusing but slightly less destructive of our collective family property.

Minami thinks:

Yuuri: Y-Y-Yuuri-san, NO I still can’t take the honorific off, I RESPECT YOU TOO MUCH plus it makes it feel that much more intimate in bed *turns brilliant red to match his hair streak*

Victor: Victor look at what I taught the twins!! Aren’t they absolutely amazing?! They’re going to break all of your records! And I can tell you’re not even upset :’D

Yurio: I never mentioned rivalry, you were the one who used that word first? ;3 But in all honesty, it’s an honor to be considered the rival of Yuuri-san’s rival so I’ll fight my hardest to not let that title go to shame.

Phichit: The fact that you are both fun and terrifying is not news to me, I’m glad you’re my family and not my enemy. I’ve seen what you can do to your enemies. Participated too, actually he he.

Yasha: You and your bro are perfect angels and I’ll show you all the cool skating things! I’m so happy your enthusiasm hasn’t died as you’ve grown older <3

Shura: It’s good to cry! Cry all you want! I’ll cry with you too! It can be a real sobfest! And then Yuuri can bring us tissues and then it can be a snotfest! Whoo!!

Arisa: DARLING CHILD you are the sweetest and you’d never do anything naughty, I have not a clue what the others are talking about. *genuine*

Yuuji: *SOBBING*

Yasha thinks:

Yuuri: MOM IS THE BEST AND MINE, YOU CAN’T HAVE HIM, and that includes all you dads so back off ;P

Victor: Dad is weak to puppy eyes and will give me anything I want. His affection can sometimes be stifling, but I love him nonetheless.

Yurio: Dad always gets flustered really easily and it’s fun to test his boundaries. And push them. And break them. But he never snaps, I think he’s getting stronger...

Phichit: The really smart dad who sees through all the pranks but still plays along, even intentionally lets me finish playing my pranks on him. It’s a bit annoying even if I appreciate it. I gotta up my game.

Minami: Ken-chan’s the BEST and he and mum are gonna kick dads’ (Victor + Yurio) asses in the next competition. I’ll cheer for dads too but Ken-chan’s No. 1!

Shura: He’s fun to make cry because he gets riled up, but the best part is the comforting that I get to do afterwards because no matter how mean I am he still comes running <3

Arisa: I’d beat you up if you hurt my sister, except she’d do it first and better than I ever could so I’ll just be prepared and bring the popcorn and watch from the front row, maybe help with clean up.

Yuuji: He’s not as innocent as he looks but you won’t hear it from me. Let the others live in denial, come to the dark side in your own time lil bro.

Shura thinks:

Yuuri: I want mum’s attention but Yasha hogs it, but mum’s the best so he makes time for me too and not just for selfish jerks like Yasha. Even if I have to share. It’s okay. I love how mum loves everyone all the same.

Victor: Dad spoils me rotten but he’s not a good shield against Yasha because he also spoils Yasha rotten. He spoils everyone. It’s okay tho, dad has a lot of spoiling to go around.

Yurio: Dad sorta gets picked on too and I sympathize...it makes me feel better knowing he was probably just like me when he was younger. The hard part is getting him to admit it, but that’s what other parents are for.

Phichit: Dad holds the answers to life and the universe in his magic smartphone. He has yet to fail to answer a single question but I’ll keep trying.

Minami: Ken-chan always plays with us even when he’s busy and shows us all the cool skating things! I didn’t get why he wasn’t dad too when Yasha and I were younger, but I’m glad that’s fixed now, though I still can’t shake the habit of calling him Ken-chan.

Yasha: He makes me cry and is such a JERK but I can’t stand to be away from him, it makes me so anxious, and he gives good hugs too so I forgive him (am I being too easy on him...)

Arisa: I want to say I protect her but it’s honestly the other way around, the best I can do is make sure she doesn’t hurt herself because she’s really reckless and it’s TERRIFYING, I sympathize with mom...

Yuuji: PLEASE DON’T STEP ON MY LIL BRO, HE IS VERY SMOL, he looks like he would go squish with one step! Risa wasn’t this smol?? What do you mean I’m bigger now so my sense of size is biased...?

Arisa thinks:

Yuuri: I’m going to protect mum. He doesn’t need it, at all, but I can do it so I will.

Victor: Dad acts gullible but I’m not fooled. He’s weak to puppy eyes though, that’s for real. And I have the best puppy eyes, or second to Yuuji. I’m okay being second to Yuuji.

Yurio: Dad’s trying really hard but he’s also really gullible so I can’t help but tease him. It’s okay I won’t be too mean, and I’ll even reign Yasha back some.

Phichit: Dad knows I’m smart and will protect my bros so he gives me the tools and education to do so. I don’t think mum and my other dads know just quite how much but it’s okay. We’re not hiding it on purpose.

Minami: If you hurt Ken-chan, I’ll knock your teeth out. I’d say “with my fists,” but I don’t think I can reach. It’s okay, I’m creative.

Yasha: My partner in crime, he’ll follow my orders even if they’re impossible and will somehow make it work. Because Yasha’s a miracle-worker and I believe in him.

Shura: The only ones who can make him cry are me and Yasha. But we do it a lot. Which means he has no more tears for anyone else. Back off or I’ll make you disappear : )

Yuuji: He is my squishy smol. He’s smaller than me! He never complains when I hug him and squish his cheeks until they turn red, and then I feel a bit bad...

Yuuji thinks:

Yuuri: Mum is the best! He gives me a lot of attention because I’m the youngest, but I kinda want a younger sibling too. Dads always hush me when I try to bring it up and I don’t really get why.

Victor: Dad spoils me rotten and I kinda feel bad because he never says no to me (or any of us), but when I mention it he gets all teary eyed and spoils me worse...^ ^;

Yurio: Dad is too paranoid about my safety. I’ll be big and strong like the others too! Just wait! Look how big dad is, I’ll be that tall one day too. What do you mean, that’s not how genetics works?

Phichit: Dad makes the best food, I wish he were home more often...I know he’s busy with his ice show in Thailand and it’s really really cool but I miss him...

Minami: Dad says he hit his growth spurt late, because he presented late. I BELIEVE! I won’t be smol forever!

Yasha: Yasha-nii has really good instincts and is there when I need him. It’s like he has a special radar and then brings the whole cavalry. So I don’t need to worry about going anywhere by myself--what do you mean, I shouldn’t be wandering off in the first place??

Shura: Shura-nii got picked on again, it’s okay, here’s a cookie I made with Yuri-dad and here’s a hug, I have short arms but love power!

Arisa: She’s my favorite sister! Even if she’s my only one! She gets really proud when I say it and I’m happy she’s happy so I say it a lot.

[imrainai]

[OOC Message log, imrainai & trashrightsactivist]

These are really old. Like, last in-universe year old. But some people wanted to see them, so here they are.

Summer, 3422

imrainai: Could I read the sideblog? You have a lot of really interesting things to say, and I'd like to read them. If you're ok with it. ^_^'

Trashrightsactivist: I would trust a promise from you, you seem trustworthy. So I will add you if you promise me that you understand how serious it could be if someone like tidalwave got hold of information that could tell her who I am in real life - I could quite easily die - and also promise you won't mention any of that info anywhere public. Is that okay?

Imrainai: Yeah, I promise. I definitely don't want anything bad to happen to you.

Trashrightsactivist: cool, adding you in a sec

Weeks Later

imrainai: ruby? are you ok? just laying low for a bit? You're safe, right?

Trashrightsactivist: yes. i am very sad and angry about things. but safe.

Imrainai: <3 please stay safe ok

Trashrightsactivist: i'll do my best. you too

Later

Imrainai: I think the internet's gonna cut out in a bit, so just wanted to tell you again to stay safe and take care of yourself. you're a good internet friend, OK, so make sure you're still here when I get back

Imrainai: taz liked your story about the aliens btw. I had to modify it some because I don't want him telling his teachers he's getting red-positive propaganda at home, it was about criminals and poor people. but the basic moral was intact, and he seemed to agree with it.

I just... be careful, OK, the world needs all the good people it can get

Trashrightsactivist: thank you. and I'm glad he liked the story, it's about the downtrodden whatever colour their hair is so yeah

Weeks Later

imrainai sent a post caste flexibility meme!

Imrainai: tag, you're privately it

Imrainai: also the internet's back and your blog is not back, are you still there

Trashrightsactivist: I will post caste meme soon. I have a secret new blog.

Trashrightsactivist: as in - the blog is not a secret but the fact that it's me is a secret

Trashrightsactivist: what i learned from tryna fill out the meme is mostly that i would be a sucky purple :P

Imrainai: ohhh, ok

Imrainai: also same

Imrainai: but I also feel like I'd feel like that no matter what I was. probably everything looks easier than it is from the outside

Trashrightsactivist: well you're like coping and looking after a baby so you must be doing something right! But probably true

Imrainai: at least if i were YELLOW i could ADVANCE in the LIBRARY SYSTEM

Imrainai: but yeah I guess Ves is more important anyway, so I can't be, like, totally failing at life in general

Trashrightsactivist: yeah that's one of the dumb things about the caste system tbh - as a purple its super hard to get anywhere really successful unless you got this one specific skillset of 'run a business'

Imrainai: well you can only run certain kinds of businesses, is the thing. like, I can't start an editing service or watch other people's kids or something

Trashrightsactivist: which is sooo dumb

Imrainai: I do not think I could, like, successfully run a restaurant or a furniture company or make clothes

Imrainai: there are lots of options, so you'd think ONE of them would work, but so far nah

Imrainai: ............I should probably not actually be complaining about my life circumstances to you, that seems rather inconsiderate

Trashrightsactivist: hmm - idk if homeschooling is a thing in Voa. If I was the kinda oddball economics green i mighta been in another life I would suggest you might be able to set up a purple-for-purple homeschooling group and argue the income as being purple either on the basis of it being like house spousing or like consultation (in that being your caste *is* the qualifying factor for a purple-for-purple homeschool)

Trashrightsactivist: and nah, it's fine - it's actually helpful to give me different things to think about tbh

Trashrightsactivist: you could apply the same argument to a daycare specifically meant to socialise purple kids in a purple environment. But idk your employment law well enough you'd need to get a solicitor to advise on it.

Imrainai: Homeschooling is a thing, but I think if you make money at it it stops being homeschooling

Imrainai: I dunno, maybe one of the librarians can help me figure it out tho

Imrainai: they're good about stuff like that

Trashrightsactivist: yeah, I mean at minimum they can probably help you find and understand the books with the law stuff in

Imrainai: Liet's orange and I could maybe finagle something around that, but she's old enough that asking her to actually work is not really.... fair to her, so

Imrainai: and yeah

Trashrightsactivist: what is it you actually do rn if you don't mind me asking? or are you at home with the kid?

Imrainai: oh! no, I work two jobs

Imrainai: I do cleaning at a nursing home and I shelve books at the library

Imrainai: And my second cousin is living here too, she works in a warehouse and sometimes watches the baby

Trashrightsactivist: ahh, right. I was confused for a bit cause i remember a post about the 1st one and i thought you were a care worker and was like 'that's purple?'

Trashrightsactivist: is that liet? the orange person?

Imrainai: Liet's my great-great-grandmother, I am am sort of EFFECTIVELY her caretaker but she's family so I don't get paid for that

Imrainai: and I do look after the old people at the nursing home, but that is not actually my job, it is just... a thing that happens when I am in close proximity to people who need things

Trashrightsactivist: really should be crossover work

Trashrightsactivist: you know one of those jobs thats two castes

Trashrightsactivist: if orange-grandma lives with you it miight be doable to do the daycare and have it that like, she owns it officially and employs you, but again you'd need to check out the legalities

Imrainai: I mean in THEORY there is a simple dividing line between "care worker" and "cleaning lady" but with elderly people the line is not always actually clear

Trashrightsactivist: yeah thats why it should be crossover

Trashrightsactivist: are you any good with numbers and people management?

Imrainai: And yeah, maaaaybe, but if anyone ever investigated it I think it would rapidly become obvious that Liet wasn't really... doing anything

Imrainai: I've never really tried those things?

Imrainai: I don't think I'm awful with numbers

Imrainai: Though I never got past algebra in school

Trashrightsactivist: I imagine you gotta have people skills to a degree cause like - you're really nice, and dealing with the old ppl probably requires like, being nice but firm

Trashrightsactivist: wouldn't require algebra just finance - you could build up to a small cleaning business?

Imrainai: Oh, I hadn't thought about that, but I guess there's no reason that should be illegal

Imrainai: I do all the budgeting here, I can handle money OK

Trashrightsactivist: yeah well afaik that is entirely a purple thing to be doing, it's cleaning and it's business

Imrainai: That makes sense

Trashrightsactivist: and your library connections and self-starter attitude will mean you can pick up the extra knowledge you'd need

Imrainai: I don't know if I'd actually make more money than just working at the nursing home, but I can look into it

Trashrightsactivist: probly need some seed money i guess

Imrainai: ...yeah, you need some to get started I think

Trashrightsactivist: yeah it would at least have more potential to grow, is what i was thinking

Imrainai: but not THAT much for a cleaning business, you don't need an office or anything for that really

Imrainai: I bet you could do it with just a web page actually

Imrainai: not that I know how to make a decent website

Trashrightsactivist: yeah you probably wouldn't make more to start with but could eventually - if you read the books and stuff and came up with a good business model you could probably pitch it to people to get a small investment for like, a website and some supplies, maybe a vehicle

Trashrightsactivist: tell the nursing home they can hire you as a contractor through your business, but if you've got other work you have more leverage to get better pay there

Imrainai: That's an interesting idea... I dunno if they'd go for it, but at least this is something to look into. It's good to have options.

Imrainai: Thanks :)

Trashrightsactivist: I mean. In a sane world you could learn more about the library while you stack shelves and work your way up to librarian but we don't live in a sane world

Trashrightsactivist: np :) I better get back to work but good luck if you decide to try it

Trashrightsactivist: oh secret new me is truth-from-ashes btw. Trusting you to keep that sceret.

Trashrightsactivist: ttyl

Weeks Later

Imrainai: Wanted to thank you for the idea to start a business. Liet's going to be starting up after-school tutoring really soon, and apparently it's absolutely legal for me to volunteer at her business and for her to then put that money towards food and rent. I'll get to make money while spending time with my family and helping Taz and his classmates with their homework. :D

Days Later

Imrainai: ruby did you hear about the thing

Imrainai: the orvara thing

Imrainai: you're not in orvara are you

Days later

Imrainai: please don't be in orvara

Later

Trashrightsactivist: I'm not there. I'm sorry if my absence from the online was worrying- reds everywhere are panicky right now and that's been my focus.

Imrainai: no no it's ok! just wanted to make sure you weren't. uh. actually dead

Imrainai: be safe

Imrainai: or as safe as possible I guess

Trashrightsactivist: You too. I don't know what's going to happen now but it's not going to be good and it's not going to just be us that suffers for it in the end.

Fall, 3422

Imrainai: ruby are you still alive and kicking and there and stuff

Several weeks later

Imrainai: rubyyyyyyy

[largentkzpreslerfh87insuran-blog]

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

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John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR

Transcript of Sonic Branding and the New Rules of Marketing and PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: One of the pioneers of inbound marketing, of the new rules of marketing and P&R, David Meerman Scott, joins me for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. David and I have been friends, colleagues, for over a decade writing about all of this crazy world of marketing. He’s out with the sixth edition. He’s also got a new project where he’s building sonic branding: branding using sound and if you check out this episode you’re going to hear an amazing story related the Grateful Dead towards the end. Check it out!

(Music)

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Meerman Scott. He is an online marketing strategist, author of a whole bunch of books, including the sixth edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Probably one of the best-selling books of the last decade, with anything to do with marketing, been translated into all kinds of languages some that I don’t even know who speaks those languages.

DMS: (Laughs)

John Jantsch: David, thanks for joining me.

DMS: It’s great to be here, John. Like Albanian. I wonder how many people buy the Albanian edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But it’s all good because occasionally I get a chance to speak in those wonderful countries. It’s fantastic. And you’ve been there since the beginning with The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I remember when we first started talking about it ten years ago, which is an amazing amount of time. It’s like twenty decades in dog life.

John Jantsch: Well, and you know I’ve been podcasting that whole time because I think you came on the show with the first edition.

DMS:Absolutely I did, I’ve been on a couple of times. You must be up to multiple thousands of episodes by now.

John Jantsch:  I am, and I bet money – I will bet money – that I’m the only podcaster on the planet who can say that he interviewed you for the first edition and the sixth edition.

DMS: There you go, well look at that. How cool is that. So you are, actually, at the moment that is true. So thank you for that, John. I appreciate that.

John Jantsch: So, what is new in New Rules?

DMS: New for New Rules. Well, what’s not new are the strategies. The strategies are: understand your buyers and create great content to reach those buyers, and reach them in real time using social networks and things like newsjacking. What is new are pretty much the tools. So the first edition was funny, I wrote the first edition in 2005 and 2006. It had, as you know because you’ve done a bunch of books, it’s due to the publisher and then it goes into this black hole for six months and then eventually emerges. And you’re like, I wrote a book? That seemed like so long ago. And when it came out, somebody immediately somebody emailed me and said “Dude, I just read your book. It’s really good. But didn’t you know there’s something called Twitter.”

John Jantsch:  (Laughs)

DMS:  And it was so embarrassing because Twitter didn’t exist when I wrote it and it did when the book came out. It’s all about the new tools and in the sixth edition the newer things are Snapchat and Facebook Live, which were not in the older editions. I mean, Snapchat did exist in the fifth edition but the Snapchat story as part of it didn’t. I’m always looking for the newest tools that people need to use.

John Jantsch:  So one thing an observant fellow like myself who has all of the editions of your book is that somehow you’ve pulled off making it shorter.

DMS: Ooooh, yes! You know what I did to make it shorter? Some people think it’s radical until I actually say the reason. I removed the chapter on mobile marketing. And people say, well, gosh, people say mobile is so important. The reason I removed it is I don’t think mobile is one chapter out of 24 in a book about marketing. Mobile is ubiquitous so I interspersed the bits that were important about mobile throughout the book. So that chapter disappeared and then I also just went through and ruthlessly cut stories even if I liked them if they weren’t appropriate any longer in this day and age. I still had some stories in there that I had written more than 10 years ago, and I liked the stories but it’s like, ahhh, I gotta cut it. I gotta put a new, fresh story in there. So that’s why it got shorter.

John Jantsch: That’s funny. Remember, we talked about mobile marketing for 10 years before it became a thing. And I think you’re right. It’s just … you know, your website has to be mobile-friendly and everybody’s on a mobile device and so it is ubiquitous, as you say.

DMS:  I think it is. I also think, although I didn’t really write this, but I also think that online marketing is marketing. I don’t really think there is any demarcation anymore. I mean, if you want to reach people with your product, your service or your ideas, you have to be out there using the tools of electronic communications. When the first edition of the book came out, it was “Hey, there’s this thing called the web.” (Laughs).

John Jantsch:  (Laughs) Right.

DMS: And now it’s like, duh, everyone knows that. And marketing is marketing, no matter what tools you’re using. It’s not like this is new and different, it’s more like okay, well how to do I do this effectively.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’ve actually, for the last couple of years, really been referring to it as your online presence. Because it’s also not just a website, it’s an integration of all of your activity online, which may end up being the hub of your business in general.

DMS: Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely right. And I think it’s really important in this world of social networking that every organization, every person, have either a website and/or a blog because that’s real estate that you own. So many people, they have a LinkedIn, they have a Facebook, that’s great. Or they have a Twitter, that’s great. But ultimately that’s not real estate that you own and it can go away. Those poor people who staked their online reputation on the Vine social networking platform, which many people did – I had a Vine account and posted some online videos on Vine – it’s gone now. Disappeared. No longer.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: I don’t think Facebook is gonna go away but they can always change the way they do business and change their algorithms and start to charge. Or maybe they’re gonna say I’m sorry, your old posts are no longer gonna be kept unless you give us money for them. But your own website, your own blog, is real estate your own that eventually people who find you, they go to you and you alone.

John Jantsch: So for many years, we marketing folks kind of put the cliché Content is King out there forever. To the point where people said, okay, okay I get it. But I’ve been, for the last couple of years, I really think content has moved to the status of air. You almost can’t play in any channel without content. How have you seen content evolve in the time period you’ve been writing about content?

DMS: I have, actually, seen that as well, John. But for me the thing that I’ve noticed and I’ve actually written a lot about it including a couple of books solely on this topic. The thing I’ve seen is that content has gone from where it started – which is that you publish content on a timetable, you do a blog post every week, or something like that, or you plan that next month you’re going to have two infographics come out, or you work on your email newsletter a couple of weeks ahead of time – to now content being real-time, instant engagement. And that’s really changed the dynamic because Twitter is real-time. When somebody posts something on LinkedIn or Facebook it’s real-time. Not next week but right now.

And then the concept of newsjacking – and we actually did an entire podcast on newsjacking a couple of years ago – the idea of newsjacking, which is linking your expertise to a breaking news story to generate attention. That’s clearly real-time. So, yes, content is like air I agree with you. But where a lot of people make a mistake is they don’t focus on creating content instantly right now through social networks, through streaming video like Facebook Live, through Twitter, whatever it might be. Creating a blog post but writing that right now when the moment is right, rather than writing it ahead of time or thinking about what you’re going to do next week.

So that is an area that most people, the vast majority of people, are not doing right.

John Jantsch: And I would contend there’s a bit of an art to that though. Because I get pitches all the time where people are trying to tag or peg their expert to something that just happened in the news and it comes off really kind of made up.

DMS: It comes off as sleazy when they don’t have a legitimate tie to the story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

DMS: And I agree with you. I get them all the time myself. It’s kind of funny because newsjacking has become so ubiquitous. I’m really glad I named that concept. It’s a nice way to drive people to your brand. But when someone just says, Oh President Trump said this so you should buy my product.

John Jantsch: (Laughs). Right.

DMS: Or, or Hey there’s an eclipse, buy my product. That doesn’t work so well.

John Jantsch:  Yeah.

DMS: But what does work is if you’re an eye doctor and there’s an eclipse coming and you put out the Top Ten Tips for how to protect your eyes when you’re viewing the upcoming eclipse. That’s valuable information and because you’re an eye doctor and because the eclipse involves looking at the sun in some way or another, you are clearly an expert in what’s going to be happening in that news story. Or what did happen in that news story if you’re writing post that event. That’s where the idea of real-time and instant and newsjacking really comes into play is if there’s a legitimate tie to that story rather than just some made-up, hey we’re thinking about this and in a sleazy way tie our brand to it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you get the bonus if you’re that eye doctor because President Trump apparently did look at the sun without glasses so …

DMS:  He did … I can’t even believe that he did that, after everyone told him not to, he still did it. Oh well.

John Jantsch:  Okay, so let’s talk about … your brand is very tied to the idea of inbound marketing. I have been pushing out for the last couple years and I get some pushback on this but I think that outbound marketing has never been more effective. In fact, I think outbound marketing is a great way to actually make your inbound marketing even more effective. Your thoughts on that?

DMS: I would agree with you that a combination of both is really great. It partly depends on definitions here. HubSpot invented the concept of inbound marketing. They wrote a book called Inbound Marketing that came out, I’m gonna guess it was 2010, I forgot the exact date. I wrote the forward to that book. Brian Hal ligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two co-founders wrote that book. And inbound marketing is using content to create something of value that drives people into your business as opposed to the concept of outbound marketing of what’s traditionally been thought of as interruption techniques of advertising and whatnot.

But I would definitely agree with you that a combination of pushing stuff out as well as creating the content that will bring people in is a valuable strategy. One neat little way to think about those two things in action would be on Facebook. On Facebook, you can create a post, you can post a photograph, you can post a couple of paragraphs of text-based content, or you can do a Facebook Live video, or you can create a video and then upload it to Facebook. All of those are ways that you can use Facebook to send a message to your audience.

But you can also then boost that post, and that’s using the Facebook advertising program. I would argue that’s outbound marketing in the sense that you’re paying for that advertisement, and you’re using it to reach people that you don’t yet know because when you choose the demographics of Facebook users that you want to reach, you pay a bunch of money and then all of a sudden, your message, your video, your photograph, whatever, gets shown in the stream of people that you don’t know. I think from … Many, many marketers have told me that strategy has been working for them. They create something, it goes to their current followers, their current fans, and then it also goes, if they boost it, it also goes to people that don’t yet know. So I’d agree with you.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, and I mean the key to that, really, is that we’re producing the inbound assets. And so you can even take that to the physical world and salespeople are much more effective now if they’ve got good content. [inaudible 00:13:39]

DMS: Yes. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I’ve …

John Jantsch: (Cough)

DMS:  I’ve said for years now that marketing is creating content that will reach many people at once fails at using that exact same content to curate that content one buyer at a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah

DMS:  And, and, absolutely. It’s interesting you said that’s a combination of inbound and outbound. I think you’re right. I’ve never really thought about it that way. It’s a nice way to think about it.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s move to social media. Obviously you’ve covered it in every edition of New Rules including the sixth edition. How, in your mind, has social media evolved for the good or bad in the last couple years?

DMS: Actually, I don’t even know that social media was in the first edition cause I’m not sure that eleven or twelve years ago we used the term “social media”.

John Jantsch:   Yeah, that was about the year 2005, 6

DMS:   I might be wrong but I think that term grew in popularity around 2009, 2010 or so. Do you remember?

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I mean … It’s not in … 2007, spring of 2007 Duct Tape Marketing came out, first edition, and I did not cover social media.

DMS: Right, right. So now it’s everywhere. So I think what’s interesting to me about social media is that the big, big, big social media players, and I’m thinking Google, Facebook, Twitter, arguably Snapchat, are all islands.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And they don’t like one another, they don’t play nice with one another. You know, you’ve got North Korea over here, and you’ve got the U.S. over there, and you’ve got another state somewhere else. When you’re playing in Facebook, LinkedIn is a completely separate island. So when social media first started it was very interesting that Google would show tweets in the search results. The social networks kind of played nice with one another. And now it’s like, they’re just trying to beat one another up. They copy one another’s features and it just feels like they’re trying to encourage people to use only one social network ,and I’m not sure I like that.

So what does that mean for us as marketers is that we have to make a decision. Are we going to focus on one social network. Hey, you know what? For me, LinkedIn is really important. I’m going to focus on LinkedIn. Or does it mean kind of what I do, which is create a piece of content and push it out on a bunch of networks. My typical pattern is, I’ll write a blog post, I’ll put it on my blog – webinc.now – and then I will send a link to that blog post on my Twitter. I’ll usually post a link to that blog post on my Facebook. Then I’ll copy and paste that blog post into LinkedIn as a LinkedIn post. It’s kind of like, okay, I’ve got to send an ambassador to each one of those islands to tell them I’ve got this thing going on. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s the reality of social networking now, I think.

John Jantsch:  I believe that in the last couple years people have come around to this idea of social media, social networking, actually being social. I see a lot more … A lot less focus on building large followings and a lot more focus on engaging in, say, Facebook groups.

DMS: Yes. I think you’re right. I think you’re right about that, John. And, and … I think that too many organizations are in broadcast-only mode.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

DMS:  They are just pushing stuff out one way and aren’t engaging in two-day conversation. And the other thing is that many, many organizations have a sort of a company Facebook page and a company Twitter account. Even if they’re a tiny company with three employees, they’re still doing it that way when, I think, it’s much better … I think it’s okay to have the company one. But also have a personal one. And if you’re the CEO of a company, have a personal Twitter, a personal Facebook, a personal LinkedIn, that you use to communicate for the most part. The company one is fine. But people don’t really wanna engage with companies unless they’re enormous brands. For example, I engage with American Airlines on a pretty regular basis. I also engage with individuals at American Airlines like Jonathan Pierce, for example, who worked there, who I met through social networks.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You told me about a new project that you’re working on, something called Signature Tones, a sonic branding studio

DMS: Ah, yes …

John Jantsch: So tell us about that.

DMS: So think about the elements of branding. There’s visual branding, which is things like logos and colors. There’s branding using text, so the written word, as a form of branding. You can use video as a way to brand your organization. Great customer service is a great way to brand an organization. One of the least used and least understood form of branding that I know of is branding using music, using sound.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: And I’ve for a long time wanted to start an agency. Actually for 15 years I’ve thought about starting an agency and I’ve always rejected it because there’s people much smarter than me who are great at having, for example, a search engaging optimization agency or a public relations agency, an advertising agency, a content creation agency. I didn’t want to do any of those things cause there’s a lot of people doing em. But almost nobody has a sonic branding agency. So I started this company with my friend, Juanito Pascal, he’s a composer and a touring musician and he has a bunch of CDs. He’s done music scores, he’s done film scores, he’s done television scores. We create sonic logos as well as original music for companies. A sonic logo is between, say, five and 15 notes …

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DMS: …that’s used as a recognizable sound, that people remember a brand around. So, for example, when you shut down your PC it makes a noise and that noise is a sonic logo.

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

DMS: Or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. Or the NBC chime or Intel Inside. Those are all sonic logos. We create those for companies. We also create original music that might be used for – hint, hint – podcast theme music.

John Jantsch: Right.

DMS: Or original music might be used as background in videos. Or walk-on music for public speakers that might be used as they’re walking onto the stage. That might be used on the trade-show floor, or on-hold music on the telephone. And that is music that’s perfectly represented in a brand. Most people, when they think of using music in those applications, do one of three things: they either steal the music, popular music, which you can go to jail for; or they use music that they get from a stock music house, pay a hundred bucks for but somebody else could have that music and it doesn’t really represent their brand; or they try to work with a recognized musician and have to spend huge bucks to get a popular song licensed for them. So we provide a wonderful alternative, which is get your music composed especially for you.

John Jantsch: I think you need to get a couple baseball players for their walk-up song. You know the [inaudible 00:21:49]

DMS:  (Laughs). Yeah.

John Jantsch: They could be your endorsements.

DMS:  And it’s been really fun because, as you know, I’m a huge music geek. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. I love the intersection of music and marketing. I wrote a book, that book, which was a fun tome about the intersection of music and marketing, and this sonic branding studio that I built with Juanito is another way that I can link music and marketing together in a really cool way.

John Jantsch:  Yeah, I was going to ask you how many Dead shows you’ve seen this year.

DMS:   I have seen Dead & Company a couple of times but oh, man, did I have fun a couple af weeks ago. Brian Hal ligan is the CEO of HubSpot. He’s a great friend of mine and my co-author in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. A couple of months ago, Brian purchased Jerry Garcia’s favorite guitar, named Wolf, at an auction for $2 million, a little bit under $2 million.

John Jantsch: Wow.

DMS:   So Brian now owns Wolf and the Garcia family reached out to Brian because it was Jerry Garcia’s 75th birthday celebration at Red Rocks out in California, one of the best music venues on the planet. And they wanted to use Wolf in the celebration and have some musicians play Wolf. So I actually escorted Wolf to Red Rocks in Colorado myself. We had two first-class seats. I had one seat and Wolf had the other.

John Jantsch:   (Laughs)

DMS: We flew out to Colorado and Wolf was played and we had backstage passes and we went for sound check and met the musicians, John Mayer and Bob Weir and Oteil Burbridge and a bunch of other cool people. And then enjoyed the show. It was absolutely fantastic. I Grateful Dead geeked out on that big time, John.

John Jantsch: I tell ya, carrying a $2 million guitar would have made me nervous.

DMS: I was nervous. I was nervous. But that was the only way the guitar could get out because Brian had a meeting in a different city before that and another meeting in a different city after that. I was going Boston-Denver-Boston and so I was the designated Wolf wrangler.

John Jantsch: So is that a Strat? What is that?

DMS: No it’s a custom-made Doug Irwin guitar. It was made especially for Jerry to his specifications. There’s only one like it in the world. It took about a year to make. It was Jerry’s favorite guitar. And unlike most guitarists who change their instruments constantly … I mean, you watch, for example, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. He’ll play five or six or even ten guitars in one concert.

John Jantsch: Oh sure

DMS: Jerry Garcia played the same guitar for a decade. It was his favorite and it was totally custom-made. For Deadheads, it’s incredibly famous. There’s thousands, well millions, of..

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