Thanks for hanging in there with me and for reading this far! When I speak to audiences and run seminars on the new rules of marketing and PR, this is the point at which many people are stimulated to get out there and make it happen. They want to start a blog right away, shoot a video to embed in their site, do some newsjacking, or begin buyer persona research in preparation for writing a marketing and PR plan that will guide them to create a content-rich website. If that describes you, great!

But in the audiences of my seminars and speeches, there is always another group of people who tend to feel a bit overwhelmed. There is just too much information, they say, or too many new and unfamiliar ideas. If you are in this category, you might be thinking that the people profiled in the book were able to figure out things that are just too complex and time-consuming for you to tackle, especially given your already hectic schedule. Hey, we all have stuff on our plates, and for most of us, implementing the ideas in the book will represent an addition to our workload.

But here’s one of the greatest things about the new rules of marketing and PR: You can implement these ideas in bits and pieces! In fact, I don’t expect anybody to implement all the ideas here. I don’t do that many of them myself (okay, I admitted it—don’t tell). Yes, I have a blog, and it is very important to me. I’m on Twitter, and I create some original videos. But I don’t have a podcast, and I’m not active on Snapchat. I just do what I can and what works for me. And so should you.

Unlike a linear, offline marketing campaign where you must take a methodical, step-by-step approach leading up to a big release day, the web is, well, a web. You can add to the web at any time because it is iterative, not linear. Think about the last print advertisement you or others in your organization did. Everything had to be perfect, requiring thorough proofreading, tons of approvals from your colleagues (or your spouse), lengthy consultation with a bunch of third parties such as advertising agencies and printers, and—above all—lots of money. Your neck was on the line if there was a screw-up, so you obsessed over the details.

Contrast that with a web content initiative that you can implement quickly, get people to check out live, and make changes to on the fly. It really is much less stressful to create an online program. If you create a web page that doesn’t work for you, you can just delete it. You can’t do that with a print ad or direct-mail campaign. So I would urge you to think about how you might selectively experiment with the ideas in these pages rather than fret about coordinating them all and trying to get everything right on the first go.

Many organizations I’ve worked with have found that an excellent approach is first to do some buyer persona research. By reading the publications that your buyers read, perhaps attending a webinar that they attend, reading a few of the blogs in the space, and maybe interviewing a few buyers, you can narrow down the book’s large list of techniques to determine the most appropriate web-based marketing and PR initiatives for you and work on them first.

Others have found that the best way to get started is to add a few pages of targeted content for an important buyer persona to an existing website (perhaps with links from the homepage). What’s great about this approach is that you don’t have to redesign your site; all you are doing is adding some valuable content to what you already have. That’s easy, right?

Still another first step might be to read the blogs in your market and begin to comment on them in order to coax your blogging voice out of its shell. Once you feel comfortable, you can take the plunge by creating your own blog and Twitter feed. But the good news is that you don’t need to show the world right away—you can password-protect your fledgling blog and share it with only a few colleagues at first. Then, with some feedback, you can tweak your approach and finally remove the password protection, and you’re off and running. The important thing is to just get out there. Remember, on the web, you are what you publish.

Your Mind-Set

To make the new rules of marketing and PR part of your personal world, you may have to change your mind-set. You’ll need to understand your buyers, rather than just talk about your products and services. You’ll need to be aware of what’s going on in the real-time news and on social networks. You’ll need to create content and publish it on the web, and sometimes you’ll need to do it urgently to be successful. On social networks, two-way communication is required, not just the typical broadcast approach that most marketers are used to. These habits and techniques do not come naturally to entrepreneurs, business owners, or marketing and PR professionals steeped in more traditional ways.

I’ve talked with people all over the world who are struggling to adapt to these new rules. The process often starts with your coming to understand just how severely conventional methods can handicap your business and your career. But since you’ve read this far in the book, you know that already. So let me first introduce you to a chief marketing officer (CMO) who has made the transition, and then share a few ideas for how you too can make the mind-set shift I’m describing. It will take some time, but I’ve seen thousands of people come to thrive in the always-on world of instant communication—and you will, too.

The Journey from a Traditional Marketing Executive to a Modern CMO

With an MBA from Wharton, a bunch of high-profile marketing gigs on his resume, and a bit of gray hair to show he’s got experience, Brian Kardon is what people think of as a typical chief marketing officer. He’s been there and done that. But he realized one day that everything he had learned in school and from the early part of his career in the publishing business had become obsolete.

“I cared about arts and crafts,” he says. “I cared about brochures and direct mail. I cared about the color on the website. And what’s happened is the world has gone digital. It’s gone social. It’s gone mobile. And we have to learn a completely new language of conversion rates and pay per click and search engine optimization and authoritative inbound links. It’s a whole new world.”

Today Kardon is chief marketing officer at InVision, a digital product design platform.

There was a moment that caused Kardon to realize he was turning into a marketing dinosaur and heading toward extinction. “Within my second month being CMO at Eloqua, I read a book called Inbound Marketing and didn’t put it down,” Kardon says. “I read it in two and a half hours, and I said to myself, ‘I have to give this book to everyone in my team, because the world of outbound marketing is being disrupted. Everyone is time-shifting. You can pause, and you don’t have to watch commercials. Spam filters are out there. Messages aren’t going through.’”

Kardon realized that there was a new way to do marketing, and the tools and techniques that were described in the book were things he didn’t understand. He realized he needed to learn.

“I didn’t really understand what metatags, alt tags, and title tags were,” he says. “I didn’t understand about blog platforms and how WordPress worked. I didn’t understand about pay per click. I didn’t understand all of these things. I was the CMO. Could I have just skated along and had all my team members understand those things? I think I could have, but you can’t outrun the ball. For a certain amount of time you can, but you’ll get to a point where someone asks a technical question or something with a little more depth, and if you haven’t done it, you’re not going to be successful.”

Kardon then did something that many executives are unwilling to do. He asked his team for help. Often. He freely admitted his ignorance but also showed he was willing to learn. And he proved he was willing to jump in and actually do real work rather than just direct from the sidelines.

“I decided just to roll up my sleeves and ask people on my team, ‘How did you do that?’ I had a bunch of people in their 20s, and I would just sit next to them and say, ‘Tell me how you did that. How did you push that out there?’ or ‘What are those social sharing links? How did you put that on there?’ I asked how HTML works and what JavaScript is.”

Today, Kardon’s 17,000+ followers on Twitter (@bkardon) show that he’s in the thick of the action and making it happen. And his work at InVision wouldn’t be possible without his willingness to get down into the weeds to understand data and the technologies of digital communications.

I asked Kardon to offer advice to other senior marketers making the transition: “You’ve got to tell yourself you’re a child again, and you have to relearn what you’re doing.” Kardon managed his fear of making the transition, and you must do the same if you want to achieve similar success.

Manage Your Fear

Every day, I encounter fear in the people I work with. Many company executives and public relations people trace their worries about the new rules of marketing and PR to their concern that “people will say bad things about our company” via social media.

This fear leads them to ignore blogs and online forums and to prohibit employees from participating in social media. And, yet, in every discussion that I’ve had with employees who freely participate in social media, I’ve confirmed that this fear is significantly overblown. Let me repeat: Everyone who has experience tells me this fear is overblown.

Sure, an occasional outlier might vent frustrations online, and now and then a dissatisfied customer will complain (unless you’re in the airline industry, and then it might be more than a few).

But the benefit of this kind of communication is that you can monitor in real time what’s being said and then respond appropriately. Employees, customers, and other stakeholders are talking about your organization offline anyway, so unless you are participating online, you’ll never know what’s being said at all.

The beauty of the web is that you benefit from instant access to conversations you could never have participated in before. And frequently you can turn around impressions by commenting on a negative post. So not only is this fear overblown—it’s often dead wrong. Participating in social media gives you the chance to make sure fewer bad things are being said about your company.

Mixing Business with Your Personal Life on Social Networks

Speaking of fear, many people tell me they are reluctant to talk about their personal lives on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Most make a point to separate business from the personal. When they use social networking for business, they present themselves as one dimensional. They’re all work and no play.

I think that’s a mistake. Social networks are, well, social. Think about the best business relationships you have: Don’t you enjoy getting to know the people you work with? Do you look forward to certain business meetings simply because you enjoy having a conversation with that person?

Like a cocktail party, social media offers an opportunity for you to share a bit about yourself: your family, your hobbies, your passions, your love of a favorite sports team. A fun aspect of social media is getting to know a bit about the personal lives of those we do business with.

I’m not suggesting you share everything. It’s fine to leave out that shot of you relaxing on the beach while you’re on holiday. Some people aren’t comfortable posting photos of family members. And it should go without saying to avoid posts that don’t reflect well on you or that describe or depict activities you would, um, never do in public.

But don’t underestimate the power of opening yourself up. Your passions say a lot about you—even what you might be like to do business with. Humanize yourself.

For example, Dr. Jon Marashi is a cosmetic dentist in southern California, and he’s got more than 13,000 Instagram followers (@drjonmarashi). His Instagram is responsible for 30 percent growth in his business, and I believe he’s successful because he not only posts about his work and his clients but also about his passions. By doing so, he differentiates himself from the thousands of other dentists in southern California.

“I had a lot of reservations with social media at first,” Marashi says. “I’m 45 years old, and I thought of myself as old school. I didn’t want to share what I eat all day long. And because of the nature of my business, I felt like I needed to be careful and not say too much. But what I realized is that the world has changed around me, and social media sharing is okay and that, in fact, there could be a way to do it strategically that . . . could be tasteful and on brand for me—and even fun.”

If you walk around Marashi’s office, you’ll see that the two most important things in his life besides his business are skateboarding and his family. “I’ve got skateboards all over the walls, and I have pictures of my family,” he says. “I thought about what I talk to my patients about during the day and what they find interesting about me, and it was those two things. You know, a dentist who skateboards is just kind of a weird thing to begin with! So I decided to post on Instagram about skateboarding and my family.”

Marashi’s website¹ calls him “The dentist behind the world’s most famous smiles.” He lists patients including actor Ben Affleck, TV and radio host Ryan Seacrest, and actress Catherine Bell. “Because of the good quality of cosmetic dentistry that I’m doing, I’ve been able to attract some of the most famous people in the world,” he says. “Initially, I was afraid of sharing my relationship with them on social media because I had never done that before, and I’m concerned about patient privacy. But I learned that many celebrities have built their brand on social media, and when I started to make a humble ask if they would be willing to do a photo with me to share, they said, ‘Of course, I would love to!’ That was the overwhelming response.”

He makes sure to check first if the celebrity is active on social networks and asks only those who are. As I check his Instagram feed, I recognize Marashi posing with Tom Hanks, Cher, Justin Timberlake, Renée Zellweger, and Pink.

Overcoming his fear of social media, being open to posting about his personal life, and asking patients if they would shoot a shareable photo with him have all been instrumental in building Marashi’s business. For the past year, when new patients first come into the practice, staff ask how they found out about him. He says 30 percent of new patients come as a result of finding him on social media. “And that doesn’t even take into account people that were referred in by friends,” he says. “We know when people are referred to me, they go online and research us. While I can’t measure that, I believe that when somebody refers their friend and then they look me up and see my social media, that is the last little nudge that got them to book an appointment.”

Getting the Help You Need (and Rejecting What You Don’t)

As you develop a strategy to get started implementing the new rules of marketing and PR, you may find occasions to call on others for help. Many people tell me that they occasionally need the services of an agency to provide them with some extra people to help execute a big project. But I constantly hear that they have difficulty finding people skilled in using the ideas that we’ve been discussing in this book.

Still others report that well-meaning colleagues and meddlesome bosses have an annoying tendency to look over shoulders and second-guess them as they start a blog, get going on Twitter, or begin filming YouTube videos. Add to that mix the fact that, in many larger organizations, the legal department tends to muck things up with nitpicky rules about what can and cannot be said.

If these sound like some of the problems that you’re encountering, fear not! Here are some things you can do to get the help you need, while rejecting what you don’t.

Bringing It All Together: Brand Journalism at Cleveland Metropolitan School District

Recently I had an opportunity to meet with Roseann Canfora, chief communications officer for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD). I spent a day with her entire team. It was incredibly interesting to hear how CMSD deploys journalism techniques to communicate with students, parents, the media, and the wider Cleveland community. Canfora’s team focuses on reaching not only the families of the district’s 40,000 students but also those who attend other schools and might consider CMSD.

This excellent example should be useful for any individual or organization making the transition from traditional marketing and PR to the new forms of communication I’ve outlined in these pages. It’s also instructive for those facing resistance from parts of the organization.

Canfora operates what’s effectively a full-time news operation—including a television studio—in support of CMSD and the wider Cleveland community. She leads a team of 12 people divided into two teams: news and information, and marketing and advertising. The CMSD staff includes a multimedia journalist who came to the district from television and a station manager who taught television production for many years. The news director was a reporter for nearly 25 years with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, including three years as a beat reporter. Everybody on the entire news team, including Canfora, comes from a journalism background.

“It’s our responsibility to let families know about the choices they have in Cleveland,” Canfora says. “Unfortunately, we don’t have much of an identity but that of a struggling, inner-city school district if the people telling our stories are the local media. The daily stories that big-city journalists are drawn to include gang fights, low test scores, truancy, and weapons finding their way past metal detectors. These stories fall short of what I learned in journalism school was our social responsibility to tell the deeper stories, the root causes of these things, the incredible stories of triumph over those challenges that take place in schools every single day. Those are the types of stories we now tell ourselves.”

When she started at CMSD, Canfora inherited a virtually inert communications operation that was producing print materials to be taken home by students. Each school in the district also did its own communications, further diluting the CSMD brand.

“The buy-in took years, because it meant disturbing the comfort level of thousands of people, people who felt very territorial. ‘Well, that’s my event. Why are you doing that?’ ‘That’s my task. We do the mailers. Why are you doing that?’ Even prying from them their love of ClipArt and WordArt and telling them to throw out their hot pink paper [was difficult]. The pushback I was experiencing was coming school-by-school and department-by-department. But I had the buy-in from the top for a clearly defined brand framework. I set the boundaries regarding what stories are told, how they are told, and more importantly by whom.”

It was clear to Canfora that CMSD was not effectively reaching families until the district approached marketing and advertising as a much bigger stream of content. “It meant creating a team of writers. It meant finding a multimedia journalist to go out with a camera and convey these stories in depth,” she says. “It meant having social media specialists in every part of our team to not only write for our brand but also create content that will be interesting for the media. We’re looking for interesting stories, unique angles, and beating the local media to the punch by telling it better so that they see us as a thought partner and even a thought leader.”

A major challenge for Canfora was finding journalists who were eager to move over to CMSD and become a brand journalist. Many reporters are reluctant to join what they call the “dark side” of communications—working outside of a media company. On the other hand, there are many people with a marketing and PR background who are not qualified for the roles Canfora had available.

“I can clearly see the difference between a story and a story with credibility, one with facts, stats, and all the elements of good journalism,” Canfora says. “That is probably the greatest challenge in going the brand journalism route. We’re telling our own stories, as journalists, and that’s different from a PR writer writing a bio about a new person, introducing a new product or a new way of doing things. Readers see through it quickly if your content marketing reads more like selling and less like telling. Hiring trained journalists is key to establishing credibility in our news bureau, but having good reporters who love to tell good stories is what is making it work.”

To further complicate the hiring process, Canfora tries to bring journalists onto the team who know the Cleveland market and who have covered the news there. “What sold me on my multimedia journalist was her work as a news reporter at WKYC Channel 3 here in Cleveland and also as a news anchor in Michigan where the stories she always wanted to tell and the ones that were her favorites were taking place in schools. Our youngest and newest member of the news bureau was a crime reporter at the Plain Dealer. These are people who know our city. They know our families. They know our challenges. They know the poverty in this district, which has the highest number of children of poverty in the nation. If you don’t know these people, you can’t really write about what’s happening in their lives with any kind of meaning or with any kind of accuracy.”

Now CMSD delivers constantly across multiple channels to multiple audiences every single day. “This is the first year I can actually say we are a mobile, digital, multiplatform operation where brand journalism, which was always my goal, works,” Canfora says.

Poking around on the CMSD news site offers some fun stories produced by the television team. For example, they produced a news story about how students at Design Lab Early College High School have set an example for makers across the country. The school had a special visit from Adam Savage, former cohost of the hit Discovery Channel TV series Mythbusters.

There’s a written story, “New School to Have Space at MetroHealth,” that tells how CMSD’s new Lincoln-West School of Science and Health is being based partly at the MetroHealth System’s main campus. District and hospital leaders believe the school, which opened July 25, 2016, with ninth and tenth graders, may be the only one in the country located within a hospital.

Canfora is currently working to hire an individual who understands the metrics associated with the site and social channels. “Incorporating analytics into the brand journalism strategy is the only way to know if we are truly engaged,” she says.

It’s exciting to see what’s possible for any organization willing to do the work.

Great for Any Organization

There’s no doubt that your organization will benefit from your getting out there and creating web content in whatever form you’re most comfortable with. But I’m also convinced that no matter who you are or what you do, your professional and personal life will improve, too. If you are an innovator using the ideas in this book, it may lead to greater recognition in the office. And if you’re like many bloggers and podcasters I know, you will derive a therapeutic benefit as well.

If you’re like me, you will prefer to write rather than create audio or video content. But I know plenty of people who hate to write and have created terrific photo, video, and audio content to reach buyers. And it works for all kinds of organizations: corporations, nonprofits, rock bands, and politicians. People often say to me: “But I’m just a ______ [fill in the blank with pastor, painter, lawyer, consultant, sales representative, auto dealer, or real estate agent, for example]; why should I blog or create a podcast?” My answer is that not only will you reach your buyers directly with targeted content, but you’ll also have fun, too—web content is for everyone, not just big companies.

In fact, one of my all-time favorite examples of success with the new rules of marketing and PR comes from an unlikely marketer: the pastor of a church in Washington, D.C. But his isn’t a typical church, because he doesn’t actually have a church building. Instead he uses video technology, blogs, podcasts, and the web to tell stories and build a spiritual community both online and offline.

“The church should be using technology to reach people; that’s what Gutenberg did in the fifteenth century with the printing press,” says Mark Batterson, lead pastor of National Community Church (also known as the Theater Church), a multisite church that conducts many services per week in six nontraditional locations. “Most churches have a church building, but we feel that a building can be an obstacle to some people, so we do church in theaters and have built the largest coffeehouse in the Washington, D.C., area.”

What distinguishes National Community Church is Batterson’s approach of embracing technology and web marketing and applying it to church. The vehicles include a content-rich website,³ podcasts of the weekly services, a motivational webcast series, video, an email newsletter, Batterson’s extremely popular “evotional” blog⁴ (tagline: “Spirit Fuel”), and his Twitter feed (@MarkBatterson) with well over 100,000 followers. “The greatest message deserves the greatest marketing,” Batterson says. “I am challenged that Madison Avenue and Hollywood are so smart at delivering messages. But I believe that we need to be just as smart about how we deliver our messages.”

Attendance at National Community Church includes several thousand adults in an average weekend; 70 percent of them are single people in their 20s. “I think we attract 20-somethings because our personality as a church lends itself to 20-somethings,” Batterson says. “Our two key values are authenticity and creativity. That plays itself out in the way we do church. I think that church should be the most creative place on the planet. The medieval church had stained glass to tell the gospel story to the churchgoers, who were mostly illiterate. We use the movie studio to tell the story to people. We use video to add color and to add flavor to what we do. If Jesus had video in his day, it wouldn’t surprise me if he made short films.”

Batterson’s focus on the website, podcasts, and online video (as well as video at the services) means that National Community Church staff members have some unique job titles, including media pastor, digital pastor, and buzz coordinator. “We want to use technology for really good purposes,” Batterson says. “Our website and my blog are our front door to National Community Church. The site is a virtual location in a sense. We have a lot more people who listen to the podcast and watch the webcast than who go to the services, so it is a great test drive for people. They can get a sense of the church before they arrive physically.”

Batterson has gained online fame well beyond the Washington, D.C., area—his blog is followed by tens of thousands of readers all over the world, and the podcast is one of the fastest-growing church podcasts in the United States. He has also written several books, including In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars. “Blogging cuts six degrees of separation into three,” he says. “I write knowing that my audience is another pastor in Australia, a housewife in Indiana, my friends, and people in Washington, D.C. Marketing through my blog is powerful. For example, last week I did a blog post about my book and asked my blogging friends to also post about it. We went up to number 44 on the Amazon bestseller list, and Amazon sold out of the book that day. They just ordered another thousand copies.”

Batterson’s enthusiasm for how churches can use the web has caught the attention of thousands of other church leaders who follow his blog. “The two most powerful forms of marketing are word of mouth and what I call word of mouse. A guy named John Wesley, who founded the Methodist Church, traveled 250,000 miles on horseback and preached something like 40,000 sermons. With one click of the mouse, I preach that many sermons with my podcast—that’s word of mouse. It is about leveraging the unique vehicles on the web. The message has not changed, but the medium has changed. We need to continually find new vehicles to get the messages out.”

Now It’s Your Turn

Isn’t the power of web content and the new rules of marketing and PR something? Here’s a guy who’s a church leader without a church building, and through innovative use of a blog, a podcast, and some video, he has become a leader in his field. He’s got bestselling books and tens of thousands of devoted online followers. Whether you’re religious or not, you’ve got to be impressed with Batterson’s business savvy and with the way the new rules have helped him reach his buyers.

You can do it, too. It doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in or what group of buyers you’re trying to reach. You can harness the power of the web to reach your target audience directly.

If you’re like many of my readers, those who see me speak at conferences, and the people who attend my masterclasses, you have colleagues who will argue with you about the new rules. They will say that the old rules still apply. They will tell you that you need to spend big bucks on advertising. They will tell you that the only way to do PR is to get the media to write about you. By now you know that they are wrong. If I haven’t convinced you myself, surely the 50 or so successful people profiled in these pages must have. Go on. Be like the people you met in this book—get out there and make it happen!