David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott
David Meerman Scott photographed in Boston, MA on August 11, 2014 by Bruce Rogovin
Residence	Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma mater	Kenyon College
Occupation	Marketing strategist, Speaker, Author
Website	Official website

David Meerman Scott is an American online marketing strategist and author of several books on marketing, including The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Scott graduated from Kenyon College in 1983 with a BA in economics. After early jobs as a clerk on several Wall Street bond trading desks, he worked in the online news and information business from 1985 to 2002, holding executive positions in an electronic information division of Knight-Ridder, from 1989 to 1995.

Scott moved to the Boston area in 1995 and joined Desktop Data, which became NewsEdge Corporation, ultimately holding the position of vice president of marketing until the business was sold to Thomson Corporation in 2002.

At NewsEdge he and his team found that do-it-yourself programs based on creating useful content and publishing it on-line at virtually no cost consistently generated more interest from qualified buyers than expensive profession public relations programs, especially if the content was "ungated" (freely available without even requiring the reader supply personal information like an email address). Thomson Corporation terminated his employment after acquiring NewsEdge, so he started his own business as a marketing strategist.

Scott's ideology "the new rules of marketing & PR" is that marketing and public relations is vastly different on the Web than in mainstream media. He says that the "old rules" of mainstream media (which he asserts do not work on the Web) are about "controlling a message" and the only ways to get the message into the public domain using mainstream media is to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write about you. He says that the rules of marketing and PR on the Web are completely different. Instead of buying or begging your way in, Scott says anybody can earn attention by "publishing their way in" using the tools of social media such as, blogs, podcasts, online news releases, online video, viral marketing, and online media. He believes that, with few exceptions, marketers gain the best return on their investment in content creation when they choose "ungated" publication.

Writing for Forbes, Nick Morgan notes that "David is one of those select few people who saw and understood the social media phenomenon as it began..."

Scott is the author of ten books, as detailed below.

Scott initially released the book as a free, ungated e-book. It was subsequently published as a traditional printed book.

Scott summarizes the book's content marketing theme as "You are what you publish online." The content should be about what audience cares about, not directly about the product itself. "Nobody cares about your product but you," Scott says.

Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan recommended the book "For practical P.R. in the age of Twitter,..." In an interview on Marketing Update, Scott stated that besides the fast pace of change in marketing, another motivation for the new edition was that the book had been incorporated into the curriculum of many universities. As a result, he plans to publish a new edition in summer every other year. The second edition won praise in The New York Times and Computerworld reviews. The first edition was featured in the BusinessWeek Best Seller List. John P. David describes the book as being the preeminent text on public relations.