World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories

David Meerman Scott turned the foundations of marketing upside down with The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which won the 800-CEO-READ Author’s Choice Award, was named one of the best marketing books of all time by Bnet, received a starred Publishers Weekly review, and almost two years after publication is still one of today’s best selling marketing books. 

Now, in WORLD WIDE RAVE: Creating Triggers That Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories (Wiley; March 3, 2009; $22.95; 208 pages), Scott shares the secret to the most powerful marketing tool available—one that again goes against all the out-of-date rules that your boss, your agency and many experts are too afraid to abandon. 

A World Wide Rave is when thousands of people are talking about your or your company because they want to, not because they were coerced or tricked.  How do you create one? You might know a little about part of the answer: blogs, links, YouTube, Facebook and viral videos. But even the most tech-savvy marketer won’t get any mileage out of these online tools if they don’t craft the right content to trigger conversations that can spread to millions. 

Scott studied what content spreads like wildfire and what spreads like fruitcake, and reveals the most effective triggers for lighting the fire under a network of people and making your content easy for them to share. To succeed in this new world, you have to break the rules of the old world by giving up control of your message and giving away your content for free.  As scary as this may sound, Scott proves his point with inspiring stories of how such unorthodox techniques created wildly successful worldwide raves for companies, nonprofits and individuals like:

Tim Washer, manager of new media web video at IBM Communications, who humanized the image of IBM in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of viewers by producing a series of mockumentaries that spoof corporate training videos

Cindy Gordon, vice president of new media and marketing partnerships at Universal Orlando Resort, who reached 350 million people about the launch of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park by telling only seven carefully selected people.

Steve Chazin, whose job search strategy included publishing an ebook online so that employers would seek him out for his ideas instead of ignoring one more resume in the stack.

Barack Obama, who used Twitter to update fans about his campaign and to announce his VP choice before it was announced to the press. 

WORLD WIDE RAVE is a guide to empowering others to tell your story and spread your ideas for free—and during today’s economic downturn what better time to try a free strategy that works far better than the expensive ones?