This blog is the fourth in a series of blogs on people that have added something important to the world of communications.  Today, my gratitude is for David Meerman Scott.  The series is personal and partial, but I welcome nominations for those you think I’ve missed.  I’m grateful to these people because understanding how we communicate is desperately important to bettering our humanity in both business and life.  Miscommunications are sometimes merely irritating, but sometimes fatal.  Business communications are usually banal and boring and only occasionally riveting.  Leadership is tougher than ever – and more than ever about communicating well.  The great business communicators can turn little companies into dominant ones and truly change the world.

Which brings me to David.  As he noted in a recent blog, David was fired from his V-P of Marketing job 10 years ago, because he was pushing crazy ideas about social media and free ways to get the word out to customers.  Ten years on, of course, those ideas don’t look so crazy.  And you almost certainly know David as the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, World Wide Rave, and Real-Time Marketing and PR, as well as, perhaps, how his love of the Grateful Dead has led to a book on their marketing ideas, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. 

Also over the past 10 years, David has become one of the world's most in-demand speakers.  You can see him speaking here. 

David is one of those select few people who saw and understood the social media phenomenon as it began, and as a result he has a platform now in the space that most people envy.  But the really interesting thing about David is that he isn’t just your typical social media maven.  Rather, he’s always thinking more broadly about the future of business, strategy, and marketing, and he realizes that social media is just a set of communications tools like the newspaper and TV were before them.  That view shows up most powerfully in Real-Time Marketing and PR, which is a profound book about how business needs to respond more quickly not just in the marketing and PR realms, but also in product development, R & D, and every other significant thing that business does. 

So, for constantly pushing the rest of us to think ahead about how to connect better with customers in a wide variety of settings and ways, thanks David. Below, David in action. 

(Full disclosure: David has been a client of Public Words.)