The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 5th Edition

Preview: The New Rules of Sales and ServiceHow to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business

The following is an excerpt from The New Rules of Sales and Service, the newest hit book by bestselling author David Meerman Scott, from John Wiley & Sons.

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Are you old enough to remember when travel agents were an essential part of your life? To book a vacation you had to go to a travel agent. There was no other choice. Every town had at least one, and in the big cities travel agencies were on every corner.

First, before you set foot in the travel agency, you might do a little research about the sort of vacation you had in mind. Warm weather at a beach? Or perhaps a week of skiing? Maybe a cruise? Did you want to go somewhere exotic and far away? Or nearby within driving distance?

Doing the research was really, really difficult.

You would ask friends for recommendations, but they knew only so much. You could read a travel magazine, but with only a limited number of pages in each issue, it was hardly comprehensive. Guidebooks helped, but because of the book publication cycles, they were inevitably dated. If you wanted to compare different destinations, you needed more than one guidebook. And by definition, a book is just one person's opinion—the author's. No matter how much research you did, it was never enough to ...