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David Meerman Scott spotted the real-time marketing revolution in its infancy and wrote five books about it including The New Rules of Marketing and PR, with more than 400,000 copies sold in English and available in 29 languages from Albanian to Vietnamese.

Now David says the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of superficial online communications. Tech-weary and bot-wary people are hungry for true human connection. Organizations have learned to win by developing what David calls a \\u201cFanocracy\\u201d -- tapping into the mindset that relationships with customers are more important than the products they sell to them.

He is a massive live music fan, having been to 790 live shows since he was 15 years old, is passionate about the Apollo lunar program, and he loves to surf but isn't very good at it.

Most passionate about

• Over the last five years, I\\u2019ve been thinking very, very deeply about what\\u2019s coming next after the social media and real-time revolution. The reason I\\u2019ve been thinking so deeply about this is that The New Rules of Marketing and PR is the book I\\u2019m most known for. That book originally came out in 2007 and now it\\u2019s in its sixth edition.
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR has influenced a lot of people but it has also led to a new online world that I think is becoming more polarized. It\\u2019s becoming a place where people are just trying to send another email, another piece of spam. They are trying to push out their content in inappropriate ways. There\\u2019s even inappropriate use of artificial intelligence.
• I was recently on a site and didn\\u2019t even realize, until after a couple of minutes, that I was talking to a robot. And in the political world, the political discourse online is becoming so nasty and mean, even from the President of the U.S.
• What I recognized is that the pendulum has swung in the direction of superficial online
• . But people are hungry for a true human connection. So, I\\u2019ve been thinking deeply and writing and researching about how people can have a much more human connection with other people, as well as how businesses can have a much more human connection with their customers.

Aren\\u2019t the connections between two human beings \\u201chuman\\u201d anyway?

• I don\\u2019t think so. I think that when a company deploys artificial intelligence and pretends that you\\u2019re talking to a human, or when a company puts 100,000 email addresses onto a single email, or when people are just being mean and nasty, this is not human. This is not a powerful connection. It\\u2019s just doing something to sell a product or a service, and we don\\u2019t want to be sold in that way. So, I think organizations that will be successful in 2020 and beyond are the ones that understand how to reach people in a way in which they are growing fans of their customers.
• Five years ago, I was very focused on the idea that superficial online communication is no longer working for many people. But at the same time, people are fans of the things they love, like a sports team, classic cars, bird watching, or an artist. Everybody seems to have something that they are incredibly passionate about. Many people are incredibly passionate about the companies that treat them well, that treat them like human beings.
• That\\u2019s what led us to write that book that turned into Fanocracy\\u2014 turning fans into customers and customers into fans. I wrote that with my daughter.

I can understand and identify with being a fan of a music band, or an author, or a sports team but it\\u2019s not exactly the same as becoming a fan of a company. So, what should a company do to attract these fans?

• There are a number of prescriptions that we identified. What was interesting about writing this book with my daughter is that she is a scientist. She got a neuroscience degree at Columbia University and is now in her..."