Talk:David Meerman Scott

Page views for the last 12 months

GAR: Community reassessment

David Meerman Scott

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Delist Some issues have been brought up relating to the GA criteria. I understand that some of these have been addressed, but there are still major flaws. The lead was brought up and is still inadequate at a single sentence. The tone concerns (Criteria 4 - Neutral) is the most serious one. The Content marketing strategist section still comes across promotional. I realise the main editor trying to save this wanted the closer to ping the other commentators, but this is not really practical (especially as it is coming up to ten months). You should have ping them yourself. The only editor to return has restated his delist !vote and I don't feel the other editors concerns have been dealt with enough to keep this. AIRcorn (talk) 07:25, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

This community reassessment is being started because an individual reassessment had been started in July 2013 by EBY3221 that was never closed (or contributed to beyond the following day), but raised some cogent issues that I think need to be examined. The article's primary author, Woz2, became a Vanished User in June 2014, and EBY3221 was indefinitely blocked for COI/undisclosed paid editing in September 2015.

The main issues had to do with the sheer amount of primary sourcing, from Scott's own websites, companies that presented his webinars, or his publishers. The article is quite positive—there don't seem to be any equivocal or negative comments about any of Scott's books or talks, which seems to violate the neutrality criterion. The lead had five of six source citations directly to Scott's material; it's now up to six of eight, with the other two being related press releases: all primary sources, all laudatory information. This raises verifiability issues.

Other issues, both from the previous GAR and from my own observations:

• The lead contains information, primarily in the second paragraph, that does not appear in the body of the article. There shouldn't be anything significant in the lead without it also being in the body per WP:LEAD, another GA criterion. Examples include the book being "inspired by an accidental discovery" and another by being a bond trader.
• The "Early life" section is misnamed, since it goes up until he was 41 years old, and doesn't start until he graduated from college. It seems to be about his education and corporate career, before he was let go from Thomson. The third paragraph, starting and ending "he says", should be paraphrased and condensed; this is not a magazine article interview, and it's also self-sourced.
• The article hasn't been updated much since late 2011, so statements such as how many keynote speeches he gives per year are probably out of date and need more recent sourcing and revised wording.
• The Books subsection could use some reorganization; it's sometimes unclear which book is being talked about; EBY3221 suggests a subheading for each of Scott's significant books.

This should be enough for editors to start working on, and for the community to consider during this reassessment. Many thanks for your contributions. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:58, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

There are enough reliable sources to use instead of the primary ones viz. Wikipedia Reliable Sources search but the extensive redo envisioned here would take more time than I have right now. What is the time frame for these reviews? Thanks! ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 11:38, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

SageGreenRider, these community reassessments typically take a month or longer. If you can take on updates over the longer term that would be great; if not, then it depends how long it takes for a consensus to develop on the article vis a vis the GA criteria. Thank you for considering undertaking addressing the issues raised. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:31, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

OK great. I can get to it weekend after next probably. ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 10:16, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't get to this yet. I did find a bunch of sources that I'll try to add this weekend:

Five Questions about Newsjacking with David Meerman Scott http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-p-david/post_10907_b_9045656.html

Using Ungated Content to Drive Outstanding Marketing Performance http://customerthink.com/using-ungated-content-to-drive-outstanding-marketing-performance/

Has the term ‘newsjacking’ damaged the PR industry? - this is the only negative one I found - it will help fix the NPOV objection http://www.prdaily.com/mediarelations/Articles/_Has_the_term_newsjacking_damaged_the_PR_industry_21235.aspx

David Meerman Scott: The New Age Of Sales And Customer Service http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2014/09/03/david-meerman-scott-the-new-age-of-sales-and-customer-service/#7e15e8013549

People I'm Grateful for #4: David Meerman Scott http://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorgan/2012/06/07/people-im-grateful-for-4-david-meerman-scott/#7f366b991a17

'Marketing the Moon' examines Apollo program as one giant leap for marketing kind http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/chi-marketing-the-moon-david-merman-scott-richard--20140718-story.html

Concert ‘Merch’ Comes of Age https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/concert-tour-merchandise-justin-bieber-rihanna-kanye-west

Preeminent Book on Marketing and PR Gets an Update http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-p-david/preeminent-book-on-market_b_8774570.html

Marketing Lessons From the Presidential Election https://www.asicentral.com/news/web-exclusive/may-2016/marketing-lessons-from-the-presidential-election/

How 5 Influential Leaders Keep Their Sales Forecasts Laser-Accurate http://www.business.com/sales-strategies/how-5-influential-leaders-in-sales-keep-their-forecasts-laser-accurate/

Two Colorful Infographic Wheels Used to Track the Apollo Missions http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/05/15/apollo_mission_history_two_mission_tracking_wheels_from_ibm_and_raytheon.html

Got a book in you? Self-publishing could be your best bet http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/startup/got-a-book-in-you-selfpublishing-could-be-your-best-bet-20120330-1w36p.html

Apollo Lunar Program A Big Marketing Success, Book Says http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2014/05/19/marketing-the-moon

NASA'S (UN)CENSORED MOONWALKERS http://www.popsci.com/nasas-uncensored-moonwalkers

Free art: blessing or curse? https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/09/25/free-art-blessing-or-curse.html

How NASA Sold Us The Moon http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2014/03/12/how-nasa-sold-us-the-moon/#41e2002c4acb

Mad Men in space: the ads that sold NASA's golden age http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5636754/mad-men-in-space-the-ads-that-sold-nasas-golden-age

The Anatomy of a Great Content Strategy https://www.searchenginejournal.com/anatomy-great-content-strategy/106355/

LIVE FROM THE MOON http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/live-moon

Nasa's Mad Men: How the agency sold the Apollo missions to the public and inspired a golden age of space exploration http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2612074/Nasas-Mad-Men-How-agency-sold-Apollo-missions-thr-public-inspired-golden-age-space-exploration.html#ixzz4K3onmu5o

Independence Day Special: Here's how newsjacking looked like in 1947 http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-08-12/news/65490567_1_usha-social-media-jaago-re

How to Launch a Viral Marketing Campaign http://www.inc.com/guides/201107/how-to-launch-a-viral-marketing-campaign.html

With Twitter wit, CIA tries to shed staid public image (+video) http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2014/0710/With-Twitter-wit-CIA-tries-to-shed-staid-public-image-video

Save Big Bird! Will Romney’s Threats Wind Up Boosting PBS Fundraising? http://business.time.com/2012/10/04/save-big-bird-will-romneys-threats-wind-up-boosting-pbs-fundraising/

Cheers!

^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 18:32, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

• Delist: Unfortunately, it has been a month since the list of sources was posted here, and no edits have yet been done to the article. All of the issues enumerated above remain true. If these issues are eventually addressed, I will reconsider my recommendation. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:41, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

• Sorry, I've been very busy in real life. ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 01:40, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

• Delist -- I had a look and the article is in a bad state; it's promotional and suffers from the use primary sources. K.e.coffman (talk) 00:51, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

• Comment I reorganized the book section per the suggestion above and added some of the third party cites. Please take another look and give me some feedback? Thanks! ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 14:54, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

• Sorry, this is still too promotional. K.e.coffman (talk) 16:44, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

• Can you be more specific? ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 15:35, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

• Delist.

1. Most of the trees [refs] are to Press releases and are therefore not sources independent of the subject.
2. Newsjacking.com and WebInkNow are both Scott's websites.
3. Ref 41 is dead,
4. Ref 11 implies it is a direct quote from Scott but it is instead a 2011 Tweet from Colin Warwick.
5. Ref 17: Ok. AdAge 150 is a daily ranking and it is waaaay out of date. Frankly who cares that a blog/website was in a daily Top 150 10 years ago? and the sentence in the article says that the blog is in the Top 150. No. Not so. the statement should be stricken from the article along with the outdated source.
6. Image problems - the source of some of the images lead to WebInkNow but the trail goes cold there since apparently the internal URLs have changed.
7. The fact that Scott's book 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 is a present best-seller on Amazon and that fact indicates he is notable, but the present state of the article does not prove that notability.

• If I were giving this article a first-time review for possible GA status, I would quick-fail it for its many referencing issues and for its promotional tone. Shearonink (talk) 04:13, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, most of those are actionable, except for "promotional tone" which isn't obvious to me. Can you point to specific passages? Also I'm not sure what you mean by "most of the trees are to press releases." Can you be more specific? Last question, from the list of sources above that have not yet been included in the article, are there any that you would consider more worthy than the ones that are there now? (PS I'll work on the issues you mention this weekend hopefully.) Thanks again. ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 15:56, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Promotional tone

@SageGreenRider: Ok. The article does not read like an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica, it reads like a press release. Here are a few examples:

• "However, the idea was too radical..." Really? Who said so? Oh, looks like the subject said so, not an independent source.
• "such as the David Scott who walked on the moon as the commander of Apollo 15 (and whom he has met)" extraneous trivia, that is, again, sourced to the subject. Frankly, who cares? Content about who the subject has met is trivial, it demeans the importance of the subject if their article has content like this.
• "Scott is the author of a blog, Web Ink Now, which was ranked in the now defunct AdAge Power 150 as one of the top marketing blogs." This is a mischaracterization of the AdAge content. The blog was listed as a Top 150. For one day. Ten years ago. This is trivia, unless the blog was named as a Top 150 of the year or something like that. Also, anyone and everyone has a blog now...having a blog does not seem like a bullet-point on one's resume that is important enough to mention in a Wikipedia article.
• ybcTV is a press-release created platform, the contents generated by this firm is not news from an independent source, it is paid-for and is therefore not a reliable source and yet is it being used as a reference.
• "To promote this book Scott created several videos including one evocative of the joyous Matt Harding Where is Matt? series[45] and a series of three[46][47][48] in the workplace mockumentary style of both Ricky Gervais's The Office and the Art of the Sale videos.[49]"

Really? who said it was "reminiscent of...?" and who said it was "in the style of...?" Those two assessments are not in the cited sources, those are characterizations I would suppose from the subject himself.

• The only evidence one can find about "In 2015, Robert Stone announced that a documentary film entitled A Place Beyond the Sky, based in part on Scott's book Marketing the Moon, is in production. The film is currently in post-production and is slated for completion in 2018.[41]" is Stone's own press release. There is nothing in any of the trades about the documentary, nothing on IMdb about it...actually, I couldn't find a thing about it in any other source other than the press release on Stone's own website...this project has a little bit too much of a WP:CRYSTAL in it to be included in this article and should be deleted.
• Non-encyclopedic... How about the fact that the pronoun "he" is used 9 times in the "Education and career" section. Combine a few sentences, use his last name, do something to avoid the redundant use of words...it's very jarring and slightly juvenile.
• What is up with the books getting individual sections and the main Books section being a single sentence fragment ending in a colon. So ALL of those book paragraphs, those seven sections about the books, are subordinate clauses to "Scott is the author of ten books:"? Ummm...no. I am sure this usage is against some kind of WP:MOS subsection but don't want to try to look it up at the moment. If you want to get an idea of what this article should be striving for, take a look at some of the Featured article biographies on businesspeople like Finn M. W. Caspersen. Yes, I understand it's an FA and not a GA, but read it for the tone. A Featured article has the proper tone - *that* is what you should be thinking of when you work on a biographical article in Wikipedia.

This article needs to drastically pruned-down. No one is saying that it should be deleted, Scott is clearly notable especially because of his one book being a consistent best-seller but in its present state this article is not a Good article. At this point, the discussion has been going on since August 2016...that's four months. 3 editors have stated that the article should be delisted - 1 in October 2016, 1 in December 2016 and 1 in January 2017... the issues are still there, they haven't been fixed since the first statement on this page (which dates back to even farther - August 2016). In my opinion the article should be delisted to a C, completely rewritten, and then given a new GA Review. If I came upon this article in its present state and it was nom'ed for a GA, I would Quick Fail it for its many referencing issues and for its tone. Shearonink (talk) 17:29, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, that's very helpful. I'll work on it this weekend. Sorry to have so many questions, but what does "delisted to a C" mean? i.e. what is a "C"? ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 13:07, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

@Shearonink: I think I've addressed most of the issues. Could you please take another look? ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 16:49, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

• Keep I believe I've addressed all of the objections above. Note to closer: This is the only !vote that is based on the current version. Pls ping the other folks to get an updated !vote. Thanks! ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 23:08, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

• Comment -- confirming my "delist" iVote. The article is still highly promotional with many self-citations. For example, the lead includes this passage (all cited to Scott):

• The book's core message is that creating useful content oneself is consistently more effective than expensive professional public relations programs. Subsequent books draw from his experience as a real-time bond trader, and his observations about innovative marketing by organizations as diverse as IBM and the rock band The Grateful Dead.

References

K.e.coffman (talk) 02:43, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

I removed the above passage as self-cited and promotional. However, the rest of the lead has similar issues, being cited to press releases or otherwise non-independent coverage:

• American online marketing strategist, speaker, and author of several books on marketing, most notably The New Rules of Marketing and PR with over 350,000 copies in print in more than 25 languages.

References

If I continue, there will be nothing left :-) . K.e.coffman (talk) 02:53, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

I count 36 third-party refs including Forbes, WSJ, Boston Globe, Sydney Morning Herald... , so the article has considerable substance. I'll work on the lead this coming weekend. ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 14:55, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

• Comment WP:ABOUTSELF reads in part Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities... followed by some conditions. So I think some of the deletions are not justified. ... But out of an abundance of caution I removed the material from the lead and have not reverted the deletions by others. ^{Talk to} SageGreenRider 16:09, 30 January 2017 (UTC)