A golden rule: Make good stuff, listen, be nice

The second day of Nomadic Marketing was considerably more difficult that the first (in a good way); a huge diversity of content, style, opinion and perspective. But if there’s one message that’s emerging clearly from absolutely everyone it’s that the rules of success in social media are not very different from the rules of success anywhere else: like it says in the heading, make good stuff, listen to people and be nice. Find people where they are, speak to them about what they need when they need it. And so on.

In a fairly fundamental way I think this is taking us back to a far older way of managing markets and conversations. Assuming the human race survives long enough to develop some good hindsight, I wouldn’t be surprised if we come to view the 20th century as a period of historical aberration during which it was briefly possible to market successfully by brute force; it was the age of broadcasting and mass communication and we’re seeing its dying spasms. What we are (re)discovering is the real import of the fact that markets are based on trust, and trust gets thinner the further it’s removed from a human face and personality.

(If it all adds up to the death of “the brand” I’ll be delighted; after all these years of talking and hearing people talk about “the brand” the phrase still makes me cringe a little.)

The conference has also so far produced a lovely small case study of the power of social media, provided people are willing to listen and respond. Paul Jacobsen Twittered dissatisfaction with service he was getting from DataPro and I passed the comments on to Duo Marketing, who passed them on to someone who could do something about it, who actually did something! Paul has the whole story here.

Yesterday’s question about how to make this all valuable to the kind of engineer- and entrepreneur-led techy companies I like to work with was also partly answered today, thanks to Mike Perk of World Wide Creative: “Just because your business is boring doesn’t mean your content has to be”. (Actually I’ve never met a really boring business yet, but it can look that way until you scratch the surface).

So all in all I’m feeling optimistic about the prospects for small, agile, responsive companies who are a) willing to listen to their customers and b) not hamstrung by their own internal bureaucracy when it comes to acting on what they hear. For the larger, lumbering types I’m not so sure. Lester alerted me to this nugget from
Seth Godin:

Organizations don’t fail because the Web and the New Marketing don’t work. They fail because the Web and the New Marketing work only when applied to the right organization. New Media makes a promise to the consumer. If the organization is unable to keep that promise, then it fails.

Which about sums it up, really.