Entries Tagged 'Nomadic Marketing' ↓

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.

The first day of Nomadic Marketing has been interesting and challenging in unexpected ways. On the one hand I’ve not encountered anything particularly new — in fact, one of the biggest surprises was discovering that the idea of markets as conversations is not universally accepted as blindingly obvious. Listening to various stories of corporate obliviousness has made me freshly grateful that I have very, very little to do with corporates.

On the other hand, it’s been a fantastic opportunity to play around with tools I don’t normally have time for, and to rediscover the value of some things I’d abandoned. In no particular order:

1. Following very enthusiastic evangelism by Mike Stopforth, I’m playing with del.icio.us again — I managed to tag some of the more interesting URLs mentioned during the day here and will keep adding to the list over the next two days. I also (finally!) got the “social” part of social bookmarking; I still think deli.ico.us could make it a lot easer, the interface is cumbersome at present but at least the payoff is now clear to me. Does anybody still use Furl?
2. Similarly, there is more interesting stuff happening in SA’s online media space than I had given it credit for; it’s clearly worth investing more time in exploring Afrigator and Amatomu; I’d (unfairly) never spared them more than a passing glance before.
3. Jayne Morgan is doing fantastic work at Podcart, which I can see might work really well for a couple of my clients.
4. Adii did a great job of selling me on Wordpress, which I have been feeling lukewarm about on grounds of user-unfriendliness. Fresh incentive to poke about here a bit more. I lost all my notes from his presentation to a Google Docs glitch (the danger of putting everything online) so will hope for more detail on the wiki.

Stuff I would like to see, discuss or think about over the next two days:

1. I’d dearly love to know more about the Standard Bank Pro20 campaign - details of how it was built and implemented, what platforms are being used, what the feedback and results are and so on. Ditto for Standard Bank’s MXiT campaign; a live demo or screenshots at the very least would be great. If this is all too much detail for others (I’m aware my appetite for detail is not shared by everyone) I may have to interview Mike Stopforth about it…
2. In fact, I’d dearly love to know more about MXiT all around; the future of social media in SA and Africa is going to be about mobile more than anything else, and it’s an area I know next to nothing about (looked at it once, didn’t really get it — clearly I have less in common with the users of MXiT than with their parents:-). Mike’s comment that today’s teenagers have skipped the web really struck home.
3. There’s a big and not very well formulated question in my mind about how to make all this work for companies that are a) not consumer facing and b) not wealthy enough to employ full-time community managers etc. It obviously works very well for freelancers and small companies whose work is precisely about social media — their engagement in conversation is essential to what they do every day; but what about companies who are selling, I don’t know, fingerprint scanners or ERP software or archiving systems? I’m sure there is a way to make it work, but I also suspect it will take a different kind of thinking and engagement. People just don’t get passionate about fingerprint scanners in quite the same way they do about cricket, on the whole; and the people who do get passionate about them might not be the same as the people in a position to spend money on them (although it would be very short-sighted to ignore the people who influence the people who influence…). As I say, not a well-formulated question so if anybody can help me unpack it please do!
4. On the detail front again, I’d like to know a great deal more about who is online in South Africa, what platforms they’re using, where they’re going and what they’re doing there. I’m not completely convinced by Alexa as an information source given that they base their information on users of the Alexa toolbar so there’s very likely some sample bias in there. On the other hand, maybe all this detail is simply a quick route to analysis paralysis and there’s more to be learned from just diving in and doing it.

And Dave and Adii, if you guys manage to read all this by 8am tomorrow morning I will be seriously impressed.