Entries Tagged 'Relationships' ↓

I get this question a lot. It’s a question I ask of myself a lot, as well. I’m betting on the answer being yes, with some caveats depending on exactly who and where your target market is and what the best way might be to reach them. My “yes” is not yet authoritative, but it’s getting firmer by the day. I will (try to) blog the learnings as they happen. In the meantime, Chris Brogan has a great roundup of posts on this and related subjects here: Best Social Media Advice from Chris Brogan. There are especially good posts about small businesses under the “community development” and “social media” headings. I’ll be coming back to this resource.

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.

I was about to go to bed last night when I picked up a comment on Twitter that suggested there was something interesting going on at the SXSWi conference* in Austin, Texas, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed live on stage by a journalist called Sarah Lacy. The story in a nutshell: Many in the audience disliked her interview style, backchannel Twitter traffic got heated, there was heckling etc, it all melted down and there have about a zillion blog rehashes already so I won’t bore you with the details.

What interests me, mainly, is why I was interested. Here was a person I was vaguely aware of and whose product I recently started using, being interviewed an ocean and several timezones away by another person I’d never heard of, in front of an audience of people I’ve never met. Actual relevance to me and my life here at the nether end of a country some of them couldn’t locate on a map? Somewhere very close to zero. Yet there I was, glued to the screen & hyper-alert: palms sweating, heart racing, manically spidering my way through a sprawling web of links to find out what was going to happen next and who was saying what about it.

What is it about wasting time this way is so enormously seductive? Perhaps it has something to do with the illusion of being there, or maybe it’s the equally illusory conviction that witnessing something live is better/different than just hearing about it afterwards (as if forced exposure to Sky News at the gym hadn’t been enough to put me off the stupidity of “live coverage”). Is immediacy addictive? It certainly isn’t fulfilling (sort of like cheap chocolate: no matter how much you have it’s never entirely satisfying. Give me one square of Lindt 70% over three bars of Cadbury’s any day).

Meanwhile this sideshow has distracted me for an entire day. I know in some circles continuous partial attention is supposed to be a good thing, but the resulting continual state of jittery hyper-alertness is exhausting, and entirely inimical to flow.

I need to stay with Twitter etc for a little while longer to discover if there’s anything actually useful in it for my real needs, but it is going to need very careful management.

* Brief explanation for those who know as much about it as I knew yesterday: gathering of the uber-geeks. Everyone who is anyone on the internet, etc. Reading between the lines: lots of egos, lots of jostling, lots of parties.

Now that I’m looking for them, I can’t take a step without falling over interesting examples of social media marketing at work. Right now, for example, my five-year-old is taking some rest time listening to a podcast of The Happy Prince, beautifully read and downloaded gratis from StoryNory.com. The site is a project of a London PR firm called Blog Relations, and their media relations pack says this, in answer to the first question that popped into my mind:

What is your business model?
We want to keep the stories free forever. We are looking for a sponsor who would love to be closely associated with a voice that reaches into the hearts of kids and families. One day it would be great to have spin-offs into books and other media. Storynory also gives us proof-of-concept that helps bring consultancy projects to the parent company, Blog Relations. For the time being, we more than cover our costs with Google AdSense and sponsorship brought to us by our agent, Wizzard Media.

I like the idea of the free site as proof of concept for larger projects. Storynory, incidentally, currently ranks #2 on a Google search for “kids audio books” and they’re serving over 200,000 downloads a month. That’s a decent market.

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging, one of my favourite reads, just posted this very embarrassing pitch he got from a PR person who should lose their account on the spot for being utterly clueless.

And witness, incidentally, the power of social media: Alex Steffen blogged about it, and no doubt a few others besides me will also pick it up as a result, some of whom will have actual readers that pick it up in turn. I’ve never heard of Ethos Water before today, but I’m sure they would have preferred another way to bring themselves to my attention. Or can it really be true that no publicity is bad publicity?