Un-Marketing
Brian Solis wrote a great post today that every marketer should read. He articulates a very important change that is taking place, “Now, we’re entering an entirely new paradigm for cultivating relationships with customers as well as the people who may one day become customers.” I completely agree.
Please check out the full article, “Will The Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?”
In it, Brian describes a change that is taking place from traditional marketing where we speak through relatively impersonal top down messages to one where we have real conversations with people.
He says:
“We’re starting to figure out that we need to humanize our story. We’re realizing that we would never speak to our friends and family through messages, so why should we speak “at” the very people we want to reach and befriend. We’re opening our ears and our minds to acknowledge that we can no longer push our thoughts at people in order to earn resonance; we have to listen, talk, listen, assess, and contribute value.”
And,
“Instead of top down communications and focusing on the influence and control of messages and perception, we’re learning that those influential groups of people are now our peers and therefore require respect, honesty, and support in order for us to earn their trust – and hopefully their business and enthusiasm along the way.”
So how does a marketer go about this? Brian also provides very practical advice including:
“Observe the online communities where your company and brands (or those of your competitors) are actively discussed and figure out how to participate in those conversations as if you were approaching someone in real life whom you greatly respect. Perhaps the most valuable piece of advice I can share is to pay attention to the culture of each community and how people communicate and interact with each other. This will reveal how best to embrace the opportunity and reach out to people though a through a new form of “un” marketing.
And,
“- Start by participating as a person, not as a marketer.
- Talk like a person, not as a sales person or message factory.
- Be helpful and bring value to the conversation.
During this entire process, you’re contributing to the personality and the perception of the brand you represent.”
This advice is right on the bull’s-eye and exactly the type of marketing that I believe in. At what point did we forget that it has always been about people and relationships, about adding value? I’m glad this movement is under way.
April 9th, 2008 - Posted in Online Listening, Influence, Conversation, Social Media | | 0 Comments
The Social Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan was a true media philosopher. Born in 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), he became a highly regarded communications theorist, scholar/educator and philosopher. The concept of persuasion and influence was of great interest to McLuhan. His most famous publication, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man was written in 1964. From this research and analysis he coined the now famous saying, “the medium is the message”. What did he mean by this?
The slogan summarizes his theory about the influence of communications media on society. His thesis was that a communications medium influences society by the inherent characteristics of the medium rather than the contents of its message. Hence, the medium itself is the message; the medium itself is the greater influencer of society - more than the messages it is carrying.
Now, honestly, when I first decoded his famous slogan, I thought, “that can’t be right”. Surely it is the ideas themselves that change society and not the communications pipe through which they are sent? I mean, did McLuhan really believe that the impact of television on society would have been the same regardless of the type of programming? Yes, he apparently did.
At first, this seems counter-intuitive, but let’s consider an example: e-mail. Did the introduction of e-mail as a communication medium, by its own characteristics, change society (ex: how we work) or was it the specific messages we received? When you really think about it, this particular medium has completely transformed how we work. Try working without a computer (or any email device) for a day and you will be reminded just how much the medium itself has impacted society.
In his Prologue to The Gutenberg Galaxy – McLuhan stated that media are “extensions” of our human senses, bodies and minds. And he believed that each medium produced a different effect on how we view the world.
For instance, he argued that “the technique of suspended judgment” (or suspended disbelief) was brought on by the story telling characteristics of radio, movies and television and that this was a key point of change in the 20th century in terms of how we now look at the world.
Whether you agree with his theories or not, it is certainly interesting to think about the impact of social media, or rather the Social Medium, and all of its new characteristics. In particular, I wonder how the unique conversational characteristics of the Social Medium might be changing our values or views. In what ways do you think the current adoption of the Social Medium is changing our perceptions of the world?
The social medium is the message.
February 27th, 2008 - Posted in Influence, Conversation, Social Media | | 4 Comments
Influencer Share of Meme
I have been thinking about the distributed influence discussion that Jonny Bentwood and the roundtable initiated. It is now a meme where several others have added to the conversation. The focus of the discussion is on the calculation of an individual’s online influence. An idea occurred to me this week about memes and the measurement of influence.
As background, Jeremiah Owyang defined a meme as, “an idea or discussion that grows and spreads from individual to individual into a lengthy commentary”.
The whitepaper connects influencers to memes. It begins by recording the opinion of Jeff Jarvis who believes that an influencer is either a meme starter or a meme spreader. The roundtable then adds other types of influencers to the list such as the meme adapter, meme commentator, meme reader, but reaffirms that the first two have the greatest impact (starters and spreaders). The group also references Charlene Li’s technographics that categorizes online consumers into creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
So I thought I would test drive the idea for the “distributed influence” meme. I setup a topic profile to analyse the meme in our social media monitoring & analysis system. I then compared each of the roundtable participants and also added a few other influencers who contributed to the meme.
You can see from the above chart that Jonny Bentwood is not only the meme starter, but he is also a prominent part of the meme itself. His Influencer Share of Meme is 43.6% (48 mentions out of 110 on-topic posts in a 30 day window). This means that when someone talks about distributed influence, they also talk about Jonny Bentwood 43.6% of the time. The remaining Influencer Share of Meme leaders for meme are Peter Kim with 12.7%, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel at 11.8%, David Brain at 10.9%, Max Kalehoff at 7.2%, Keith O’Brien and Henry Copeland at 6.4%, Dr. Walter Carl, Sarah Petersen and Charlene Li at 5.5%, Jim Tobin and Rick Murray 4.5%, Kami Huyse at 3.6%
Another interesting point is that this influencer share of meme is a dynamic value that can also be measured over time.
For example, the illustration above shows a time series chart comparing the Influencer Share of Meme for David Brain and Jim Tobin over the past 30 days. From January 16 to January 23, David Brain had a 19.3% SoM where Jim Tobin had 0%. But then you can see that Jim Tobin jumps in and grabs a 41.6% SoM from January 31 to Feb. 2 where he and his ideas suddenly became a bigger part of the meme… although the meme momentum itself (the red line) is gradually slowing at the moment.
February 8th, 2008 - Posted in Influence, Social Media | | 5 Comments
Social Media Influence
If you are interested in the topic of social media and influence, there is a really interesting conversation taking place currently. I posted a few links about it today on the Radian6 corporate blog, PowerShift, in case you want to check it out.
February 2nd, 2008 - Posted in Influence, Online Media, Social Media | | 0 Comments
