So I was at a small gathering yesterday…that I probably had no business being at. It was hosted by a leading business periodical who partnered with an innovative think tank. There were about 15 CMO/CIO execs from Fortune 500 companies there who were hoping to ‘unpack’ social media on the net, and define tangible ways on how their companies could participate. Scattered among these execs were a couple net entrepreneurs, writers and smart industry pundits. Overall, it was a very thought provoking day.
It was ‘off the record’, so I can’t really give you a record of the day (as if you wanted one). But I’ll just tell you what I observed:
– There’s a lot of desire and creativity on the part of the manufacturers/marketers to do…SOMETHING
– Their motivator seemed to be more driven by fear than opportunity
– Loss of control is something they think they can still *decide* if they want to do with their brand
They are denying that they have already lost control. That netizens now have a mouthpiece for themselves that amplifies and accelerates their own individual messages…sometimes faster and more effectively than that $10,000,000 marketing budget.
The execs’ fear of these uncontrollable individual messages getting out seems to paralyze them. They draw a blank on what to do.
The execs I met yesterday are so smart…so passionate about their brands. They’re experts at human nature and how to win people over. Yet, for some reason they think social networks defy human nature – that somehow all the rules they know have just flown out the window.
Human nature has not been eliminated by the net. On the contrary, social networking has finally injected a healthy dose of human nature *into* the net. Your knowledge, expertise as marketers is actually dead-on relevant to properly participating in social networks. Don’t try to STOP people’s messaging. When has that ever worked in life? In marketing? Win them over instead. Invest in reaching out to them. There’s no one in the world who’s passionate about a movement, product, brand, cause, whatever, who wouldn’t want to know they’ve made an impact on a big company. Knowing they’ve been heard by you is a powerful way to create an enthusiast. It’s human nature. And human nature is now alive and well on the net.
June 21st, 2007
I have finally started to get my act together around online music. Ever since Quincy Smith and CBS announced their purchase of Last.fm, I’ve been digging into the site (listening to a station they created for me based on my love of DJ Tiesto right now) and trying to understand the lessons. I’ve also been trying to figure out Pandora and iLike, but finding them a bit more complex (it’s me, not them). And while I’d be the last person to argue that the music business is an easy one, there is one huge advantage relative to some other consumer products businesses….namely, people are wildly, sickly passionate about the product. So passionate that you might have even stumbled over my describing it as a consumer products business. It’s not a product…it’s a lifestyle, it’s who I am, it helps define me.
That passion means that consumers will put up with - won’t even SEE - a lot of marketing that would be inexcusable in other industries. As hinted at in my Honeyshed post, MTV (regardless of what the labels may have thought at the time) was an enormous commercial for the music industry. From working in the cable industry, I can tell you that the cable operators saw right through it and thought it was the stupidest idea they had ever heard. I can also tell you that as a 12-year old in 1981, it never, ever, ever occurred to me that I was watching infomercials. It was simply the most fabulous content I had ever been exposed to.
And while he even admits that it took him a few minutes, Om Malik figured it out today while reading about Apple and Bebo working together….commerce is infiltrating social networks. We barely even recognize it as such because music is the form it most commonly takes and it’s so invisible as commerce not only because it is media itself but since we WANT the content (for another use case see here for a book review that I wrote on Amazon’s Facebook app promoting a book that talks about using social media for marketing - commerce - purposes. Twisted, isn’t it?).
It may seem that the lessons here for other industries are few and far between, but I don’t think so. Reread that phrase I used about music….it’s a lifestyle, it’s who I am, it helps define me. What brand doesn’t aspire to this? And in a world of consumer generated media, what brand isn’t representable by ‘media’? The key is to package and deliver this content back to consumers in a way that they perceive as programming, as value, as identity enhancing. The answers, as they say, are out there.
June 13th, 2007
