by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
October 2, 2007 at 5:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Here’s a Tom Asacker quote from last Friday’s phone interview:
“I’d get this whole idea of marketing communications and messaging out of your head because customers don’t want any more messaging. They really don’t. If somebody said to me, ‘hey here’s a brochure, would you read it?’ I’d say to them, ‘here’s a dollar, I’d rather not read it, go away’ … So I think that marketers have to change their thought process… From marketing communications, let’s figure out how to be marketing value creation. What kind of value can we create for our audience such that they want to ‘consume’ our marketing?”
I think this makes a point that so many marketers forget when they talk about doing their messaging. Their customers don’t want messaging.
So how do you tell them about what you’re trying to sell, then? I’ll post about that next.
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
October 2, 2007 at 1:25 pm · Filed under Podcasts, Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice
Our second in a series of interviews and debates on our Facebook Marketing 2.0 group: An interview with Tom Asacker, renowned speaker, provocateur, and author of “A Clear Eye for Branding”.
On to the interview…
by Hylton Jolliffe
September 17, 2007 at 9:20 am · Filed under Research + Studies
From Business Insight, the WSJ insert which ran this weekend, comes commentary worth catching from several academics who study innovation:
When it comes to innovation, the myth of the lone genius dies hard.
Most companies continue to assume that innovation comes from that individual genius, or, at best, small, sequestered teams that vanish from sight and then return with big ideas. But the truth is most innovations are created through networks — groups of people working in concert.
The misperception has never been more damaging, as companies pour more money into generating ideas and then end up frustrated as innovations simply don’t develop. To lay the groundwork for innovation, organizations must make it easy for their employees to build networks — talk to their peers, share ideas and collaborate…
Read on here.
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
September 17, 2007 at 7:35 am · Filed under Research + Studies
Matthew Creamer over at Ad Age writes:
“American companies are shifting more and more marketing dollars out of paid media. You see it happening every day as marketers—smart ones, at least—talk about things such as word-of-mouth and conversational marketing, the kind of activity that doesn’t feed the coffers of media sellers or traditional ad agencies and hence goes unmeasured in bellwethers such as TNS reports.”
Creamer suggests that professionals who are making money via “some form of media or marketing activity depicted on the TV program ‘Mad Men’” pour themselves a drink. I would add, “then contact MarketHum”.
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
September 15, 2007 at 2:00 am · Filed under Crappy Marketing
I just noticed an ad at the bottom of a Facebook page announcing that Monster, the job listing site, has a new feature: Career Horoscopes.
Have we sunk to a new low here? If this were a joke, perhaps Horror-Scopes for Halloween, I might find it creative and funny. But have they correctly judged their user base? Because if so, I don’t know that I’ll be advertising my next job opening there. Unless I’m looking for an astrologist.
Come to think of it, if Monster.com is that desperate for users and for giving them something to do on their site that they have to attract them through horoscopes, I pity them for that reason too. This is just bad all around.
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
September 15, 2007 at 1:29 am · Filed under Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice
To inaugurate our new Facebook Group, Marketing 2.0, we did our first of what will hopefully be a regular series of interviews and debates. David Weinberger was our guest. The recording is here:
http://www.markethum.com/humdingers/marketing2.0interview.weinberger.mp3
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
September 14, 2007 at 3:57 pm · Filed under Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice, Print vs. Web
I was struggling today to try to explain politely to a potential client why a traditional PR agency might not be the best source of advice on how to understand the conversational power of the Internet. This is always a touchy subject because of course there are plenty of people working in jobs at very established firms, who totally “get” online PR.
At least, I hope there are! But there are many more traditional PR people who know the right buzzwords but don’t really understand what it means to foster market conversation as opposed to controlling the message. And there are still more traditional PR people who don’t even know the right buzzwords.
The Internet is really quite different from print media (this is a newsflash for some folks). For the PR professional, it’s a bit like the difference between moderating a panel and giving a lecture. If the moderator talked the whole time, and the panelists said nothing, well they would probably be pretty pissed and so would everyone in attendance (”lurkers” are today’s audience).
In today’s conversation-enabled world, some end-users are starting to think of themselves more as panelists than as a polite audience. They can be reached, they listen carefully, and they are amazing at getting the word out - but “the word” is going to be their word, not your word.
Anyway, as it turns out this client already knew what she was talking about so I needn’t have struggled. She came up with what I thought was a very clever analogy in speaking to an old-school ad man the other day, and shared it with me. “Do you remember,” she said to him, “how outraged you were when little Mom and Pop shops started coming out of the woodwork saying they could do ad campaigns, and you knew you could do it better because you’d been doing it for 15 years already?” Of course, the guy had to admit that experience counts for alot, when he was reminded of his own experience and what it counted for. He could hardly discount that!
I thought this tack was brilliant, and I never would have thought of it because I don’t have a built-in prejudice against Mom and Pops. But it’s true - we’ve been building communities for so long that we can now take people’s “establishment” prejudice and turn it inside out to work for us instead of against us.
I’m not saying that people who have trained and learned one skill for many years can’t change or learn. But I am saying it’s a good idea to ask your PR company things like “who do you have on the team who has built online communities and how long have they been doing it?”, “How long have you been working with user-created content?”, “How long have you been blogging and participating in social networks?” and “What lessons have you learned about online collaboration?”.
Contrast that with questions like “How long have you been in the PR business?”, “How many magazine editors do you know?” and “How many press releases have you written?”. By pointing to their existing areas of expertise, it should be easy to remind them that experience counts for a lot and that they should bring some conversation experts in-house, if they haven’t already.
by francois
September 14, 2007 at 3:11 pm · Filed under MarketHum
Three weeks ago we started a Marketing 2.0 Group on Facebook - today it has more than 1,000 members. It is amazing to see what can happen when you go and try to organize groups of like-minded people where the communities already exist rather than creating communities from scratch.
The plan with the group is to get a few marketing thought leaders to help us lead conversations on the future of various aspects of marketing. Periodically we also plan on having interviews, debates and discussions on the future of marketing, as we did this past Wednesday in an interview with David Weinberger (audio for replay of that interview coming soon).
Stay tuned for a schedule of upcoming interviews and for interesting conversations on the future of marketing.
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
September 11, 2007 at 8:11 pm · Filed under Humdingers, Uncategorized
I like that Kohler has sponsored an initiative for user-contributed design. It makes me feel that they care what I have to say, and that they are staying current about design. Great things come from Wisconsin!
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