Marketing is one of those words that more often than not, gives engineers hives. Use ‘marketing’ in a presentation at a technology conference and expect every subsequent word to be met with suspicion. I certainly don’t blame people for distrusting marketers. We have a long history of being smarmy and despicable.
I spent the first part of my career trying to come to grips with being a marketer. I actually found the study of marketing and communications fascinating, especially the cultural studies. The understanding was that people were unique and influenced by their personal experiences, and that it was more beneficial to build relationships and learn from these individuals than it was to try and push messages repeatedly until someone picked them up.
However, when I entered the advertising world, that kind of attitude was frowned upon. It wasn’t ’scalable’ and it took too long to accomplish anything. The ROI on a billboard was simple: such and such numbers of eyeballs would suck in the message daily, leading to a certain percentage of others ‘acting on’ that message. It was up to us as a creative team to make that message as compelling and memorable as possible.
But something sat wrong with me in that model. It seemed that there was a huge amount of time and money squandered. It was sort of a ‘throw the paint on the wall and see what sticks’ mentality. The wasted paint was just a part of the equation. There is actually an infamous quote in advertising that “Half of all advertising is wasted, we just don’t know which half.”
Compounded with the waste, I just didn’t see any long-term benefits from these campaigns. Sure, you may arrest someone’s attention with an ad that catches them in the subway. They may even be influenced to buy a product or service from it. But these advertising messages have little or nothing to do with the products themselves. They are brainstormed in an agency boardroom, with a team of people often different from those who designed the product. “We care about you” often results in another poor customer experience.
After enough experience with marketing messages misaligned to actual experience, people have grown to totally disregard these messages altogether. And this was years before ’social software’ allowed for word of mouth and peer-to-peer to travel like wildfire around the globe.
Then I read a book that changed my life. Actually, I read a website that was also a published book. The Cluetrain Manifesto, written as a series of philosophical rants by Doc Searls, Christopher Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine, really hit home for me. Their first thesis, “markets are conversations” summed it all up for me. The future of marketing was not about pushing messages or yelling or broadcasting… they were about having a two-way conversation with your customers.
What Will These Conversations Do For You?
That is where companies get it wrong. It isn’t about you at all. It is about your user/customer. I could go on with the benefits of building relationships rather than SEO campaigns, such as:
- Longevity and customer retention, not to mention repeat customers
- Bug tracking and community policing (ie. Flickr’s ‘Flag this photo as “may offend”?’)
- Amplified word of mouth
- Built in market research
- Buying ads is bloody expensive
But I won’t. I could tell you that if you don’t have those conversations, you will probably end up making decisions along the way that will make those few customers you have go away to someone who is listening. But I won’t say that either.
Because you don’t need to know those things. You really have no choice in the matter. You can’t afford not to have that conversation. The only thing that is standing between you and your customers is a blog, a forum, a clearer way of providing feedback, opening up your bug tracking system, or a published email or IM address.
It’s incredibly simple. It’s actually the most natural thing we do. The benefits are immense and it increases customer satisfaction and retention tenfold.
[p.s. it feels darn good, too]
But Is It Scalable?
When you are a humongous corporation with hundreds of customer service staff, you most certainly can empower each and every staff member to empower each and every customer they speak with. You can implement a very expensive customer relationship management system that makes it possible to remember every detail of every transaction and you have the person power to spend individual time with each customer.
But when you are a strappy startup, with three engineers, one non-engineer and an angel-funded project that you give away for free, you don’t have the same resources available to you. So, wouldn’t it be simpler to just buy those ads?
Let me tell you this: scaling issues are the best issues to have. You should be so lucky.
If you need to hire a community manager, you are doing something right. If you need to hire a community team, you seriously rock. There are ways to scale the conversation, and I will talk a bit more about that in future articles, but the first step is opening up those lines of communication today.
How Do You Open Up Communication?
The simplest way to do this is to take a look at how you communicate already. I would never recommend a blog for someone who hates to write or a forum for a group of engineers who have never spent time in one. If you are really efficient with email, put your email address on every page… top and bottom. If you spend all of your time on IM, publish your username on the website.
We’ve advised some of our clients to open up their bug tracking system to the public. Interested parties can see what is being worked on already and add suggestions directly to your process.
Make it incredibly friendly so people feel they can approach you, too. Put photos and bios of all of the members of your team up on your website, with clear contact information. Describe in clear language what ‘part’ of the website everyone is responsible for so customers will know who to contact.
Technology allows us to go further, but this is a start. In the community marketing series that follows this article, I plan to discuss the how of it, the where and when of it, the overall essence of it and the measurement of it.
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Mon, Oct 23, 2006
Advertising, Features, Marketing