Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Leading Participation

The discussion I have been following below - tagged by Umair as consumer dynamics - has been joined by the O'Reilly crew.  Based on their massive open source credentials, they emphasise the need for leadership when building online communities: "It's your job as figurehead of an open source project or creator of web app code to align with people's motivation (by meeting the emotional and technical needs they have) and hope you can keep the skill-time barrier low enough that you'll get people working on it. The biggest part is the motivation, meeting the emotional needs of developers."  I think this is a helpful insight for modern marketing.  There is sometimes the notion that open source marketing is about *just* handing over the reins to customers and then standing back while chaos ensues.  But the truth is that brands' involvement is vital and, indeed, time consuming.  Possibly much more so than traditional techniques where a message is finessed and then fired out across the marketplace.

Our Job

At Modern Marketing most of what I talk about is based on the simple idea that - these days - effective marketing campaigns are 'open' to some degree.  To my mind 'open' means that people can become involved in the process rather than being presented with a finished article that they can only admire.  Why I believe this open approach works is because the modern consumer is motivated by the chance to participate, innovate and learn.  As a result, there are great benefits for companies and brands that build platforms for that participation to take place. Now those are pretty broad statements and are only a starting point.  It's our job at Collaborate is to bring them to life within specific corporate and brand briefs - answering questions about the who and the how.

Generation 2.0?

Robert Young has written two excellent posts, as a guest at GigaOm, talking about the way in which MySpace and other mega-communities are twisting the standard capitalist view of the marketplace.  Now that might sound grandiose but the scale of MySpace - which Young notes, "has essentially captured the entirety of Americas youth" - makes it seem less sensational.  He also articulates an issue I've been considering:  "Such changing market behavior, which is structural and permanent for any industry being usurped by the Internet, must be met with a corresponding shift in corporate mindset. Otherwise, a “generation gap” will exist between the members of management themselves, as well as the company and its market."  Consumer dynamics on steroids.

Sauce at MRS

Johnnie and I are hosting a little chat about a User-Generated World at the Market Research Society's Annual Conference on 23rd March.  The brief we've been given is, "Knowing your Blogs from Your Pods", but we're aiming to fit a little sauce in too...

Maslow and Social Networks

Every marketing student will be familiar with Maslow's Hierachy of Needs - the classic pyramid describing the way that people organise their basic physiological needs such as shelter before moving onto higher level needs such as friendship and belonging.  The recent Forrester report - Social Computing - raises Maslow as a helpful way of understanding why social networks are growing so fast:  "As technology has made ever more  products available to a wider audience at lower cost, many Europeans, Americans, and  Japanese already meet their needs for food, shelter, and safety. They are now striving to fulfill  the higher needs in Maslow’s scheme: love and belonging; esteem; and self-actualization."  This is an idea that's also popular among open source communities.  I read it as : People Want A Voice.

Degrees of Participation

Now that the major US players (GYM) have got their super-communities up and running we are starting to hear some great insights about the consumer dynamics that Umair highlighted below.  Bradley's Horowitz's post about the way Yahoo views its audience is attracting a lot of attention and debate.  He (as head of Tech Dev Yahoo Search) says the company sees the audience as a kind of pyramid of participation: 1 creator for every 10 synthesizers for every 100 consumers.  Horowitz says that 100 per cent participation is neither desirable or practical but goes onto stress that the pyramid is an observation not a strategy.  That doesn't stop Greg Yardley from suggesting that this view is restricting Yahoo's vision: "If you expect the bulk of your users to be passive gawkers your thinking’s never going to stray from CPM ad space. How disappointing - since it is possible to design a service that demands creation, and such services are far stickier than ones built around showing ads to passive surfers. To compete, Yahoo’s new services need 90% creators, not 1% or 10%."  And for a tremendous take on the data side of the Web 2.0 world check out Tom Coates presentation. (Via Bubblegeneration).

Making Marketing Not Evil

On our trip to NYC last month one of the most striking aspects of the professional marketing scene was reaction to MySpace.  The vast community has done for blogging what eBay did for auctions : kill the remaining geeky stereotype and make it credible to the mainstream.  However, this brings its own anxieties as marketeers try and work out the new rules.  Interestingly, Umair writes that massive mainstream community spaces create anxieties for geeks too.  He highlights that The Valley (collective name for geeks - like pride for lions) is scared of MySpace due to a lack of understanding about "consumer dynamics".  The geeks (including the VCs) who step up to the challenge of, "making marketing not evil", Umair suggests will win the day.  So it seems that while marketeers sweat about a lack of technical know-how, geeks just continue to avoid eye contact.  Of course, Umair's idea relies on the marketing industry actually being the home for an understanding about modern consumer dynamics - but it's not a bad focus for marketeers who feel caught in the headlights of the MySpace juggernaut.  In the meantime consumers and users just carry on rewriting the rules.  All Open Sauce themes.

Forrester on Social Computing

Forrester has just published a Social Computing report and Charlene Li gives it a little write-up here. "To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists." Nicely put - sounds like open source marketing to me.  Li also stresses the fact that so much of what is happening is not being technically driven: "Technologies will come and go, but the power built on the relationships created by social computing will endure." Thanks to Alex Barnett.

Honda's Unmeasurable Choir

Over at Weiden & Kennedy's blog, an interesting little chat has emerged about their latest Honda mega-slot where a choir, er, makes the noises that a Civic car makes.  No, nor do I.  Anyway, the interesting bit is that W&K is delighted to announce its new ad has been downloaded 804,000 times.  It sounds like this all compares extremely favourably to traditional TV but according to the blog it's not possible to compare Web vs TV bang-for-bucks:  "The Choir spot first aired in Celebrity Big Brother, which has pulled in audiences of around 6 million. To buy a single 2 minute spot in that will be...

You Make The Commercial

So while Stratton is scaring the bjeezus out of the US agency world, L'Oreal is forging ahead by challenging members of social space Varsity World to come up with ads for its new beauty products.  Have a look at the winners of You Make The Commercial - very impressive and with a built-in relevancy for the customer.  Oh, and the small matter of 250,000 votes for the competitors to keep the L'Oreal marketing team happy....