The marketing of no marketing
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008(or five huge egos at one table….)
Chris Heuer Partner, The Conversation Group
Tara Hunt Co-Founder, Citizen Agency
Jeremiah Owyang Forrester
Deborah Schultz Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com
David Parmet Owner, Marketing Begins At Home LLC
Hugh MacLeod Grand Pooh-Bah, gapingvoid.com
How to market into community without appearing totally overbearing?
How do you build the community around what you are doing for your company?
TH - the more I gave away my expertise the more expertise I seemed to get. this giving away stuff led me to give my time to creating new communities (barcamp and co-working). People open up their offices and lives to me when I do this. Social capital - the value of the relationships and your reputation. We are raising our own social capital with what we are doing. online it is about how much you can give away - the best way to get your own stuff you should give more away to help others. You need a patronage model of people in large companies who are prepared to pay for it.
CH - you need a way to sustain your life as well as giving things away free. Tools creating for Web 2.0 is democratising and enabling good to be given back.
HM - STormhoek - sent out 200 bottles of wine to bloggers who asked for it from Hugh's website. And then they sponsored the geek dinners.I never thought of the drinkers as 'the stormhoek community' it was just wine drinkers - but the conversations happening around the wine were interesting. Social gestures beget social objects and these beget social markers. The new N95 and IPhone are territorial demarcations in the phone geek community.
DS - spend your marketing budget by getting out and meeting customers e.g. go to conferences and see what's happening at the fringe. Find the customers who love you and talk to them. In start-ups you have a low ratio of employees: customers don't put up an FAQ, use humans to answer questions. This is smart marketing and customer support. FAQs are for big organisations. (more…)
