Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing
By jmj1. Monday, 10. March 2008, 19:07:40
I have say that I've been pleasantly surprised so far by my experience with this conference. As an academic, my conference experiences have all been academic ones, and, frankly, academic panels are a mixed bag. I've enjoyed some of them, but most academic panels I've seen are under-prepared and don't stick together very well. However, halfway through SXSW, I've not yet been to bad or uninteresting session.This high-spirited panel was no exception. Before it began, the chair, David Parmet,—the owner of Marketing Begins At Home—organized the audience into a wave, while Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com sang "Feelings" and spent the entire panel sketching comics and tossing them into the crowd.
Parmet began the panel with two questions: How can marketers promote products without being totally skeevy and overbearing? And how do you build a community around what you’re doing with your company and product?
Deborah Schultz, Founder and Chief Catalyst of deborahschultz.com, began by grounding the conversation in customer relationships. According to her, marketers have to understand their audience, and no amount of schwag will fix that. Rather than thinking that marketing 2.0 is some sort of button that marketers can push to create buzz for their product, the great opportunity presented by Web 2.0 is that it makes it possible to constantly hear back from customers. According to Schultz, most companies only listen to customers who complain; instead, businesses should seek out users who enjoy their product and solicit their feedback.
Chris Heuer of The Conversation Group echoed this sentiment. According to him, websites don’t make communities, interpersonal connections do. The great thing about social media is that it changes how we relate to each other as humans. For this reason it can help change the customer’s reaction to marketers from “stop trying to sell me” to “show me something to buy.” MacLeod gave an example of his marketing for a wine company. His goal was to create conversations around the wine. He sent out free bottles to bloggers, making the wine a social object that users can form groups around. According to him, companies build social objects by creating social gestures around those objects, which is what he tried to do with the wine.
All of the panelists were excited about the idea that marketers need to connect with individuals. According to Schultz, marketers need to get out of their ivory towers where they push stuff at people and find people who love your product. This sentiment was echoed by Tara Hunt, the Co-Founder of Citizen Agency, who claimed that she built her brands by giving away her knowledge and expertise, and that giving away, for her, always led to her getting something back from others: from new clients, from customers, etc.
