Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing panel at SXSW

Here’s a tran­scrip­tion on com­mu­nity build­ing by a panel of top social media con­sul­tants and blog­gers. Since it’s tran­scribed, please excuse the gram­mar and run on sentences.

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

“‘Con­ver­sa­tion’ & ‘com­mu­nity’, yes, yes. Of course. Given. But how, exactly? Do you want peo­ple to find out about and play with your awe­some Web stuff with­out being skeevy about it? Seri­ous about includ­ing your users in the long-term cre­ation and evo­lu­tion of your prod­ucts? Together, we’ll divine the best ways to unmar­ket and cre­ate self-replicating awesomeness.”

How can you uses social media to build communities around your projects?

Deb Schultz: None of this is about tools or technology, it's about understanding your customers and bringing them into the fold.

Chris Heuer: What makes a com­mu­nity are the inter­per­sonal con­nec­tions within it. Social media fun­da­men­tally changes the way we inter­act with each other. It takes a shift to think about par­tic­i­pa­tion in a dif­fer­ent way. We need to change people’s mind­set from sell­ing to peo­ple, to help­ing peo­ple buy. You need to have a gen­uine spirit of want­ing to do good, or peo­ple will notice the “fakeness”.

Jere­miah Owyang: Con­ducts research and most recently inter­viewed 17 com­pa­nies on best prac­tices for com­mu­nity build­ing and management.

Tara Hunt: “Mar­ket­ing is the price you pay for cre­at­ing mediocre prod­ucts.” Tara found that the more she gave away, the more busi­ness she got. The more time she donates to the com­mu­nity, the more oppor­tu­ni­ties open up to her. Read Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic King­dom.” The book talks about if you do good things for the world, you get more “woofys” (ie., Karma).

Hugh MacLeod

Was unem­ployed 5 years ago and started draw­ing car­toons on the back of busi­ness cards and posted them to his web­site. This led to a gig with a small South African win­ery, Stormhoek, which was sell­ing 50,000 cases per year at the time. Hugh then started talk­ing about Stormhoek and send­ing free bot­tles to blog­gers, with­out ask­ing them to blog about it. Hugh then noticed geek din­ners hap­pen­ing and offered to send a case of wine to these events. The only con­di­tion was to ask peo­ple to post pic­tures to Flickr. The result is that in a year and a half, Stormhoek went from 50k cases per year to 250k cases per year! Hugh and Jason [Kor­man, of Stormhoek] noticed that the wine was a social object. In fact, it was becom­ing a social marker, because it took ter­ri­tory and demar­cated the conversation.

Dis­cus­sion

If you are at a small startup and have some con­trol over your mar­ket­ing bud­get, get out of the ivory tower. Get a com­mu­nity man­ager or evan­ge­list and go meet your cus­tomers. Go to con­fer­ences and start “weav­ing”. Don’t put names on things, like “viral marketing”.

Jere­miah men­tions that he makes a lot of peo­ple at his own com­pany ner­vous, because he gives out a lot of his knowl­edge for free.

How­ever, by shar­ing your knowl­edge, peo­ple will under­stand that you have knowl­edge and this becomes your call­ing card.

Tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing is about throw­ing the net out wide and hope you catch as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. What Hugh real­ized is that you can pro­vide good ser­vice to small groups and the word will spread. “Blue Ocean Strate­gies” is a good book about these principles.

Ques­tion and Answer

How to find brand advo­cates? It’s pretty easy to find them by search­ing. You can also use paid ser­vices that will mine the net and find influ­encers.

What is Kula and what is the lat­est one? Kula are shells that peo­ple trade in South Sea islands. Islanders would pad­dle great dis­tances to gift Kula to oth­ers. It’s not about the shell, it’s that peo­ple are wear­ing them and it cre­ates a bond, an oblig­a­tion, a con­ver­sa­tion, an inter­ac­tion. It’s all about peo­ple.

It’s ok to give away the lit­tle things, but what about giv­ing away big stuff? For exam­ple, Audi is giv­ing away dry clean­ing, spa treat­ments and so on. Find related things that peo­ple you inter­act with will value. Also, break things down into smaller seg­ments and go local. Start from the bot­tom up. Rus­sel Davies said big brands don’t have big ideas, they have lots of small ideas. Starbuck’s is about the small things. Apple stores also. When you add lots and lots of lit­tle things done well, these add up. As a com­mu­nity man­ager for Hitachi, that sells prod­ucts worth mil­lions of dol­lars, Jere­miah set up a wiki that became a val­ued space for cus­tomers and rep­re­sented a huge cul­tural shift for the company.

How to mar­ket a film? Start a blog and get peo­ple from the com­mu­nity to start telling their sto­ries. The brands with the best sto­ry­tellers win. Empower peo­ple and help them tell their stories.

What’s the rebut­tal to the 1.0 Mar­ket­ing push­back? There’s no such thing as viral mar­ket­ing. Why not go right to the cus­tomers them­selves, rather than going for yet another ad buy. Some­times you shouldn’t give your prod­ucts away, but it’s those things around it, the social ges­tures you make. For exam­ple, the Honda dealer has wifi, has bagels, has play­ground for kids … so some inde­pen­dent con­sul­tants go there to work! It’s not just about giv­ing away stuff, it’s about cre­at­ing rela­tion­ships with the peo­ple you’re giv­ing stuff to.

What’s the take­away, the sound­bite? Social objects are the future of mar­ket­ing. Build social cap­i­tal and find your higher pur­pose. Pas­sion for peo­ple, put pas­sion into prod­uct. Tech­nol­ogy changes, human behav­ior doesn’t, don’t get lost in the shiny bling, don’t get lost in the ivory tower, noth­ing replaces lis­ten­ing. Peo­ple are people.

What about non­prof­its, what is free is the mes­sage … is pitch­ing the mes­sage annoy­ing or wrong or uneth­i­cal? What you’re giv­ing is a con­nec­tion to a higher pur­pose, a sense of belong­ing. Cul­ti­vate this feel­ing, rather than send­ing a mes­sage to peo­ple. Find how to con­nect with peo­ple. When do you con­nect with peo­ple? Is it just on your own terms. Do you sell tup­per­ware when you invite peo­ple to din­ner? That’s a turn off. If you only talk to them when you need them, you will lose them. It’s more about the qual­ity of the con­nec­tions, one per­son at a time.

What if these tac­tics don’t work? How long does it take? Tra­di­tional execs want imme­di­ate results. They care about levers, not peo­ple. A lot of it has to do with peo­ple not get­ting it. It’s not cam­paigns, it’s pro­grams. Get qual­i­ta­tive results, get the videos of the kids in the play­grounds and tell their stories.

Is this a fad or does it need to be done? Jere­miah believes there is a pur­pose to mar­ket­ing. But mar­ket­ing has become asso­ci­ated with sales, rather than asso­ci­at­ing the prod­uct with the value peo­ple get from them. For Deb­o­rah, it is a per­sonal mis­sion, not a fad. She con­sid­ers her­self a cus­tomer advo­cate, not a mar­keter. She loves bring­ing tools to peo­ple and enabling peo­ple to do cool stuff with it. It’s sig­nif­i­cant that every­body has a voice today. It boils down to, what’s your inten­tion? Peo­ple will notice fakeness.

Wrap-up: A story with­out love is not worth telling.