Self Replciating Awesomeness notes.
How to market without being scheming bastard?
How do you build a community?
Making a place where you want to be.
Companies saying “build me a community” is wrong. Can build a Ning site in 5 mins but can’t create a community like that.
Changes customer to company relationship, including competition, local communities, suppliers, future employees.
Stop trying to sell me, start trying to help me buy.
Company created virtual embassy – let passionate people into privileged community site. Then sat back and let the advocates do the work.
“Marketing is price paid for creating mediocre products.”
Tara Hunt: Gave away expertise, get attention, got headhunted. “This giving away stuff seems to really work”. Barcamp, co-working. More gave away, more she got back in business.
Social Capital. Value of relationships and reputation.
Wuffie – future of capital. Cory’s Down and Out book. “Everything is free” Karma.
Best way to build your own wuffie is to help others build theirs.
How much can you give away without going broke.
Need way to monetise this stuff. Some kind of corporate investment in ideas?
Web 2.0 tools democratizing stuff. Giving tools away creates capital. Wordpress?
Hugh – sent out few dozen bottles of Stormhook (?) wine. Supplying wine for geek dinners with few conditions as possible (photos for Flickr). 2,000 – 250,000 cases in one year. Rippling effect through Karma. Community of cool people who would still be cool without the wine.
Geeks socialise around objects. Started making social gestures which beget social objects, which beget social markers. Phone examples: iPhone, N95, not somecrappy Samsung
Community meaningless word. Companies think of communities as lever they can pull. They are not your community. You don’t own them.
Free scares companies.
New skill set. Art more than a science right now.
Advice from Schultz: Get out of the ivory tower of pushing stuff at people. “network weaving” – Cool stuff happens where communities overlap. Listen to people who love you, not the complainers. Don’t put names on it like “viral”. Don’t teach new behaviours. If you’re small you shouldn’t need a FAQ.
Give out 90%, sell 10%, as can only work on 10%.
Doc Searls: The Because Effect.
Key question: “Will it Blend”
Don’t say “Here’s why you should buy the wine”
Shift to social gesture. What it represents.
Book: Blue Ocean Strategies recommended by Hunt.
Find brand advocates easily as they’re already talking about it online. Start with them.
Hugh: No new Kula (?) Exchanging seashells. Shells aren’t important, conversation is. Human beings need other people, groom each other. Right now iPhone, 80s Atari, 300 years ago knitting circle. Tech only interesting in how it affects human interaction but it’s always been like this.
Schultz: Allow you to be out there amongst your people. Don’t do the big stuff “superbowl, flowers for mothers day” – be more granular. Much bigger thing than marketing.
How to deal with really big stuff. Audi are giving away services related to their cars.
Russle Davis gets a namecheck. Not big ideas, lots of little small ideas. Apple not just about big computer, it’s about earplugs, tables, etc. Little things. Help customers learn and communicate with each other. Facilitate interpersonal communications.
Brands with best storytellers win.
You don’t go viral, product goes viral. No such thing as viral marketing.
Nuance of free. Sometimes you shouldn’t give product away. Give away experience of product.
Nuanced! That’s the word.
Embrace the chaos.
Don’t get list in the shiny. Nothing replaces listening.
Not just giving a message, giving something more than that.
(The is related to my “why should I” thing?)
Hugh: You plant some apple seeds and two weeks later client says “where are my fucking apples?”
Not campaigns, it’s programs. Take a long time to cultivate. Get qualitative results.
Marketing has become associated with sales rather than original purpose of communciations.
“Customer Advoate” rather than marketer.
It’s about DNA of company and product.
One question: What’s your intention?
Hugh: “A story without love is not worth telling”
And we’re done! Tidy up to follow.
Am following all this with great interest on a number of counts. One is that B’ham is a lot more joined-up than we think it is. A collection of villages, with interlinking dynamics, like a massive Venn diagram.
The other thing that immediately comes to mind is the work done in community business development that used to be called capacity building. It’s gone out of fashion now, but we used to think that enabling key people in say, disadvantaged geographical areas like Newtown or Castle Vale, providing them with resources etc and training and stuff would pull the whole economic development effort together. And even if it didn’t do quite that, it would provide a pool of voices on the ground who could then speak for themselves, and in some way, for their wider sphere.
I am seeing that same idealistic feel through some of the language here, although I guess what is also going on is some reactions to traditional aggressive advertising or marketing and references to more cause-related marketing and csr type stuff. It’s all really quite inspiring.