The New Marketing Channels

Read the previous Entries:

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

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So the market has changed, there is no denying that fact any longer. Now the question is how do we adapt and break in to this new marketplace? Since the traditional avenues of direct marketing, commercials, advertising etc. are drying up, we need to find the openings that have been created instead.

These new openings revolve around word of mouth, this is the new hard currency of marketing and the reason so many traditional dinosaur marketers have problems adapting. Word of mouth is hard to measure, largely uncontrollable, and almost impossible to buy without running the risk of being exposed as a "cheater." Hence, it is every traditional marketers and CEO’s nightmare. What can’t be exactly measured, reported and controlled with a spreadsheet tends to be ignored. This is fine; those who adapt will just have more business when the rest keel over.

Advertising Is Dead, Long Live Advertising

The basic rules of advertising have not really changed. AIDAS (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, Satisfaction,) still holds true. The major change that social media has added, is Confirmation . Instead of having a single place in the chain, confirmation is now the center of the customer’s decision making process. Although the confirmation part is integral, it can be skipped. It can also occur between each step of the chain, multiple times if necessary. This is why the hard sell doesn’t work anymore either. The customer is demanding the right to abort any decision process to return to the confirmation part. More often than not, a hard sell approach will trigger this apprehension and drive the customer to verify with their network.

To avoid hype, people are looking to their networks to find someone who knows and is willing to talk. These experts can be anyone with the forum and will to voice their opinion. These networks are multilayered, a friend might not know the answer, but knows a blog that discusses the topic. This is considered more reliable than the corporate website.

The initial reach and market penetration is not happening through traditional mass advertising, but through targeted lifestyle and spokesperson advertising. In order to reach the new target audience, the powerful marketers of tomorrow will be on an increasing level people with some notoriety in a specific field. Being famous is no longer enough to create interest - context is.

The use of celebrities has become synonymous with major brand advertising, and as such, it carries little or no reference trustworthiness. Whereas smaller artists, athletes, bloggers, and other micro-celebrities are beginning to carry more weight because they are often seen as independent and with a higher degree of integrity and honesty.

What is important to notice is that the impact value of celebrities is diminishing, whereas the group specific role-model is increasing. Group specific in this case means anyone can represent you, as long as they are contextual. You can notice this in that celebrity endorsements have declined compared to just a couple of years ago.

No One Cares What Tiger Woods Drinks

The consumer is looking for contextual endorsements; a golf club is a great promotion for Tiger, IF he plays it himself. Or he can explain why this is a great club for an amateur and use his expertise to project believability. But he can’t sell Pepsi or any other drink very well anymore. Especially if he isn’t seen drinking it on the course. We see it more and more, celebrity advertising for non contextual products is dropping fast.

Also noteworthy here is that the reason for the non-celebrity advertising being more prevalent is not the ineffectiveness of the celebrity as such, but the ineffectiveness of TV advertising as a whole. There is simply a need to cut the production cost of TV and print campaigns to balance the reduced conversion rates that they are seeing.

This is where the micro-celebrity comes in. People are looking to the smaller more focused person, one that by default places a lot on the line with his or her word. These are the real marketers of the future.

A blogger promoting a product can have a higher impact value than a Tiger Woods promotion. Unless it is something that Mr. Woods uses on the course and thereby places his own reputation and success on the line with. Since very few people believe that Tiger actually drives a Buick, his endorsement of the vehicles they produce has been reduced, we have seen most car manufacturers move away from the celebrity endorsement to market to what the customer needs are, which currently is price and mileage. Mr. Woods’ contract with Buick expires in ‘09; I for one would be surprised if it was extended past that point.

Blessed are the Geeks

Traditionally, a marketing campaign would find their target market, and then find the middle segment -the large part of the curve - that consisted of normal users. Early adapters and latecomers were ignored as this market was the small portion of the fringe. And it was thought that early adopters would simply respond faster to traditional advertising.

As I discussed in Part 1, the middle of the road are no longer interested in hearing about your product. They have become exceptionally good at ignoring marketing messages. To get traction now, you need the people with the highest propensity to look for, and be excited by, new items.

All of a sudden, we have arrived at the evolution. Now, previously ignored market segments of earliest adopters, The Geeks , are ruling the earth. By reaching them, catering to their specific needs and wants, - which in most cases is extensive and factual information - you will create the necessary buzz around your product or service. And only through them will you be able to properly penetrate the social media networks to get enough spread. These geeks are key players in certain areas, and often have large followings of people who listen to what they say.

The early adopter is a decision maker based on two primary criteria. They want remarkable products, and they need plenty of information. In order to reach them, this information has to be available for them to become excited. What is important to recognize is that the early adopter will sell a new product before they have seen it. Your advertising can’t just sell on spin anymore; it has to sell on fact. Your word of mouth reach through these networks is the spin.

Watch Out For the Fake Geek

Although the Geeks have already passed along the social media craze well into the mid range of "normal targetable consumers." They are also the ones that pioneer the new social media sites. When a social media site becomes packed with dinosaur marketers spamming everybody, the geeks leave. When they do leave they take with them much of the credibility of that particular channel to the next evolution in social media,

To the dinosaur marketer, the obvious solution is to create a "fake geek." jumping on new forums to spread your message, but this doesn’t work well either. The "real geeks" will search and destroy any such effort, only when the onslaught is too big will they give up protecting their realm and move on to the next one. You can never maintain spam and early adopters in the same network for long. You can stay there and spam with once the early adopters have left, but your conversion rates will drop instantly when this is the norm.

A Shilling Backlash

The "shill" - a person that is paid to act like an unaffiliated customer endorsing a product, is perhaps the worst idea possible to work within this realm. It is considered one of the worst types of dishonest spam, and people are becoming VERY good at spotting this. As soon as a shill is suspected, the community will immediately paint the company out to be dishonest and underhanded. A real, honest endorsement from a customer is gold, to get caught manufacturing these is equal to suicide in most cases.

When approaching the marketplace as it looks today, honesty and disclosure have become watchwords. The customer is too smart to accept anything less than ethical marketing. They will force ethics by actively de-railing and exposing any attempts they spot to circumvent the rules of the new social networks. In the new marketplace you need to be both remarkable, and forthcoming, or you will fail on reaching the target audience.

Going Viral - Not What it Looks Like

The magic word today is Viral. The holy grail of social marketing is to find that one pearl that will spread itself like wildfire. And many companies are making a decent profit on promising viral marketing. This is an area to watch, and watch carefully. In many ways, it does not convert like you would expect. If used to spread a message that isn’t true, or leaves the customer feeling cheated, you will hear about it.

Viral marketing requires that the advertising itself is noteworthy, not the product. This creates a disconnect between what advertising is accomplishing, and what marketing should be doing. Viral marketing is so powerful that it can be intoxicating in itself. But the effect of a great viral campaign to promote a so-so product is disappointing in many ways. You’ll get noticed, which can be great for the ego, but if you’re not living up to the expectations. It won’t be good for business.

You could theoretically create something like "Poo-Perfume - He’ll never forget your scent ", and through a funny video ad blast the viral campaign wide open. You have the two parts of a successful viral campaign, the outlandish product and a funny advertisement that would be noteworthy by itself. But apart from gag stores, no one would buy your particular scent. These viral campaigns are excellent for brand building and to keep your name in front of a potential customer. However, the product has to deliver quality that matches the hype, or you are selling Poo-Perfume to everyone that thinks they bought Chanel.

The viral campaign is great for Branding, and to keep an already recognized name in front of customers. It may however not provide many sales. In order for the viral campaign to function, it has to provide an interest that can be converted into action, and that can only be done if the rest of the solutions are in place. Many of the viral campaigns you see out there miss this goal by a mile. The ad is watched millions and millions of times on YouTube, but conversion are average at best.

Since the viral spread is so powerful, if your product or service fails to meet expectations when the customers flock to find you, your negative effect can kill you as quickly as the viral boosted you to begin with. Remember that the social networks are as powerful in bringing bad products down as they are blasting a great idea into orbit.

It’s Your Call - Evolve, Or Perish

You can and must prepare to handle the new expectations of the marketplace. Social media has changed the behavior of your customer. The technical evolution of cell phones with IM, Email, Twitter and everything else connected into one persons pocket has left zero room for error. Every customer has to be treated like The editor of the New York Times, because quite frankly, their reach can be just as big.

Passing On a Sale Is Long Term Profit

Your name, brand, and business are on the line every time you try. Since you don’t know how many readers follow this particular customer. Your only bet is to apply good old fashioned business sense. It’s better to talk a customer out of a sale that isn’t what they want than to have him or her talk 400 people out of making a purchase later.

Quality Is Your Only Hope

Without it you will be left without remedy when someone is displeased. Your best bet is to fix a problem as they occur. If your business model is based on sub standard products, you can’t do this. The amount of complaints will take the profit right out of any venture. And the lack of remedy will be noticed, discussed and taken apart in public forums that you have no real control over. If you lack a direct relationship between your promise, and your delivery you won’t last long.

You can’t adopt old techniques to new media.

The key trait of any dinosaur is to attempt to fit old into new. Remember that the new media networks were created so that traditional marketing can be avoided. The only way to get old style messages into new media is to change the delivery method, which means you are trying to mass advertise without admitting that you are. We know by now that bring sneaky, underhanded, or dishonest is not the way to build relationships.

With Their Permission

Your customer is not willing to be accosted by marketing and hard sales anymore. Ask permission, don’t do it in a clandestine way either. Tell them what you want, and accept that the ones that are interested enough to give you permission to contact them are your best targeted audience to begin with. Anything less than a customer’s express permission is spam. Just because it is legal does not make it welcome.

When They Want It

Google is the key to many businesses success, being on page one there means that anyone that finds you. Should have been looking for what you have. This is why it’s a bad idea for you to have non-contextual search words on your webpage. It brings visitors that are looking for something else. Since they aren’t interested in what you have to tell them, you are wasting their time. Not a good place to start a relationship.

Customers Relations Spread

Your relationships with your customers will spread - Negative and positive experiences alike. Focus on the customer experience, and forget about the short term profit margin. You don’t like to be nickel and dimed, neither does your customer. The difference between the dinosaur age and today, is that your customer through social media and technology has a way of sharing this experience with everyone they know before they have reached their car.

The Market Is Not Yours to Take - But It Is Yours To Lose

You can’t blast your message out there until you reach enough people. There aren’t enough people interested to make it worth your effort. You can’t buy, get, or cheat your way successfully for long in the modern market. The customer is in control, and you are along for the ride.

They will not trust what you say, what your advertisements say, or what celebrities on TV say about you. They trust their networks, and their own experience. When you have their trust, you become part of that network, and they sell you to the rest of the world. Break that trust, and you just fired your best salesman.

Dinosaurs May Be a Dying Breed, But a Live One Can Still Kill You

Pay close attention to any idea that carries the traits of a Dinosaur Marketer. Anytime it sounds like they are about to break the cardinal rules of maintaining a good customer relationship as I’ve expressed here, they are liable to bring you into extinction with them.

You can’t really blame them; this evolution has shook up much of what was true in the past. Change is painful, hard and for some almost impossible when their entire world is built around providing a service that is no longer cost effective. Just be prepared to protect yourself and your company, because a dinosaur marketer isn’t willing or capable of doing it for you.

Parts One and Two Are still available, Please remember to Subscribe to get the last part.

Your New Marketing Approach - Claiming to Care is not Enough

Customer Centricity has been a catch-phrase for a while now. Many businesses still fail to understand what this is really about. It is not the practice of kissing your customers derriere, nor is it about gathering metric data to ensure that you know the size and color underwear they prefer. To be customer centric means you are in the business of being a real solution to their problems. A real solution that exists at their leisure, the price they want, and most importantly, that meets or exceeds their expectations. It is imperative, because customer centricity is the only real approach that ensures positive feedback. Positive feedback is the name of the game for your future success.

Your customer is re-learning the habit of asking people for opinions before making a decision. This is becoming the norm for most transactions. Your current customers will be talking to your future customers. You can no longer make overstated promises. Your customer is too smart, and has the benefit of learning from your past customers.

Referrals and positive word of mouth are the two major drivers of business in the new marketplace. Either can only be achieved by positive customer experiences. The end result of the social media revolution is that the marketing of today and the future will focus on completely different areas than it has been in the past. Advertising and catchy sales pitches are already taking a distant second place to the power of customer recommendations.

Marketing Today - One Step at a Time

As discussed in part one and two. The customer wants to be in control of the information they are exposed to. This creates a set of problems for reaching out with new products or ideas. In the past, advertising was the key issue here. You would blast advertising until you got a market penetration and then streamline it for effectiveness. Today, since you are not welcome to do this, you are looking at a slightly slower start phase; the return is that the products that are successful will see rapid growth as they reach critical mass on the word of mouth level. To get there, you have to relinquish some of the control to the customer; they will decide when your input is welcome.

Stages of Marketing

In order to cater to the new buyer behavior, you have to build your marketing on several levels. It is not enough to market to drive a sale. Marketing now occurs in stages, success demands that these stages are created appropriately to meet customer expectation at each level. Catering to their needs for where they are in the decision making process. Each one of these stages has to allow for customer feedback, talking TO the customer is not enough, you have to be prepared to communicate WITH them.

I will skip over the steps of product development, packaging etc. for now, and move to the relationship focus in the information and sale stages. Getting the right product to the market however follows the same principle. Listen to what the customer wants first, and try to solve that problem with your product. Any other way will be less than successful as consumers get smarter. You are rarely welcome to tell them what their problem is, instead they want to inform you about the solution they want first.

Staging marketing for customer relations means being prepared to receive the customer as they become increasingly interested and by growing the relationship on all levels, propel that interest closer toward the sale. The key concept here is that each contact should be receptive, not intrusive. Provide useful information about the product or service. Only at a late stage will the pitch be successful. If you try to drive the hard sell too soon, you will begin to see a lot more lost sales than you have in the past.

There is no set number of stages required; some products and services will require more customer steps to reach a position where they are ready to make a purchase. Propelling the customer too fast may still close a sale, but it will be detrimental to return business. The key is to allow the customer to progress through the information, and interest phase much at their own pace. If you are prepared to care for the customer needs and wants at each of the steps in their decision making process. Your bottom line will show the results.

The customer will not follow the old chain of decision making. Since additional information, customer reviews, and opinions are so easily acquired; many chose to step away from a decision until they have sought advice. This means that a sale can be aborted at a late stage, but reassume when they have found answers to their questions and concerns. Each time the customer feels that they are missing information; the new buyer behavior is to back away and look for that information. You will see this happen less if your advertising and sales approach is one of full disclosure. The more you disclose up front, the less the customer will seek information elsewhere.

Accepting this new behavior is important. The normal old-school sales process is to "not let them leave." This may have been a good approach before. But today, it is merely another high pressure tactic, and is not the best way to becoming a preferred provider of solutions. Once the customer has the information they want, the sale will be very quick. Before they get there, pressure tactics will sour the relationship.

Social Media Brand Management

Word of mouth, often in forms of social media, can affect your company and product severely, often faster than you will be able to realize something has happened. Keeping a good birds-eye view of your brand name is important, and should be on every marketing and PR department’s priority list. Good reviews and bad alike should be noted, these are prime sources of customer feedback, and is both a cost effective marketing research tool as well as a marketing opportunity if managed correctly.

There are several schools of thought on how to deal with negative word of mouth. Most of them are bad ideas simply because they forget the initial point of view. This is customer centric relationship management. As with any other customer argument, you stand to lose more the longer you let it continue.

Attack
Thankfully, not the most common approach, but it happens nonetheless, Often done through anonymous accounts and other slightly underhanded approaches. Posting ridiculing, and or scathing remarks about the original poster. Be aware that this will be seen through in most cases, giving you even more bad publicity. And the blogging world is very good at finding out the facts behind these apparently anonymous accounts.

This can also be done with a lawsuit. - Unless this is your only option, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!

You may win the lawsuit, but you have just branded yourself as Goliath, and you’ll have 100 supporters of David making your life a living hell before you know it. Your only hope here is a Pyrrhic victory. In other words, you lose either way.
In most cases, it will have the opposite effect in that it gives your original antagonist more publicity, and you will get a lot less business.

Ignore
Also a bad idea, but not as bad as attacking, ignoring it can make the situation escalate out of control very quickly. Someone took time out to rattle your cage, and if you don’t react, they will rattle it harder. Ignoring might be an option for the occasional blip on the radar. Not every hiccup needs to be addressed; in fact, you really shouldn’t address anything too small. Not everyone will like your product, don’t try to correct every opinion. But keep an eye on it - you may be looking at the tip of an iceberg.

Defend
Go on the defensive; explain why the customer that wrote or said something bad about your company or product is wrong.
Bad idea! The customer has every right to his or her own opinion. And you defending your position tells everyone else that you are uninterested in actually catering to their needs and wants.
People don’t like it when you tell them they are wrong to feel anything. And they will make you pay for it. Antagonize a dissatisfied customer and you will lose business rapidly. Always remember that you are dealing with people who will assume that your interests are opposed to theirs when you enter a public discussion or forum to defend your case.

Discuss and Remedy
Remember the basics here? Customer relation is what it’s all about. The best damage control attempts I’ve seen are the ones taking the approach to fix whatever problem occurred. By doing this, you are accomplishing three things.

1. If the person complaining is not interested in resolving the problem, they will become the bad party very quickly. So the original complainer will lose credibility if they refuse to accept your honest attempts to correct the problem.

2. If your honest intention is to find a resolution, the public forum is actually working for you. You will show everyone that reads that you ARE taking your customer relationships seriously, which is actually good publicity.
3. If the person stating the problem has no real reason to be dissatisfied, airing it out in public will prove this point as well. Your best effort to find the problem will reveal that there isn’t one to begin with.

Bringing it all Together

The marketing evolution has brought customer centricity into the spotlight. You have to approach every aspect of your business with the intention of improving the customer experience. That experience will rely on the simple concepts of honesty, integrity, and respect.

Your business can only survive for an extended period of time if your positives are greater than your negatives. Every time you fail to deliver on your promises, you are creating negative word of mouth. Fail to correct for it in time, and the market will bring a power to bear that no marketing budget in the world can correct for.

Refrain yourself from driving your sale hard, if anything, guide the customer to the point where they feel that they have made an informed decision. If you allow this, they will sell your business and product for you. Pushing and pulling might create a sale, but will have much less chance of getting good references. It will however be the best reason of you being at the receiving end of negative word of mouth.

By all means, use the power of social networks to address problems that are being raised. But do so with the humble approach of accepting the existence of a problem. Never forget that you stand to lose more by trying to protect your position than you do protecting the relationship.

Take care of your customers; the new marketplace will reward you when their references take care of you in return.
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Welcome to the Evolution

In this installment of the series we will find out what a Dinosaur Marketer does, and how to spot them in order to avoid them. I’ll also begin to explain to you what will work today and in the future, as well as what companies need to consider if they wish to be a part of this future. Today we will look largely at the Internet perspective since this is where this revolution began.

Recognizing a Dinosaur Marketer

Anytime a Marketer is telling you that your current message should be used on Social Networking sites etc. You should run the other way. The simple fact is that old-school, Hard-sell, in your face, marketing is not going to impress anyone on a social networking site, and it will brand you and your company as a Spammer very quickly.

In the future, the successful marketing message will be an information road sign. With a strong invitational tone and a weak or non-existent sales message, the key will be to provide them with key information up front, but not to try and force anything down their throats.

The Comfortable Lie

The change away from so much of what we have known about marketing is causing some serious problems for many. Both business owners and a lot of marketers are uncomfortable to accept that what they know, and what has been working for so long is not only losing effectiveness, but could actually be hurting a company.

Many marketers out there are capitalizing on this reluctance, and they are making big money telling businesses exactly what they want to hear. These are the dinosaur marketers that can effectively put your company on the extinction list. They are not selling you the best option, what they are telling you is. "We can take the old ways, and force them into the new media." This is a great sales pitch, because it sells comfortable, easy to understand, old school marketing in new wrapping to those that don’t understand what has really happened to the marketplace. It is also a great way to make you about as popular as a meter-maid. You are about to become a Spammer.

Here are two key trademarks of the Dinosaur Marketer

1. They will propagate using Social Media Profiles to spread your sales message. The worst possible scenario of this are the ones that actually hijack "hack and steal" profiles on places like MySpace in order to use the credibility of the person to send marketing messages to their friends. Should they do this in order to promote your company, you are now liable for the legal ramifications of this.

Most aren’t that bad I have to admit. The norm is to set up a profile and try to add as many people as possible in order to then send them your sales pitch. The more unscrupulous will hire people to do this in large numbers with more or less sophistication, (less is the standard.) Then they show you how much traffic they are generating.

You can forget about the traffic here, it has little or no bearing, because this like any other mass marketing will have a very low conversion rate. What is even more telling is that profiles that do this are marked as spam and deleted. Although the people on this list might be interested in your product, they are not interested in being disturbed and spammed, so they will not look at your information as often as they will mark you as a spammer effectively cutting your access to them.

2. They will try to sell you on email lists, and often claim that these are "targeted".

They do this by data-mining social networking sites, finding people who are interested in your area of business, and then compiling lists for it. They will then tell you to send emails to these addresses.
These approaches are bad ideas because they lack the key ingredient necessary for success in the modern marketplace. Remember that the customer now expects you to ask for their permission before you start bombarding them with sales pitches. An interest in your general area is not the same as giving you permission.
Instead these marketing dinosaurs are trying to use some middle ground of acceptability to justify this approach. Arguing that just because someone lists "gardening" as a hobby, they want every piece of gardening related advertising you can throw at them.

You can’t have my email

People are now protecting their contact information more and more. Even when we do post an email address online today, it is becoming normal to camouflage it in several ways. Instead of Myemail@myisp.com, People will write things like myemail (a) myisp (dot) com in attempts to confuse the automatic software applications (called robots or spiders) that scour the web for the less careful posters. This is only one of the many attempts to protect email addresses from spam.

A lot of people now have a "trash" email with a service like Gmail or Yahoo mail to use as the email openly displayed. This is the equivalent of a large garbage can to collect your information. That most of the trash will collect there. Again, this is a hint to be applied towards your re-evaluation of your direct email marketing. If people don’t want it, why keep doing it.

The Dinosaur Marketer will apply the reasoning "If they don’t protect themselves, its fair game." I’ve heard that said more than once by the old school marketers. Now all I’m asking is that you think about this for a while. Not protecting oneself is not the same as giving everyone the permission to disturb. This kind of reasoning is like saying "if you don’t lock your car, it’s you are giving permission for anyone to use it." If you don’t appreciate spam, what makes you think that your customers will?

What is the market demanding today?

The market demands less noise. It’s really that simple. We are still extremely interested in huge information flows. Interconnecting ourselves to more and more information every day, but the customer makes the choice of what information they want.

This means that there are still plenty of customers out there interested in what you have to say, but they want it when they want it. They are demanding information at their leisure, and either with their express permission or at their direct demand.

Google is a great example of this. We hear all the time that being on the first page of Google for your specific search terms is key to generating business. This is not a testament to Google as much as it is a clear indicator what the new marketing landscape demands. It does however explain that Google has understood this and has become a premier provider of the solution that the customers want.

What I want, When I want it

Context is the key word you need to remember. When a search is made for "business cards" on Google, chances are the searcher is interested in buying business cards. Not getting an oil change or reading about Britney Spears latest adventures. This is the difference between the modern world and the old mass marketing swamp.

Your customers and potential customers are getting very good at finding what they want. And thanks to all the social sites, they are getting even better at sharing this with their friends. Your business has in other words only a few simple requirements. Make sure that the customer is able to find you when they want to, and when they do, meet their expectations.

Forced Ethics

Unscrupulous marketers have made customers weary of being cheated, tricked and duped. In the past, people might have just walked out of the store. Today, they will write about their experience. Your company will quickly show up on Google’s first page alright, with the additional keyword "scam" attached to it.

Try it now, pick any decent size company, and search for it on a search engine. But add the word Scam ("acme widget design" + scam). The results are pretty telling about this concept. When you manage to make a single customer feel like they have been cheated, you are going to have to live with it. And your company name will be dragging through that swamp for much longer than you might want it to

This creates what I call Forced Ethics; the mere possibility of this happening is changing the marketplace and mostly for the better. Customers now have the direct power to do serious damage to your business based on their experience alone. Negative publicity spreads much faster than positive leaving a large possibility of making a small mistake a very expensive one.

Your only real defense is to do business in an ethical manner. Companies are being forced to live up to all those lofty statements that they made in the past and never cared about. You have to promise what you can keep, and keep what you promise, or your customers will spread the word very quickly. You are no longer collecting the cash and moving on, every single time this happens you are losing prospective customers at an alarming rate.

The Dinosaurs of the business world are trying to fight this with lawsuits, suing bloggers and social network posters that mention negative aspects of their companies. But the only effect is a snowball of bad publicity. You have to remember, that even if the initial statement is false and you can win a libel law-suit over it. The lawsuit itself will now make you look like Goliath, and the original false statement is going to be reported on 100’s of blogs around the internet.

Now the blogs are reporting what is true, you did sue XX over the statement, so you just managed to create a negative publicity campaign for yourself that you can’t sue your way out of.

This effect is the same regardless of whether a customer is disappointed on or off-line, the information about this experience will make its way online and on to hundreds, thousands or potentially even millions of others.

It’s not about Web 2.0, It’s about relationships

Your business has to be based on relationships, your relationship with your customer will make you part of their network of connections. It’s a circle of friends and acquaintances that you have to treat like a social group of any other kind. Trying to force your way in will result in an increased effort to keep you out.
If you can build strong relationships, you will be invited into these circles. That’s where your money will be coming from in the future.

In Part three, we are going to take a hard look at everything you should be doing, how to make social networks both on and off-line work for you, and how to build your business around long term sustainable practices.
Don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss the rest of this series.

This multi-part series will help you understand what is really going on with the marketplace today. How the Social Media Revolution is going to affect the way you do business today, and in the future.
We will address both the pure marketing as well as the management and business development issues that are changing your marketplace and forcing you to choose between evolution and extinction.

This revolution is not just a fad, it won’t go away, and most importantly, it is so momentous that you can’t just adapt your old techniques to fit it. Adaptation now means re-thinking your company from the core. With a weakening economy, those who cling to the old ways today will be the proverbial Dinosaurs tomorrow.

If you are in business today, or plan to be in the future, you should consider Subscribing to make sure you don’t miss any of these posts.

Part 1 - Understanding a Changing world

The technology revolution has since the 90’s sparked discussions on how we are becoming more and more disconnected from each other and how the Internet is depriving us the basic human need of socialization.

Human needs will only be denied for so long. The Social Media Boom is a clear symptom of this. The market has taken the internet to a new level by becoming increasingly interconnected. Before this revolution, a customer could do little more than sue if they were displeased. Today, even the smallest customer can build an avalanche of negative publicity.

Effectively the market has returned to a pre-computer time when "the customer is always right" still ruled. The customer now actively seeks out others to talk and discuss not only your products, but also everything else that your company does. They are using this means of communication to force companies to listen to them. The power of numbers has again made the customer right.

The relative isolation of an angry customer is no longer there. Your customer in Japan can and will communicate their disappointment to your prospect in New York as easily as if they were neighbors. Those that choose the short term solution of not listening to a displeased customer are handing out their own coffin nails.

Let’s take a look at what has already changed, and what changes we expect to see in the future.

Access Denied

The total accessibility of our modern times if often discussed. Technology gives us access to enough information to completely overload our capacity to take it in. When the overload hits, we naturally limit something. And the first thing to go out the window was our tolerance for unsolicited sales efforts.

We can see the movement towards this reduced tolerance in some recent developments.

1. The Do Not Call Registry
Over 70% has signed up for this list of numbers that phone salesmen are legally bound to not call. This should tell anyone that the industry is dead. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the remaining 30% WANT to be called in the middle of dinner, they just haven’t signed up yet.

2. TIVO / DVR
When asked, over 65% of all digital video recorder owners stated "the best thing with this technology is the ability to watch a show after it has been run so they can fast forward through the commercials." Although 35% had another primary reason for liking their DVR, over 99% reported fast forwarding through the commercials on a recorded show.

3. XM-Radio
Again, one of the big selling points here is radio without advertising. "100% Ad-Free" is on almost every XM-Radio sales poster you see around.

4. Direct Mail
Most apartment and condominium complexes have a trash can right next to the mailboxes for people to "sort" their mail before even bringing it in.
Next time you are in an office supply store, look at the shredders. One of the major selling points for these machines is that you have to shred your direct mail to avoid identity theft. Direct Mail is not only a nuisance anymore; it has become a threat.

The message is clear. The unsolicited sales effort is not only ineffective. It is now considered invasive, unwanted and interruptive. This means that the companies that continue their old forced efforts will be considered invasive, unwanted and interruptive as well. Not exactly the most desirable buzzwords for any company.

The marketplace has sent a very clear message, and you better pay attention.
"You don’t have access without my permission."

The Social Marketing Asteroid

So the customers got very good at screening out the unwanted sales pitches. This left a little room in their otherwise busy day for other types of information. Enter the Social Media networks.
Not only did they allow for a lot of activities that people simply thought were fun, it was soon discovered that it also gave access to information that previously wasn’t easily accessible. No matter how obscure the topic, someone knew something about it. Word of mouth marketing started in these networks simply because someone liked a band, a new product, or made some other discovery. This was not selling; this was honest stories from other consumers.

Now people were talking, and sharing information. Small companies, with niche products who had lived on tight marketing budgets were all of a sudden being talked about. Word of mouth rocketed some of these small companies out into the stratosphere before even they had time to react.

Then the Asteroid hit.

The information sharing online all of a sudden reached critical mass, and it became the norm for getting information about products and businesses. The customers now got the information they wanted, when they wanted it, and they got it from non-affiliated sources. We choose to listen to relative strangers before we take the word of the company that sells it.

All of a sudden, the high volume carpet bombing of customers lost most if not all effect. This was the real beginning of the end for the Dinosaur Marketer.

Just like any other well established institution, traditional marketing is fighting back, clawing at everything to retain a grip in a quickly changing world. These are the ones spreading mass emails through social networks, and using fairly innovative ways to fit their square peg into the round hole.

Here is the problem.

We know Social Networks became popular as a way to get information without being bombarded with sales pitches. The idea that we should try to fit mass marketing into this forum is nothing more than a foot in the door. It is the last desperate attempt of the ones destined for extinction because they are unable to adapt. Those who propagate this are the Dinosaurs of Marketing, and the market will exercise its power to push them into the history books soon enough.

For any company that wishes to survive, it is imperative to recognize this type of marketing effort. It may appear cheap but really is expensive, simply because it doesn’t work very well. More importantly it halts your company from beginning the necessary evolution to survive.

Stay tuned for Part Two where we will discuss how to recognize a Dinosaur Marketer, how to effectively begin evolving, and I will explain why this is going to change all marketing, not just the online world.