Business Insight Zone

Front to back: Hugh MacLeod, Tara Hunt, Chris Heuer, Deb Schultz.
(Jeremiah Owyang is obscured behind Hunt.)

One of my favorite panels at this year’s SXSW festival was “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing,” which was chaired by my pal David Parmet, who does social-media-savvy p.r. work from the New York City area. (He also took the picture above.)

The panel featured three social-media pros whose work I read regularly — Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, Jeremiah Owyang — as well as two who were new to me — Chris Heuer and Deb Schultz. Whether before or since the panel, I’ve gotten to talk with all of these people at least a little bit; they’re good folks who know what they’re talking about when they talk about social media, social networking, and online community. My notes for this panel are long and a little freeform, which is probably appropriate since the panel itself was free-flowing like a good group conversation.

The first question that Parmet threw out to the panel was this: How do you market into a community without coming across as totally skeevy? Someone made that point that, most of the time when we say “marketing,” we actually mean bad marketing — the kind we don’t like having aimed at us. You don’t mind the good kind of marketing.

It’s Not about the Technology

Deb Schultz made the great point — which I think can’t be stressed enough — that marketing, even in its newer, social-media-enabled forms, is not about tools or technology, but about the way you look at your customers. She said that this regard for customers has to be in your DNA, such that you face the hard work of getting out in the trenches and embracing the feedback your customers give you to drive your marketing, customer service, and product development.

Chris Heuer said that he hates the idea that companies (including, occasionally, his own clients) would say, “Build me a community tomorrow!” He thinks that we need an attitudinal shift, to shift people’s mindset from “Stop trying to sell me!” to “How can you help me buy?” Like Schultz, Heuer also commented on the technology angle: he said that social media isn’t new just because it’s a new tech platform, but because it changes the ways that companies relate to customers, suppliers, employees, and local physical communities.

Turn Your Best Customers into Your Advocates

Jeremiah Owyang chimed in about what he’s found out by interviewing companies, especially the different ways that they harness the energy of their best customers. The savvy companies let these advocates do much of their marketing for them.

Tara Hunt opened by quoting Andy Sernowitz: “Marketing is the price you pay for creating mediocre products.” She said that in her own experience, the more she gave away her thoughts and expertise on her blog and so on, the more attention she got — to the point she was eventually headhunted. Years later, she still finds that the more she gives away, the more she gets back. She tied this to her view of social capital, which is the value embodied in your relationships and reputation. The best way to build your own social capital is to build others’; the challenge is to figure out how much you can give away without going broke.

Balancing Community and Commerce

Parmet picked up on this to say that you need a patronage model or some other way to monetize this stuff. (Parmet used to work in the agency side of public relations, but now he runs his own one-man shop.) David also pointed out that Tara is a good person, which helps when you’re doing this kind of work or advocating these kinds of principles. His broader point was that you have to have a genuine spirit that underlies what you’re giving away, and you have to have some sort of financial model that allows you to keep food on the table.

(Two notes: 1. I got to share a meal with Tara a few months ago when she was in town, and we’ve corresponded a bit since then. She — like everyone else I know from this panel — genuinely lives the sort of share-and-share-alike principles they preach. 2. What David says applies to the panelists, all of whom work as consultants or analysts in social media, but I think it also applies to corporate marketers trying to make social media work for their companies: you have to be genuine about social media or it won’t work, but you also have to have some way of showing the company that its investment in social media is working in the company’s favor.)

The Stormhoek Wine Experiment

Hugh MacLeod talked about his own experience promoting the Stormhoek winery of South Africa. He had the idea of giving away bottles of wine to bloggers, and then later started organizing “geek dinners” that featured Stormhoek wines. The point wasn’t that Stormhoek had some “natural” connection to bloggers per se. Rather, Hugh’s embrace of the blogosphere — and not least his nifty cartoons and labels for Stormhoek — gave the wine a point of entry among geeks as what Hugh calls a “social object,” i.e. the sort of thing that social networks and relationships can orbit. The result for Stormhoek, growing out of the “karma” that Hugh helped it to cultivate, was huge growth in sales.

One of Hugh MacLeod’s labels for Stormhoek wines.

MacLeod added that “community” is a worthless word when it’s talked about as a lever to pull for gross marketing purposes. What you’re really talking about, instead, is a bunch of lovely human beings who happen to be using your products. And they’re not your community — you don’t own them. You’re just participating along with them.

Giving It Away for Free

Parmet then raised the point that giving things away for free — as MacLeod did with the wine for the geek dinners — scares a lot of companies. Schultz’s reaction was to talk about the ways that companies can interact in this world whether or not they give away free products. At this point, she said, doing this sort of social marketing is more or an art than a science.

Her advice: “Get out of the ivory tower.” Don’t stay in your company bastion and push stuff out at people. Instead, get out and start “œweaving”: go to conferences and find out what people need, what they’re doing, who loves you and who doesn’t. Get authentic. Above everything else, talk to your customers all the time.

Owyang said that the amount of knowledge he shares for free on his blog makes some of his Forrester colleagues very nervous. MacLeod pointed out that analyst James Governor gives away 90% of his ideas, because Governor believes we can only execute on 10% of our ideas anyway. So he charges for that 10%, and gives away the other 90% — essentially as an exercise in marketing.

A Paradigm Shift toward Human Interactions

The panelists had a lot to say about how this “new” marketing is really about warmer relationships — real people-to-people interactions that get away from traditional marketing messages. A sampler:

• MacLeod: the paradigm shift is away from “messages” and toward “social gestures” — which can’t be faked.
• Hunt: A lot of traditional marketing plans intend to cast a wide, generic message. But Hugh’s work with Stormhoek (like a lot of other successful new-marketing efforts) took a different tack by providing a message into a particular “tribe.”
• Heuer: It’s not the message, or the brand logo, but what it represents to people. We often miss these human connections, ergo we miss the opportunities to be human with our users (and thereby legitimately humanize our companies).
• MacLeod: Human beings are primates: we need other people. “Technology is only interesting in how it affects and changes human interaction.” Human beings socialize around objects (ergo his focus on “social objects” like Stormhoek).
• Schultz: “Transactions are the byproducts of good relationships.” When you’re in a relationship with another person, sometimes you give things away for free. It doesn’t work to ignore them most of the time and then woo them with a Superbowl ad or flowers on Valentine’s Day.

Robust Q&A

To the panel’s great credit, they stopped spieling and started taking audience questions at the halfway point of the hour-long session. They had lots of takers.

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Q: How do you “give it away” when your product is something big and expensive?

Answers centered around how you can give away things around your product.

• Heuer: Audi’s not giving away A8’s, but it is giving away many services through its dealerships.
• Hunt: One of the most welcome things you can give away is amazing customer service around a big-dollar product.
• Schultz: If you’re big, you have to break it down smaller. E.g., host a party for your customers somewhere.
• MacLeod: Create cheap social objects that somehow relate to your other offerings.
• Heuer: Give away education and knowledge. Ask yourself, “How can we help customers interact with each other and share knowledge?”
• Owyang worked as a community manager when he was at Hitachi. He got into some hot water when he created a data-storage wiki, especially when the wiki ended up giving away price lists and other things that the Hitachi hierarchy was sensitive about. But the wiki was a huge hit with Hitachi’s customers.

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Q: How would you promote a human-rights-oriented documentary?

• MacLeod: Put half the movie on YouTube. If it’s good, people will want to buy the other half.
• Heuer then made the general point that “The brands with the best storytellers win.” So if you’re selling a good story (or a great storyteller) to begin with, then you should already have a leg up.

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Q: What’s the rebuttal to Marketing 1.0-type thinking — i.e. an insistence on older methods?

• Parmet: “You can’t ‘go’ viral.” The product has to go viral. In most of marketing, we go through intermediaries — but not when we’re doing social-media-enabled or online-community-oriented marketing. You go directly to the customers themselves and put your wares in their hands.

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Q: If you could distill this topic into a sound-bite, what would it be?

• MacLeod: “Social objects are the future of marketing.”
• Hunt listed the five steps of building social capital.
• Owyang: “Let go. Gain more.”
• Heuer: “Passion for people. Put passion in the product.”
• Schultz: “Technology changes, people don’t.”
• Parmet: “People are people.”

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Q: A PETA worker asked what her organization can do to interact with people without annoying them.

• Heuer: What you’re giving people a connection to a higher purpose. Focus on that, and you won’t annoy them.

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Q: The questioner said “This is more of a personal question,” which got a laugh. If marketing is the price to pay for making bad products, why are the panelists doing what they do — because they believe in it, because it’s a fad, or what?

• Parmet: When his young son figured out what he does for a living, the boy said, “You lie for a living.” Parmet’s response: “Yeah, that lie is gonna put you through Yale, buddy.” (Big laugh from the crowd.)
• Owyang: Marketing isn’t about hiding things.
• Heuer: Marketing has become overaligned with sales, instead of with its original purpose of hooking people up with products they want.
• Schultz: “For me, it’s a personal mission.”
• Hugh MacLeod got the last word of the session when he said . . .

Related: Hugh MacLeod explains how “Social Gestures Beget Social Objects” in a video interview with Shel Israel.

Category: Marketing & Sales, SXSW, Social media