If we accept the notion that marketing is fundamentally different now due to the advent of social media (see: attention economy, permission, the ridiculous reach of the individual, Remarkable, Raving Fans, and Community Driven Marketing)…
then it would only follow that marketing planning should be fundamentally different as well.
The question, of course, is how?
And how can companies of all sizes adapt?
Or how should they adapt their planning processes (a loaded word in and of itself)?
I’ve had some ideas bouncing around in my head for a while and, in the way that the blog was meant to be used, will share these rough concepts with you in the hope that
- putting them down in a rough form will help me clarify them for myself
- those who read this blog will serve as “anvils” and provide valuable feedback to crystallize the concepts
So, here we go…
To drive breadth awareness of your business—that is, MORE people, (as opposed to deeper relationships, aka Depth), you have to figure out different ways to “get the word out.”
Now that I think about it, perhaps a better phrase and a more apt one is “have the word spread.”
“Getting the word out” implies that it is on your shoulders to tell everyone.
“Having the word spread” implies that others will do the spreading for you.
A small, subtle difference but perhaps an important, semantic shift.
So, we “want the word to spread.”
And, we know, that the way to do that (to create something Viral, as it were) is to be Remarkable.
Old news for longtime readers of this blog.
Now, we also know that Viral is the Effect, NOT the Cause.
Our job as marketers is to create the conditions that will enable the “perfect storm” and thus increase our chances of a given activity “going viral.”
I happen to think Venkatesh is right when he says that it is IMPOSSIBLE to control for ALL of the conditions/variables that lead to the big “Forest Fires” or Black Swan events (great book-The Black Swan
There are certain things you can do to help things along.
A lot of them seem small and potentially significant, but doing a lot of these little things are what act as the accelerant to the contagion.
On a super-tactical level, you can add a TweetMeme, ShareThis, or Send to a Friend button, which makes it easier for people to pass along your information.
On a strategic level, you can cultivate a community of Raving Fans (stage 2 of CDM) so that when the right activity is placed in front of them, they are there to see it, embrace it, and spread it.
What’s difficult to predict, of course, is which marketing “spark” is going to light the right fire which will then set off the viral inferno?
On this point, we agree.
Venkatesh says that the answer “is diversification and dollar cost averaging. Try many things under many sets of conditions. Vary between funny/campy/"wow effect" type messages (very cheaply produced) and keep it regular over time, (your drip irrigation metaphor).”
With the stock market down, I might use another analogy and pull from Chris Anderson’s new book “Free” and call this “thinking like a dandelion.”
Or, perhaps, putting your Roulette chips on as many numbers as possible instead of all on one or two numbers.
Either way, what we are advocating is that the era of “big marketing investments” on 1 or 2 initiatives has passed and that, smaller, more frequent bets on a variety of possibilities may be the way to go.
As Mitch Joel wrote, Maybe It Is Time For Marketing To Move Away From "The Big Idea"
I think it is…
The question (and the subject of the next post is) how do we do that exactly?
That’s what we’ll start to discuss in part 2.
