The Wall Street Journal (11/29) ran a piece of hype about marketing 3.0 by Tom Hayes and Michael Malone. The two claim that the new networked web (My Space, Facebook etc) is a revolutionary marketing tool. In their complete ignorance they throw Youtube into the networking category. The networking component of Youtube is an insignificant part.
Their marketing advice:
(1)
'from loyalty to attention'. Nobody edited these guys. They mean get
attention first then loyalty. Get attention by paying people to read
your boring ads.
(2) 'from crowds to clouds.' They mean turn heavy traffic viewers into producers for your product by having the site visitors offer suggestions, create your ads, help on your designs and research.
(3) 'from memes to bemes.' Bemes are memes that are corporate directed and passed on from potential consumers to their friends.
Our book Marketing Without Advertising, written in 1982 and now in the 6th edition was saying something much more fundamental quite awhile ago. Marketing is and always has been largely social networking.
People make positive recommendations to their friends about products and services when the product or service is well above ordinary standards and will remain that way when the friends try it.
The social netwroking medium can be email, face to face, notes, twitter, a networking site or anything else. People also diss products and services with even greater emotion and frequency when they are poorly treated.
A recommendation only counts when the recommender is trusted in the subject matter of the recommendation (a fan of Miley Cyrus doesn't count for much when making a recommendation on symphony performances). All the rest is about knowing how to deliver top quality and how to let the customer know that they bought top quality.
(Image: WD40 became the single dominant product on the market without ever having ads. It got ads after it was bought by some advertising fools.)
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