Think Big: Marketing as Social Experience.

5 Oct
2009

This past week, I had the chance to speak at the University of Texas, McComb’s School of Business “Marketing Fellows” Customer Strategy program.   About what?  … social media of course.  It seems you can’t have a marketing, business or media conversation without social being front and center.

And while I’m very much a participant and believer in social technologies and how they have impacted the business I work within.. I also approach it with a healthy degree of skepticism.  Our own human tendency (and even more so with the marketing, advertising and tech crowd) is to seek a holy grail, chase the bright shiny object, and drink the Kool-Aid that drive’s the hype cycle.  Social Media/Social Business is clearly that latest hype-center for all of our conversations.  But it’s important.. question is how?

My hope was to bring a different point of view to the group, help them peek into the future and channel a bit of Henry Jenkins, Jane McGonigal, Marta Kagan, Russell Davies, Mark Earls and others as they think through social as the context to how they approach marketing.

The conversation revolved around a few simple thoughts:

  1. This is not about technology, this is about people. Insight first, platform and content will follow.
  2. “Media” (online property/platform) isn’t  the solution.  Building a social experience is.
  3. Social experience require multiple mediums, venues and applications to make connections with people.
  4. Ultimately, social media doesn’t matter.  People do.  Technology has broken barriers that require “marketing” to be a social experience, something people have always craved in one form or another.  Creating stories and personal connection that engage people with a brand are ultimately where all this is headed – with a focus on experience design.
  5. If you are going to be able to make any of this work.. you need a social currency.

The slideware for what was a fun, spirited and open conversation with a really smart group of future marketing leaders follows.  Visual inspiration from Nike, HBO, Come Out & Play Festival as an addendum.

Think Big: A New Social Point Of View for Marketing.

View more documents from Andy Hunter.

Thanks to Wayne Hoyer and colleague Maury Giles for the opportunity, and to all the Marketing Fellows students for their participation, conversation and thinking during the session.

2 Responses to Think Big: Marketing as Social Experience.

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Sam Ford

October 5th, 2009 at 10:32 pm

I’m in total agreement, Andy. I think we’re singing from the same hymn book here. I had someone say to me recently that they didn’t know how to talk to Millennials because today’s youth are nothing like marketers in their 40s and 50s…Why? Because they use social media. I told them something they might find surprising: These “young’ns” are humans, too, and humans haven’t actually changed all that much in the past couple of generations. Henry has written in the past about how uncomfortable he is with the supposed divide between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” and I agree. If we see social media as completely disconnected from what came before, it is a disservice to the marketing profession, to academics, and to online communities.

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Dave Evans

October 5th, 2009 at 10:50 pm

Right on, Andy.

A couple of keys that you’ve brought out here:
1) Social media doesn’t matter: people do.
2) Media isn’t the solution: the experience is.

Simply, what this all comes down to — when you clear way the fixation over technology and terminology — is that consumers are actually past being “fed up” with pushed messages. They aren’t even listening anymore!

Instead, they are participating with each other to share and learn based on *experience.* They welcome those marketers who choose to engage on these common ground, and skip (literally!) the rest. This is just an evolution of basic business, driven by a technology that has (finally, just now) connected people on a massive, nearly friction-free information platform (meaning, you can participate from your mobile phone, which has huge global implications as the voice web emerges, and “My Mom can (finally) do this.”

Forget the hype, forget the shiny stuff: If you run a business, connect marketing, operations, HR, …with your customers. Directly. Engage them collaboratively and build/operate in the way that makes them happy.

Far from new, that’s pretty old. What’s “new” is that businesses will actually have to operate this way now, and will see the direct benefits ($) of doing so.

Yah, right on, Andy, as always. ;-)

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