I am a Marketer

September 13, 2007 · Comments

that guy John Havens hosts a weekly live Internet radio show called New Media Havens, and today’s guest was author Michael Port, a small business marketing expert. I asked Michael a question, but led off by saying that I’m not a marketer. He corrected me and said I most certainly was. (The entire show is archived here, and I think it was pretty good!)

Michael went on to tell me that marketing has a bad rap in lots of circles, and that it’s just the fault of bad marketers. I agree. There are LOTS of bad marketers out there. Right? But this all got me thinking.

I am a marketer, and you are, too. So why shouldn’t we think about it more clearly?

Conversations and Meaning and The Like

First off, I have to tell you: I agree sometimes with Strumpette. I don’t think cumbaya-only Cluetrain-only methods work especially well. I don’t think all corporations are rotten, that all professional marketing entities are evil shills, etc. I think there’s a time and a place for professional marketing campaigns.

If marketing is a conversation, there are lots of ways it can be done.

And Yet

(God bless Elie Wiesel for “and yet,” which I think was in NIGHT) I am quite often traditional marketing averse, except when it comes to food and movie trailers. Show me a Burger King ad and a Batman trailer and I’ll want it. But show me an ad of some person in an office pretending to really enjoy a new server, and it’ll wash right over me. Have experts like Tiger Woods tell me which car to buy and I won’t remember the ad. There’s nothing there.

So how will I (or YOU) market better?

Believe

Remember the poster in Mulder’s office on The X Files? “I Want to Believe.” Well, do it. Believe in what you’re going to talk about. For instance, I sent mail out to people in the media making space about Blog World Expo. I think it’s going to be a cool event, and I wanted people to know about it. And instead of being paid for telling people about it (which was the original deal), I’m being paid a plane ticket to attend and a pass to get it. Disclosure.

Be Transparent

If you’re marketing for some gain, tell people. Just be clear and give disclosure. It’s nothing too tricky to do, and the opposite, hiding this fact, is cruddy and will impact trust. And trust, dear friends, is the absolute glue of the social media and social networks economy. It is a trust economy every bit as much as it’s an attention economy.

Tell Good Stories

If I’m going to bother marketing, it’s just going to be storytelling of some kind or another. If I’m telling you about PodCamp, I’m going to tell you that it’s the most amazing place to meet media makers, and the people who want to participate in the new media space. I’m not going to tell you shiny shiny new new. I’m going to tell you about the people and the passion, and then, wait for it…

Connect with Connectors

I’m going to do one better. I’m going to give you better people to ask than me. I’d rather have Whitney Hoffman or Phil Campbell or Justin Kownacki or anyone who’s built a PodCamp tell you about the experience. I’d rather show you the hundreds and hundreds of blog posts from people who can say what they want without me censoring them, and let THEM tell you about things.

Why should I do all the heavy lifting of being a marketer? I’d rather my friends tell you about what I’m passionate about, because then you don’t have to take just MY word for it.

Encourage Community

One reason why I felt I wasn’t a marketer was that my stereotype for marketers was being “that guy.” You know the one. He tells you about himself all the time, about his product all the time, about how all roads lead to him/his product all the time. EVERYTHING is about the message. Nothing is genuine, and nothing is ever participatory.

It’s all about remembering that we have two ears and one mouth, so we should be listening and participating, not just hammering people over the head with the message all day. In fact, why have a “the message?” Engage in real conversations with people with similar interests and develop the relationships that way.

Deliver Value

One reason we’re pissed off with traditional marketing is that the marketing effort is a bludgeon, and there’s no real value to the payload of the effort. If I’m going to market to you, I’m going to do it by building the brand’s value to you. How? By being helpful, by making you feel like you’re part of it, by empowering you to make of the brand/product/service what you need it to be. Those kinds of value experiences bring everything forward even more.

I’m Completely Clueless

In the art of marketing, traditionally, I have nothing. I sit in meetings occasionally at work (my day job is to build professional conferences, and all events companies live by their marketing), and I have no idea about half of what people are saying. And yet, I think I must get SOME of this, because people keep accusing me of marketing and being a good marketer. (Several also tell me I’m a bad one, so I’ll save you that comment).

Do I need to know more? Sure. But I’m going to learn the way I learn everything: through trying it out, figuring it out, and asking all kinds of friends.

And most of all, I just plan to keep being me. Being genuine seems like the easiest brand to uphold. Being myself. Don’t you think?

Your Turn

Are you a marketer? By trade? Do you see how you’re a marketer, even if that’s not your title? What tips and pointers do you have for me? (Yes, I’ve read every Seth Godin book- I get where he’s coming from). And finally, how does this new social media world turn marketing upside down? Or does it?

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photo credit wiseacre photo, and I *highly* recommend you check out this guy’s work

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  • Small businesses live and die by our marketing abilities. Marketing is reaching your market, having a conversation, meeting people's needs. With this view, online tools are just new tools.

    I've never bought into the negative view of marketing, and so that influences my willingness to throw myself into it.
  • I really liked this entry.

    Yes, those of us with a presence in the online community are marketers of sorts.

    Some of us, it is just ourselves that we market through the social webs. Others, like myself market for a living, plus I do a good bit of marketing for my Podcast and my blog as well.

    I like your advice about transparency. I find businesses that come to the web fresh from the brick and mortar world seem to have trouble getting through to the citezens of the Web 2.0 world, and transparency is the key. At least I believe it is.

    I can go on my Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever and see what people like you,
    Calacanis, Scoble, Sigler, and so many others are doing and cooking up. It is so much more intimate, and refreshing.

    The B.S. meter is so much higher on the net these days. Old media style marketing to the lowest common denominator just flat out turns people off in this setting. But that is what makes the Social aspect of the web so appealing.

    Your post brought up some very good thinking points.
  • I agree with Eban.
    We are marketing ourselves & transparency is key!
  • Completely Amazing Post!

    The "Be Your Own Brand" and "Market your own brand" message is important, because I think everything I do says something about my brand. It doesn't have to be loud in everyone's face or spotlight seeking, it is what it is. That's why sometimes it's hard to realize that you are still "marketing your own brand" even when you think you're doing nothing at all.

    The things I admire about you most is your ability to be just totally Chris. I trust you because you always point me to interesting stuff and ideas, and then I go off and spread the word elsewhere, or take the idea and spin it off into something new and useful.

    I guess I don't understand why it's hard for some people/companies to just be themselves and know that's more than just good enough. It's the genuineness and honesty that always show through. And that's what makes a difference in the end- you don't need subtitles, or feel someone is always looking for the win rather than looking for the solution to the problem at hand.
  • I think one of the biggest things you hit was the idea of telling a good story. We've seen thousands of posts on the topic, but it's still something we seem to skim over. Our strongest negative reactions to marketing usually happen when someone has told a "bad" story, when marketers misrepresent. Even worse is the condescending pat on the head.

    Once marketers realize that respecting the audience is part of the equation, they can do so much more.
  • wow love the new look of your site chris. good going.
  • I am a professional marketer; have been one my entire career, more or less. I love some of the changes that are coming to marketing, because "traditional" marketing can feel like a straitjacket over time. The grooves in the record are so well-worn that to produce a traditional marketing campaign you hardly have to think at all anymore. It's deadly boring.

    I'm thrilled by the changes that are happening in the marketing world. We have a tremendous new toolset to work with that's giving us all sorts of new ways to communicate and connect with our customers and our prospects. It's an exciting time to be in this business.

    To be sure, just because things are changing doesn't mean that everything we've done before was bad, nor does it mean that everything we're doing now is going to stand the test of time. With luck, we'll be able to take the best of both old and new marketing styles and more forward into a better future.
  • Hey Chris,

    First off, thanks very much for calling in to the show. I'm also really glad you'll be on the show in October and perhaps we can continue some of this conversation then.

    I think with all of our desire not to schill we forget that we all work for companies that in some way or another have to sell something or that business/company goes away. So some of the conversation about, "I don't want to market," or "I hate selling" is really irrelevant. Okay, so you may be in HR versus selling the widgets that your company develops, but if those widgets don't get sold, you're out of a job.

    My point here is that it's high time we gave more credit to salespeople/marketers if we understand that at the end of the day, nobody buys things they don't want to. I get a bit fed up with the notion that "evil salespeople coerce you to buy something Madison Avenue is pitching." If you buy something, you've made the decision to buy. I think I've been tricked to purchase something a few times in my life, but more often than not, someone exposes me to something in a way that makes me want it. Buying it is my call.

    Does that make sense? Let's remember that commerce involves communication and the consumer is typically pretty smart. Especially these days. So as a marketer (or in my case as VP of Business Development) my focus is always on fostering relationships first, with the tacit understanding that OF COURSE I want to sell you something. That's how I pay bills and feed my kids! But OF COURSE I understand that you (person I'm talking to) won't buy from me unless I demonstrate value for my product/service and you trust me. Period.

    We in the new media world have to stop thinking in the "us versus them" mentality, re: buying and selling. Commerce has always inspired a refining of communication through the ages, and keeps us on our toes. And just because someone is trying to sell you something doesn't make them evil. We're all trying to sell ideas as well as stuff. So let's get over the knee-jerk reaction of saying, "no pitching!" and move on to quickly identify how we can best foster lasting relationships that last beyond any particular potential sale.
  • Being a technologist, I share your suspicion of marketing. Guys like me actually believe that something worthwhile and good will find its own fan base without a marketing department at all.

    The list of projects, products or sites that made it this way is long and impressive. craigslist, Twitter, gmail, linux, ruby, php, and any number of other open-source languages and projects.

    And they're not all non-profit exercises. Blip.tv, which is now entering its serious let's-try-to-make-some-money phase, had virtually no promotional or sales effort when it started, and has little more now. Rather, their marketing strategy was and is simply to help their users and be responsive to problems and ideas. To this day, you will still get support email from "mike". That's Mike Hudack, the CEO.

    The thing all these projects have in common is being first concerned with helping people. Being truly interested in making something good and useful is different than trying to persuade people that what you've made is good and useful. Ultimately, to someone like me, "marketing" is always about spin, about persuading, convincing, yes, even deceiving. It's all about selling not satisfying. It's never about your users, it's about the people that aren't your users yet.

    So, for sure, I'd agree that actually wanting to help people and build something you can be proud of is key.
  • Marketing is making a plan and setting goals for growth. There are many ways to grow but the good marketer is the person in the group who hounds the plan and the goals. We are a part of that planning process and we are committed to the goals. Find ways to plan, then execute and *measure.* Find a way to measure. That's marketing. BTW, in my book, many here are describing sales, which is a piece of marketing. Peace!
  • Chris: I think mass communications gave marketers a lot of power, and the ability to manipulate buying audiences. We still see this with folks like Karl Rove, etc.

    Social media is ripping that control away. I think Cluetrain manifesto is a great ideal. Something to strive for... It is far from becoming a reality. in the interim, we can change one by one.

    I'd like to share a quote I've been using lately when I talk about PR. It's the dictionary definition of public relations (via Dictionary.com):

    1. the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc.

    2. the art, technique, or profession of promoting such goodwill.

    Novel concept, huh? How did we stray so far away from this?
  • Geoff, spot on referencing that definition.

    Chris, you ask how does social media turn marketing upside down?

    It starts by having marketing executives pulled by their neck ties and fancy handbags into the conversation. Once you start listening and participating it completely transforms everything, from how you think about marketing, things you say to the way you view people.

    It's all about relationships, not the sale, and social media is forcing that reset.
  • @Rachel politely points out that we can't throw all traditional marketing under the bus. In fact, we should learn what worked the best, learn how that might or might not work in the new world, and reconsider all the tools that seem worth using.

    I'm often guilty of abandoning it ALL in pursuit of shiny and new, the innovative. But there's lots to be said about the foundations of things.

    I learn all the time, and YOU are how I learn.
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