Post 1: Frank Trivieri talks about GM Canada
Post 2: Steve Levy on spending money online
Post 3: Mitch Joel on Six Pixels of Separation
Post 4
Markets in the Age of the Miscellaneous
David Weinberger, co-author of the influential bestseller, The Cluetrain Manifesto
I’ve never heard David Weinberger speak before but he has a fantastic amount of passion. His main point was that the internet is made up of people, and they don’t want to be marketed to or marketed at.
Here are the main points:
1. Don’t let old institutions or work habits or creative plans re-inflict themselves online. Don’t take the easy route, don’t just go with what you know.
2. Take the war out of marketing: guerilla marketing, target audience, consumer intelligence. We talk this way out of fear. Us vs. Them. We build our businesses as little forts and the information we let out we call marketing or press releases, and the information we allow in, we guard. Get out of the fort.
3. Markets used to be about place, socializing, meeting up, and shared interests and exchanges. This is what online wants to be, but “marketing” today is something that happens to people, usually against their will. The industrial revolution allowed us to believe that goods are interchangeable, as are workers and customers–we are cogs in the machine of progress. Consumers. (David made a graphic point that consumption used to be about coughing up blood.)
4. Marketers need to think about how to have real conversation online. Conversations are in our own voice, they are open ended, they are voluntary, they are about things both parties are interested in, they are not about something else (there is no alterior motive).
5. Blogging is where customers talk to each other. Blogging is not about cats. Reddit.com and Digg.com will show you it’s not about cats, it’s about a constructed self, it’s about pointing away or outward to other sites. Any marketer or ad agency who brushes off blogs as private journals, people talking about their cats, or self-involved little worlds are really out to lunch. If you want to talk about self-involved little worlds look at the New York Times website, or any CanWest news site, and you’ll see a self-involved little world. The only links out are for ads on the site. “There’s a narcissistic bubble,” says David.
David Weinberger, author of
The Cluetrain Manifesto
Small Pieces Loosely Joined
If you want more, check out David Weinberger online.