http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/02/06/market-ing-is-considering-conversations/ Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:29:35 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/02/06/market-ing-is-considering-conversations/comment-page-1/#comment-145175 Chas Martin Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:20:41 +0000 http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/02/06/market-ing-is-considering-conversations/#comment-145175 The holy grail of marcom has always been word of mouth (now word of web). It cannot be bought or sold. It is an organic buzz, earned when some intrinsic value of a product or service reaches an emotional level that requires one person to communicate it to another. Subtext: Passion is transmittable and virally contagious. If your passion for something moves you to speak, others to listen and some to respond, you have community. If you use what you learn from this feedback, you have a learning community. This is a form of <a href="http://www.innovativeye.com/front-end-of-innovation/2006/6/1/eric-von-hippel-mit-sloan-school-of-management.html" rel="nofollow">crowdsourcing</a>. Listening is the essence of competitive advantage. Innovation is more often successful when the ideas are generated at the point of contact - the front line. After all, it is the end user who takes a product and improve or modify it to suit a different purpose - maybe one it was not originally intended to perform. Social networks effectively replace the contrived community of the focus group where people are paid for their opinions and feel peer pressure to say something - anything. I've never put much stock in that kind of obligatory feedback. Self-organizing social media-based communities of interest, however, are a completely inverted paradigm. And, I believe they not only represent a potential source for innovation, but a predisposed audience to assist in the development and ultimately early adoption of whatever new products or services result from their input. The holy grail of marcom has always been word of mouth (now word of web). It cannot be bought or sold. It is an organic buzz, earned when some intrinsic value of a product or service reaches an emotional level that requires one person to communicate it to another. Subtext: Passion is transmittable and virally contagious.
If your passion for something moves you to speak, others to listen and some to respond, you have community. If you use what you learn from this feedback, you have a learning community.
This is a form of crowdsourcing. Listening is the essence of competitive advantage. Innovation is more often successful when the ideas are generated at the point of contact – the front line. After all, it is the end user who takes a product and improve or modify it to suit a different purpose – maybe one it was not originally intended to perform.
Social networks effectively replace the contrived community of the focus group where people are paid for their opinions and feel peer pressure to say something – anything. I’ve never put much stock in that kind of obligatory feedback.
Self-organizing social media-based communities of interest, however, are a completely inverted paradigm. And, I believe they not only represent a potential source for innovation, but a predisposed audience to assist in the development and ultimately early adoption of whatever new products or services result from their input.

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