This week’s interview is a partial edited transcript from last week’s audio interview with Chris Heuer. The whole 30 minute podcast is still available here on the Buzz Bin:
“Now Is Gone: A New Media Primer for Executives and Entrepreneurs� will be released in early Fall, 2007. The primary thesis of the book is Chris Heuer’s Participation is Marketing concept. Contributing author Brian Solis guided me towards Chris’s participation post, and the rest is history.
BB: What does “participation is marketing� mean?
CH: I was at the first BarCamp back in August of 2005, almost two years ago now, and I started seeing things a little bit differently there because power has shifted from institutions to individuals. A lot of people look at marketing now as a four-letter word.
The game has completely changed. In fact, lately I’ve been talking to people about how, the web wasn’t as revolutionary as it was evolutionary with the development of a new channel. But the rise of social media, and this participatory media really has really fundamentally changed the entire rules for business and that really turns marketing on its head.
So back in late-2005, I did Web 2.1 and started putting together some events of our own, these un-conferences and what-have-you. At that time, I was trying to explain to people that just slapping your logo onto an event and saying “well, we’re sponsors, look how great we are,� wasn’t going to provide the sort of impact that you were looking for. [Companies] needed to show up, [and] needed to be a part of what was happening, and that ultimately, the people who threw in some money to make stuff happen, [ended] up taking on a role of host.
Well if you’re a host, you need to be there to host the party; you need to be part of that conversation. You don’t need to direct it, you don’t need to talk at people, you don’t need to go up and give your sales pitch, you [just] need to be there. You need to be a real participant in what’s happening. You need to contribute something of value to what’s happening. This means fully interactive, it means listening as much as talking, if not more. The old adage is “two ears, one mouth for a reason,� we should be listening twice as much. With that in mind, I’ll kind of shut up for a minute and see how that plays for you.
BB: What happens to companies that don’t adapt to the “participation is marketing� concept? What’s the usual reaction to their attempts to really control the message in the blogosphere and social media campaigns?
CH: That leads me to one more clarifying point before I come back to what happens to the companies who won’t adapt. What this also means here is a sense of “peerdom�, meaning that the people who come in and represent the companies are in fact peers. If you come in with that kind of respect for the people you’re talking with, that is really the more important thing, that’s what I’m more concerned about. If companies don’t start getting respect from their customers, potential customers, competitors, and those in the market, that’s where there’s going to be some real serious consequences.
At the beginning of this year it was “share of content� week down in San Diego, and I had a chance there to meet Kelly Thule from State Farm. State Farm at the time was suffering from some reports on 20/20 about some not-so-great things that some of their agents did down in New Orleans in regards to Katrina victims. I really did not have that great an experience or idea of the brand of State Farm.
But Kelly was at this conference as a speaker, as a participant, they spent their money to send him there. But that $1200 or so they spent to get Kelly there, and the time off for the week, was more advertising impact for that brand than they could have ever gotten by sponsoring the event, or distributing pens, or doing anything else.
The reason why is because he was a human being who really was very passionate about his company and what he did. The way he was able to help people, the way he was able to contribute his expertise, the way he was able to actually listen to what you were talking about and try to find connections to help you, was really, really unique.
That leads me into answering your question a little bit more. I don’t know if it’s so much the organizations adapting as much as it is people within the organization stepping up and doing the right thing and changing their behavior, and starting to look at things differently.
As far as consequences go, let’s be honest, we are in a bubble, and I don’t mean the market bubble of the VC world that’s going to pop, and Web 2.0 and all that, I mean we’re living in this echo chamber bubble. What we’re looking at, what we’re thinking about, and talking about Facebook blowing up or whatever, that’s just such a slanted view from the rest of the world, it’s totally missing the point.
To that end, there a lot of tenants that we have about how things should be, and how the new marketing should work, that really doesn’t matter to a lot of people. So a lot of companies are going to be able to keep doing what they’re doing. This is very much similar to the analogy along the lines of newspapers.
I remember in 1995 going to a newspaper convention, I forget which one it was, where somebody, well several people, but one person in particular was saying “Newspapers are dead! In a decade no one’s going to be printing anymore!� Well, that’s not true. Why? Because the rest of the world does not see the things [in the same way that] we see out here on the edge. They don’t have those experiences. They don’t process them in the same way. Change is a very slow process for a lot of people.
In fact what we are talking about here in “market conversations� instead of marketing, this is a 10 year cycle that we’ve really just begun. So the short term consequences for many companies not adapting to this kind of understanding is not going to be that large. The long term impact means that there are opportunities for new competitors to arise within those markets, it means that there are opportunities for these companies to screw up, it means there are opportunities for customers to revolt, and take over that power, and seize back control. So they are going to have some serious economic consequences as a result.
But then there are other markets, such as Web 2.0 tools, and some of the emerging tech, and blogging, and social media, and communications in general, where not having an understanding of these things is going to prevent people from getting out the gate and ultimately mean total failure. So as with most things, I think the world is a little bit grey and mushy, and we’re going to see the impact of people understanding this, and refining their understanding of this philosophy over time. If you ask me again in a year I think we’ll have a better sense of what it really means for people who don’t understand the importance of this shift.
BB: What are your thoughts on “thinking liquid�?
CH: Well there’s a lot, and it’s too early for me to get into this, I would probably need a few drinks in me to really get to it. But I really do like the concept.
One of the things we’ve been trying to get across around this has been the idea of holistic thinking. In fact, the topic wasn’t conversational intelligence back in 2000 at PC Forum, but I think the topic was batteries, or something. But this was the first time I talked publicly about conversational intelligence and what that meant in conversation analysis, ultimately and brand intelligence as it is more commonly known.
What I tried to get across to people was that this leads to holistic opportunities, and of course, you say a word like holistic and everyone starts thinking crystals and new age and all that fun stuff, but I mean thinking of things as a whole. It’s very hard in an Adam Smith world, where it’s all about specialization of labor, and compartmentalized departments, and expertise and what-have-you, to find generalists who can really understand the different parts of a system, and think about that as a whole.
The liquid metaphor I think is a really strong way to kind of further that, because if you move something within a liquid body, of course everything else moves with it, so it is representative of that dynamic, flow state that we’re really looking for. With social media club even, one of the big challenges Howard and I had when we were debating how we should do things and how do we co-create this? How do we really vet the good ideas and the bad ideas and look through that stuff and kind of parse it out and involve the community in some of the decision making?
The biggest challenges and opportunities in this era is for companies to shift their thinking from the control mindset of course, and telling people how it is, to looking at how they can really co-create value within their markets. This value is with their customers, with their competitors, with their partners, within the ecosystem, and really bringing about this holistic state. I think the liquid metaphor is a strong way to help people kind of understand that.
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