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It's All About Content
Public relations, PR, communications, marketing communications. No matter what term you use, it always comes down to one thing: content. You can have the perfect story, but if the pitch does not work, no one will bite. The pitch is your content.
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Is Podcasting For Real?
In less than an hour, Neville and I will record the next installment of For Immediate Release. One of the issues we'll discuss is a post from Darren Barefoot's blog titled, "Why I'm Not Smoking the Podcasting Dope."
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| 04.21.05
Open Source Marketing Goes 'Outside In'
 By James Cherkoff
Traditional marketing has been built around the idea of creating a central set of messages and sending them out into the marketplace.
This can be thought of as an ‘Inside Out' approach, where the communications infrastructure required to manage brands, information and image (cameras, editing suites, media, design & creative personnel) is held inside an organisation and used to distribute information out.
However, as savvy consumers filter out unwanted advertising information using PVRs, adblockers, SPAM filters, RSS feeds, subscriptions and customer communities, the Inside Out approach is becoming less and less effective.
Distributed Media
One of the reasons for this change is that communications infrastructure is no longer confined withincorporate walls. It is distributed widely, and freely available in the shape of digital cameras, blogs, RSS, communities, podcasts, Bittorrent feeds and P2P networks.
Operating as an Inside Out organisation in this new distributed environment can lead to numerous problems.
Firstly, customers become very frustrated. This leads to an opt-out culture with consumers shielding themselves from unwanted messages. Unfortunately, some Inside Out organisations respond by working their existing infrastructure harder in an effort to reach the consumer. This is a vicious circle which benefits no one.
Secondly, unhappy customers can find each other and mobilise into communities. At the low end of such activity are ‘gripe sites', where people air their grievances online. However, increasingly sophisticated techniques are emerging such as the community of Verizon Wireless customers who took out a class-action lawsuit against the wireless operator.
Thirdly, marketeers grow out of touch and feel removed from their audience. They find themselves pulling the levers but not getting the results. In extreme cases, marketeers can develop a bunker mentality. It's as if consumers have turned the tables and put them ‘under fire'. Sometimes this can lead to the position where brands are used as defensive shields, rather than positive business tools.
A practical example of this is the banking customer who feels bombarded by direct mail but cannot get a satisfactory, timely answer when something goes wrong. He just struggles to infiltrate the complex systems of an Inside Out company.
Open Source Marketing Goes Outside In
Not surprisingly, some companies are looking around for new ideas. Open Source Marketing is one idea that people are turning to as they realise that the values behind the Open Source Movement can be applied to industries beyond technology.
The Open Source approach can be described as ‘Outside In'. It recognises that in a distributed environment a lot of information and content about a company or brand is being produced outside of the organisation by consumers and other stakeholders.
It also recognises that this information is more influential than the spiel produced by a company itself. For example, someone looking to book a hotel will probably place greater value on a customer community such as virtualtourist.com than a hotel website.
Companies introducing the Outside In approach are seeing some success.
Converse, the Nike-owned manufacturer of training shoes recently launched the Converse Gallery, an online challenge to its customers to produce a film inspired by the brand. The company has received around a thousand entries which can be found on its website. They are of a very high standard and form the basis of a competitive community that is creating large amounts of branded content. And all at no cost to the organisation.
Read the Rest of the Article.
About the Author:
James Cherkoff is an independent marketing consultant based in London. When he isn't helping companies like GM and Nestle to get to grips with the networked world he writes articles on the subject for online and offline media, including the Financial Times.
www.collaboratemarketing.com |
