If you own your own business, then your job is marketing.
A few years ago when I first started working with Anthony Richardson, a.k.a. @webfugitive on “The Twitter,” the lightbulb went off and I realized that my job was marketing. Sure I had to run the business and do all of the businessey things that business people do, however day-to-day operations don’t bring in the proverbial bacon. Marketing is.
What is marketing?
Wikipedia defines marketing as, “an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities are informed or persuaded that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others.” So in plain English, marketing is getting the word out about your product or service.
Marketing takes many forms. There is push marketing and pull marketing. Push marketing is what most marketers do, and what most of us hate. It’s pushing the message on us via distribution and promotion since no demand exists. It’s television, or those spammy people on Twitter. All that is required is an audience. Pull marketing starts with consumer demand. It’s when I go on Twitter and ask for a product suggestion, and a brand approaches me with their solution. What is required here is for a company to be listening.
Oh how things have changed…
Marketing is no longer what marketing was. That guy in the picture above? He’s not marketing. That person responding on Twitter or Facebook or GetSatisfaction – that’s marketing. The game has shifted from talking to listening. If you know me I like to talk. It’s as if I’ve been making up for lost time since I started late. But talking gets you nowhere. It doesn’t help solve customer problems, or find new opportunities. Listening is the key, and active listening even better.
Tools of the trade
There’s a lot of conversations going on out there. Twitter, Facebook, millions of blogs. What’s the listening marketer to do these days? Here are a few simple tools I use to cut through the clutter and engage in the conversations relevant to us.
I use Seesmic as my Twitter/Facebook client of choice. It handles multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, searches, groups, and much much more. It also groups all replies for all accounts into a single column, and does the same with DM’s.
Seesmic also integrates with bit.ly, so I can track clicks on all the links I share, and see how many others out there are sharing the same content I am. I love numbers, and as a marketer, numbers are your friends.
AddThis is a great, free tool to add to any content you want your audience to share, and then see how they’re sharing it. Again, lot’s of friendly numbers.
Dawn Foster wrote a great post on setting up a monitoring dashboard using RSS. This is my main method of keeping up on conversations about all of our brands. After a few hours, depending on how many brands you are managing, you’ll be monitoring those online conversations like a pro, able to respond quickly and professionally.
Stop. Collaborate. Listen.
When Chris Brogan recalled this quote from Vanilla Ice at Izeafest to describe how marketers should be, the crowd went wild. It makes sense though doesn’t it? Try it using the tools above and see how it works out for you, and then let us know here.
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