A friend of mine has developed his marketing mantra. It’s quite good and it goes like this:

1. Markets are conversations
2. Conversations happen around social objects
3. Social objects are products or services that are remarkable
4. Remarkable is not just something special, but something worth being remarked about
5. A great product, and even better customer service are the most remarkable things you can offer.

I like it (although I’d change the first point to read “your market is conversing”), and it fits in with pretty much everything I hold to be self-evident: The TV-industrial complex has crumbled and in an age where advertising saturation makes it almost impossible to push your message out, the best way of marketing your product is to get people to talk about it. Social media, as a form of word of mouth marketing, works, but what if you’re not remarkable? What if no-one wants to talk about you?

What if you make brown shoelaces, or you have a brand of aspirin that does the same thing as all the other brands of aspirin? What if you don’t really have a story or you don’t have a chance to really impress your customers with amazing service… What do you do? Do you just give up and start something else?

Nope. You invent a story.

If you make brown shoelaces you get Bear Grylls to explain that if he was stuck on a mountain and needed to create a makeshift parachute, he would only recommend using your brand. You would start a YouTube channel with a series of videos detailing other amazing uses for your brown shoelaces and explain how they are the best. You would find bloggers who talk about running shoes and dress shoes and adventure shoes and you would send them free product samples. It would be so successful that people would start buying your laces to put in their brand new shoes because they would think that shoe manufacturers didn’t know enough about lace technology.

If you make a new brand of aspirin you would create a 1300 number that people could call and whinge to; you’d remove their headaches. This number would be advertised, radio presenters would copy the idea. You would setup a social community where people can talk about their headaches and you would get experts to jump online and give advice.

If you think your product isn’t remarkable, you’re not trying hard enough.

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft provide solutions to people with video game problems. The trouble was, in 2006, the proportion of people who realised they had a gaming problem in need of a solution was very small in comparison to the population of the earth. Worse still, most people with video game problems needed to get hold of their mom’s (sic) purse first.

Rather then come up with the next fastest/loudest/baddest/blue rayest/most violent/most banned/most wanted new gaming console in the history of the world to date, Nintendo, instead, were smart. Very smart. They created Wii. Kids like it. Mom’s love it, heck, even the Queen of England has one. In fact, Wii sales now account for more than both main competitors combined.

If you’re going to develop a new product, think outside the (X) box. It’ll pay off. Especially if you back it up with customer service people rave about.

My first proper job was as a reporter for a start-up indie newspaper in the north western suburbs of Sydney. The editor was an awesome guy called Peter Gladwell; he hired me because he had a fire in his eyes and I think he saw a bit of that in me too. He wanted to bring credible, interesting, ballsy journalism back to suburban newspapers and I wanted to write credibe, interesting, ballsy suburban journalism. The paper was called the Northwest Edge and it was brilliant. I think it lasted five issues.

When Fairfax and News Corp got wind of what this little start-up was doing they slashed their advertising rates and undercut the market. A little indie newspaper stood no chance against two giant media corporations and that was that. I looked Peter up on LinkedIn and he now appears to be Chief of Staff at Fairfax, which is kind of ironic. I’m sure he’s getting his own back, one stolen paperclip at a time.

The Northwest Edge is a David and Goliath story. There are lots of them in the media, and sadly, Goliath usually wins. What happens though, when Goliath fights Goliath? Google is the biggest giant standing in the current media landscape and they’ve put numerous companies out of business by not just undercutting the market, but literally giving away products and services other companies were charging a mint for. Imagine if you’d invested millions of dollars into any of the following services in the last decade with the hope of making money from them:

• Maps
• Email
• A Blog Service
• A Website Where People Can Share Videos
• Website Traffic Analytics
• Satellite Imagery

You’ve now either been bought by Google, or you’ve been put out of business (or you will be soon).

Google has avoided producing ‘content’ of it’s own so far, with the exception of mapping data, but before long their share price will level off and investors will start demanding further diversification. The Google search brand is so well established that it won’t be tarnished or have its power diluted by adding more complimentary services. There is absolutely no reason why Google cannot feasibly, tomorrow, muscle in on the real estate, jobs and classifieds markets. There is no reason why they can’t produce their own accommodation search engine. What exactly will RealEstate.com, Seek, CarSales.com.au and Stayz do if when a major player like Google comes along and makes their product free. When was the last time anyone used WhereIs? (A site that just launched a popup ad in my browser, little fuckers). Does anyone really think that MySpace and Facebook are going to remain dominant for more than a few more years?

(Almost) everything online will soon be free. If I was shareholder in of any of those fore-mentioned companies, I’d be cashing out now.

Here’s a list of 25 top marketing and social media blogs. It comes from a guy called Mack who makes lists of blogs every now and then based on how many people subscribe to them. It’s by no means definitive, but there are some gems in here. Have a browse if you’re bored or looking for inspiration.

1. Duct Tape Marketing
2. Church of the Customer
3. CopyBlogger
4. Search Engine Guide
5. Chris Brogan
6. Influential Marketing
7. Logic + Emotion
8. Converstations
9. Drew’s Marketing Minute
10. The Viral Garden
11. Experience Curve
12. Conversation Agent
13. Techipedia
14. The Social Media Marketing Blog
15. Emergence Marketing
16. The Social Customer Manifesto
17. Techno Marketer
18. Social Media Explorer
19. Movie Marketing Madness
20. Daily Fix
21. Customers Rock!
22. Shotgun Marketing
23. Biz Solutions Plus
24. Resonance Partnership Blog
25. MediaPhyter

Imagine if you had a photo of the factory worker who put your iPOD/Phone/TV/Shoe/Pen/T-Shirt/Chair/Computer together.

We’re putting together a marketing plan and digital strategies outline for a children’s television series which is in development for an Australian network. It has been sold around the world and the producers are pretty excited about the social networking opportunities. Forums, blogs, ‘Second Life’ Islands and behind-the-scenes access areas are nothing new, but this series comes at a time when 90% of nine-year-olds have used the Internet and 34% of twelve year-olds have a profile on a social networking site. Never before have young teenagers engaged so enthusiastically with online content or been more inclined to join online communities.

I can’t reveal too much about the series, given that it’s in production and all a bit hush-hush, but it’s along the same lines as something like The Saddle Club or Bluewater High — a bunch of kids who are elite proponents of a particularly popular activity who are growing up together and attending the same school. The websites for those shows are pretty good, I particularly like Bluewater High’s, but the strategy we’re putting together is going to be on a whole new level.

The online strategy for the show is divided into four basic parts:

• A website which invites fans into a virtual world, allowing them to interact with the characters and their unique environment and chat with other fans.
• A behind-the-scenes website which acts like an online (extended) version of the special features on a DVD that shows interviews, allows fans to ask questions and even allows people to audition for the show.
• An online store which sells related merchandise.
• Discussion forums where fans can post messages and respond to related topics about the show and the popular activity the show deals with.

Here’s some of the cool things we’re doing on the social networking side:

A ‘Virtual World’ Website with Characters Integrating with Facebook and MySpace

Using Flash™ technology a detailed virtual world will be created where fans can walk through the sets and see where the characters have been. Bandwidth issues in Australia prevent video-intensive features like real-time character interaction (like you might find in a video game), but it’s certainly possible to create a static virtual world. Powderfinger’s Hotel Existence website is along the lines of what we’re talking about.

Fans will be able to sneak into character’s bedrooms and read their diaries, see what they’re listening to on their iPODs, see what they ate for lunch and gather clues from the virtual set to use in online games and competitions.

The coolest feature of this virtual world though, is how the character’s profiles will integrate with actual Facebook and MySpace profiles. The producers were keen to create a new stand-alone social networking platform especially for the show, using something like Ning, but we explained to them that if we used existing platforms, fans will already be familiar with the user-interface, they won’t have to sign-up for anything new and most importantly, every single aspect of their interaction with the show’s characters will be automatically broadcast to all their other friends who share the same social networking platform. The average Facebook user has more than 150 friends, so by allowing fans to interact with characters on Facebook you are increasing the show’s marketing reach by a factor of 150 for every single fan.

The social networking profiles will be updated weekly by production staff, in sync with the onscreen events. So, for example, when two characters start dating, their Facebook profiles will change to show that they are ‘In a Relationship’. When they break up, their profile will be updated accordingly. These changes will obvioiusly also appear in their real-life ‘friends’ news feeds as if the events were happening to real people. When characters post on other characters’ walls, fans will be able to track the conversations between them.

The characters will also post event invitations. For example, in the lead-up to an episode where one character throws herself a sixteenth birthday party, all her real Facebook friends will be invited to attend. Candid photographs of the party will later appear and fans will be able to comment on the photographs.

YouTube Integration

Several instructional videos will be created by real-life, professional proponents of the activity the show centres around (imagine if Kelly Slater had put together a series of instructional surfing videos for Bluewater High and then they were posted all over YouTube). A section of the website will be devoted to showcasing these videos and via step-by-step tutorials, fans will be able to learn what the characters are doing. Fans will then be able to film themselves and their friends and upload them to the site and to YouTube. This will ensure the website gains significant exposure in YouTube (and Google) when people from around the world are searching for videos of this activity – increasing the reach of the online campaign far beyond the core Australian audience.

Montages of popular television shows created by fans who put their favourite scenes together in a YouTube re-mix are another recent video Phenomenon (one fan film clip from Australian children’s series H20: Just Add Water has had more than 650,000 YouTube views). It’s a labour of love that can take countless hours, but tools like Flektor are making it easier to do and by providing fans with a library of useful clips, helpfully sorted under appropriate categories, we’ll make the process super-easy and encourage fans to plaster as many clips as they like on YouTube.

Fans will also be able to download songs from the website soundtrack and edit them into the clips, resulting in huge exposure for the artists (a bargaining chip when licensing the songs). The website will then run competitions and the fans can vote on their favourite montages, bringing new filmmakers to the fore and increasing exposure on YouTube to a worldwide audience.

Fan Fiction

Creative, dedicated fans love writing fictional stories about their characters. Sites like Fan Fiction.net have millions of stories uploaded about virtually every popular television series ever created. Buffy the Vampire Slayer alone has more than 30,000 stories uploaded by fans.

A section of the website will actively encourage fan fiction competitions where people write stories about the characters and upload them for others to read. Producers will actively use this as a research tool to figure out what fans want to happen in the next series.

Those are just some of the strategies I can talk about publicly. We’re pretty excited about it all and I’d love to hear any feedback you had on what we’re doing. If anyone has any brilliant ideas of their own I’m all ears…

It’s a capitalist tool, but even after the revolution, in the darkest days of red army rule and state-induced famine, the Bolsheviks had it. Imagine a world without advertising. Imagine if no organisations exchanged currency for promotion: No billboards, no radio spots, no TV commercials, no banner ads, no AdSense. No editorials, no splash pages, no magazine back-covers, no inside covers, no infomercials. Imagine if no one saw or heard ads anymore.

Imagine if the only way you would make a purchasing decision was because of the advice of other people you trusted.

That’s where we’re heading.

Don’t think outside the square.

Think outside the circle.

…you’ll make more money.