No Man’s Blog

Shit I wanted it to be just seven but another one just entered the door before I got to publish the post…

Here it goes, eight sins of nu-marketing (bloggers/gurus/evangelists etc.), which, BTW, guilty as charged, I too, have committed some of these sins at some point in the past.

1. Sensationalism.

“The death of the TV!” “Twitter is killing the blogosphere!” “Facebook is killing email!”… it might be the sometimes staggering speed of the rise and adoption of emerging platforms (can you remember life without Twitter??) but time and again we seem to be living in our own over-dramatised world, making self-righteous sensationalist headlines that have no real hold in reality. New stuff don’t just kill old stuff it adds up to it. Everything changes, nothing is changing.

2. Dogmatism & sweeping generalisations

A by-product of sensationalism is dogmatism (or is it the other way around?). Time and again we fail to grasp the complexity of the new landscape. It’s easier to shout “it’s all about this!” (‘this’ being the buzz-word of the day: engagement, relationships, co-creation) than to scrutinise the context face the uncertainty, and admit the complexity. It’s exactly because ‘it’s NOT all about this’ that doing interesting, effective marketing is so damn difficult these days – life was just so much easier if it were all about this…

3. Falling in love with our own cliches and making them strategies

There is a vicious cycle of seductive analogies and catchy phrases becoming the headline of our strategies. “Starting little fires”, “actions not words” and “always in beta” are good examples. As Uri once told me these are not strategies, they are exactly the lack of one. Look around, there are more.

4. False Causality Assumptions (based on anecdotal evidence)

There is an odd assumption that if you only start doing (social media, digital, engagement marketing etc) you will start kicking ass. Example: If you have a company blog, you will have an ongoing dialouge with customers (see the false causality here?). These false assumption are, of course, based on / backed by anecdotal evidence. DellOutlet as an evidence that brands should be on Twitter. WhopperSacrifice as a proof that facebook apps are the way to do marketing (before these – X-Men 3 garnered 3.2 million friends on myspace as a proof that brands should have a myspace page – remember?). Meerkat as a proof that social media is the future of marketing. These are all great examples of great ideas that led to successful marketing NOT a proof that these platforms work. Moreover, they are usually too specific and context based to be anything more than merely a good story that is just too specific to be applicable to you.

5. Using staggering stats to make a case for nu-marketing

Strongly related to he previous sin. “450 million people on facebook!, 56 million tweets every day! Billion videos on youtube!, Million iPhone apps downloads every day!”. These are indeed fascinating numbers but what do they actually tell us? That Facebook is fast becoming hygiene social tool, just like email, that people are into each other more than anything else, that Twitter is the tool of choice for verbal diarrhea, and that the App store is about to become a massive graveyard for apps just as facebook did. What are the real, direct, aplicable implications for marketing? How does million of tweets can actually change the way I do brand and marketing communications is a much more complex story.

6. Ownership of ‘engagement’:

Directly related to sins #2 & #4 – since ‘it’s all about engagement’ and since ‘you have to use social platforms to engage with your consumers’ somehow along the way people forgot the fundamental difference between interactive and engaging and therefore took ownership of engagement. Just because it’s digital, social or interactive doesn’t make it engaging, oh no.

7. Taking learnings from digital brands and making them best practice for consumer brands:

This is one of my favourites. People using internet brands as best practice for marketing for consumer brands. Case in point: “The Widget Economy” – a very hollow marketing bloggers meme from 4 years ago that goes something like this: “it’s all about making it easy for people to take your content and put it on their personal social spaces. Look how many Flickr widgets are out there! you should create a widget that people can embed on their blogs!”. Other examples – ” gogle don’t do advertising – you too, should let the product do the marketing for you! ” or “it’s all about open-source these days, you have to let people build your product and market it for you! see how wordpress and google are doing it”.

8. Over chatter, under-doing.
Well, that’s not a sin as such, just the fact that it’s so damn easier to blog about the seismic change than to implement it in real business. How easy it is to write about “Agile Planning” or about “The future of advertising is great products that have marketing embedded in them” and how oh so difficult it is to implement it. There are probably 10,000 think-tanks for every single do-tank.

C’mon there must be more – what are yours?