We Don’t Talk Anymore

I spent a couple of days last week in San Francisco at the Social Media Marketing Summit. In all of the presentations and the discussions that I had during the two days, one thing is for sure, we’re all starting to talk about the same thing: “Marketing is about relationships.”

Now, I’m not sure if its ever been all that different, in theory at least. Mass media armed marketers with tools to be able to ’scale’ and gave them reach. However, marketing seemed to lose something along the way. Afterall, as consumers, we love being treated like everyone else, don’t we? We like assumptions to be made about our likes and dislikes. We like being sold to…

When did a brand’s relationship with consumers become so cold? So unfulfilling? Charlene Li, author of the Groundswell and founder of the Altimeter Group, showed this clip which I think says it all:

Consumers have always had a voice, but unfortunately didn’t have scale and reach. As I talked about in a post a couple of weeks ago, consumer expectations have changed and the tools that enable scale and reach are more accessible than ever. As Charlene said in her keynote last week, “people have the power in the Groundswell.”

The question for marketers and the brands they represent remains: where’s my place in the multilogue world (where many-to-many conversations are happening simultaneously).

Tara Hunt, one of the industry’s most highly regarded thought leaders and practitioners, and author of the upcoming book The Whuffie Factor, talks about this in terms of connections, reputation and subsequently, a brand’s social capital–or as she calls it, Whuffie.

In traditional marketing, brand commonly equates to trust. In today’s social web, this same definition applies, however, as we all know the opportunities for a brand to build that trust differs but also increases substantially.

What does Whuffie buy a marketer? I’ll leave it to Tara to tell you that in her book next Spring, but, my take is that if marketers are able to start thinking about and acting on real relationships with customers (earning Whuffie), we’ll start to see greater brand loyalty and more cost effective ways of reaching our customers.

If you’re thinking about your brand’s social media strategy, it’s a good time to ask yourself what you’re doing to maximize your brand’s Whuffie mojo.