Tech Crunching the grassroots in Austin
Friday I tweeted advice to the TechCrunchies after their ill-advised attempt at a “grassroots” panel:
1) 20 people is not a panel, it’s a mob.
2) There are women in this industry, too. (They only had one on the panel, and she was there because Lori Hawkins raised the issue in the Statesman.)
3) Make sure your panelists know not to mention that their companies bought their slot on the panel.
4) A bunch of CEOs and marketing guys do not a grassroots panel make. That mislabeling of the event was just silly.
There were also distracting ads flashing behind the panel, but worst of all was that the audience – at least everyone I spoke to who showed up – found the talk boring. I wasn’t bored, though… I was truly interested in hearing the perspective of people who are relatively new to the web and have only ever known it as a business platform. The conversation, and the afterparty, were very much like late 90s web events, but the conversations suggest a business environment that’s grown far more complex.
A few of my notes:
Is word of mouth marketing (WOMMA) the same as “grassroots”? (Later someone came up with a definition of grassroots as “grown from teh soils of the people’s hard necessity.”)
Greg Lee of the Lance Armstrong Foundation notes today’s high rate of web adoption and says that “passion drives revenue.” Focus on passion and awareness first, and the dollars follow. Advocacy is stronger than satisfaction in driving decisions about brands.
Kip McLanahan of OnNetworks said “this is a conversat4ion about consumer control. The consumer is in control now more than ever.”
Matt Corey of Golfsmith says they’ll still keep bad user-contributed product reviews on the site as long as there’s no profanity. I’m thinking there shouldn’t be a question whether you’d keep those reviews, if you wanted to have authentic customer conversation.
In the music industry, each band is a grassroots marketing machine. They’re selling concert events, which is where the money’s made these days – presumably recorded music in digital format is so easily ripped and traded that it’s become, not the product in itself, but advertising for the product delivered live, and demand is increasing for live performance.
Andrew Busey: a grassroots campaign has a prerequisite, which he referred to as the seed, using Obama as an example.
Acknowledgement that things that suck also spread virally.
Brett Hurt: brands can listen in ways that they coudln’t listen before, and they have to respond in ways that they haven’t responded before. LL Bean says the product knowledge lifecycle has decreased from thee months to three days. (Reference to knowledge about how consumers are responding to a product.)
How do VCs evaluate a product’s possibility to become viral?
In marketing, we’re having to change messaging from interrupt to something that drives engagement, and creates a dialog.
The need for efficiency of customer acquisition varies.
Here’s one that David Armistead and I found relevant, because it’s about what we do: Businesses are not geared up for listening, and they’re not prepared to be facilitators of dialog. They need help. Customers are clearly up for dialog, and marketers are getting there.
Greg Lee asks about the call to action: when is the right time to ask for engagement?
Another note relevant to SWS: How many companies are ready, when the firestorm occurs, to change the core of the company. What’s the firestorm? It might be a situation where the values of the company clearly don’t match customers’ (or stakeholders’) expectations.
Matt Corey: core values are supposed to stand the test of time. (Well, yes, but paradigms are shifting hard.)
Principles to take away. Are people, realizing that the balance of power has shifted, playing offense, or defense? Brett Hurt: the best brands have always played offense. Social media is a reflection of the physicality that has always been there. Now we have tools to speak for them and tools to listen for you.
