Liveblogging Enterprise 2.0: Marketing 2.0 - Set your customers free!

Jeffrey Walker from Atlassian and Willms Buhse, CoreMedia

Marketing 2.0 - the Beauty comes from the inside

Someone else was going to speak this am, but we were asked to do this session via twitter this morning. So if you have thought twitter didn’t have value - it can.

Some broad thoughts to begin the conversation:

- If you love your customers, set them free - ask them for as little information as possible, and let them engage when they want to. Red Hat example - webinars without forced registration - participants went up dramatically and so did leads! Don’t make people register at all if you can.

- Assume that they are as smart as you think you are. It is ok to give customers lots of choices.

- Transparency: Be honest, open, straightforward. The more the better. CoreMedia tracks their bugs in an open format. Contrasts Sun versus Cisco in terms of how difficult it is for employees to blog - not saying one is right and the other wrong, but the aggressive nature of Sun’s approach (anyone can blog - all you need to do is register and check a box which says you’ve read the policy) is very interesting.

- Self-service - let customers find what they can, without having to call you.

- Anti-marketing - be willing to live with less customer information - the information people willingly give when they contact you is so much more valuable than whatever you require.

- Websites - Your website should assume your customers are smarter than you think, and you put yourself in their shoes, you can make your site more relevant.

Dr. Willms Buhse:

Focus on authentic, personal messages - not a careful honed marketing message.

Be open for feedback - participate in the dialogue.

Change your role as VP of Marketing into Artist Management - your employees are the artists and your role is to help them to be popular.

Whatever perception your customers have - say thank you. Even if you disagree!

Collaboration in Marketing = Gather Feedback

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Discussion:
The closer you can get the customer to the people who actually build/manufacture/design whatever it is you do the better. You want to get customers to the subject matter experts.

Get employees involved, get customers closer to the experts, use PR for more formal official announcements.

Audience questions:
Collaborating with our customers - should we be incenting customers to participate - tshirts, ipods, whatever.

Can be a good idea - the main currency to use is reputation - let other users rate content contributed, gather their contributions in a profile, etc - reputation is the primary currency that matters in many of these contexts.

Audience comment - this isn’t marketing 2.0 but unmarketing. How do you help a marketing team understand the value of this, if your marketing team isn’t aligned with this vision. (Resembles the challenges in bottom up emergent collaboration in a top down command and control environment).

Audience Question: What about transparency in a professional services firm versus confidentiality or concerns about proprietary methodology, etc.

The most important thing is reputation for execution - ability to do good work consistently. Transparency will help you with that.

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