With all the social media, engagement, crowdsourcing, transmedia, and UGC sentiment flying around lately, sometimes we forget that people don’t want to have to do anything with our brands or ads. It reminds me of Your Brand Is Not My Friend but to a higher degree. Sometimes a good value prop is all we really need.

This (fictional?) situation, along with a lot of what is being pushed lately, strikes me as one of those “if you have to ask, you’ll never know” scenarios, in that if you’re trying to manufacture brand interaction, you’ll never get it. It shouldn’t be our job to beg, borrow, and steal people’s attention and time. Instead we should focus on creating an environment that encourages, facilitates, and highlights that kind of engagement.

Kid build a room full of furniture out of your FedEx boxes? Send him more and see what he can do. Start a contest and buy actual furniture for whoever builds the best FedEx box furniture.

Bros Icing Bros? Let them run with it but start a campaign encouraging people to be Brosponsible ™.

You get the idea. Now leave me alone…for some reason, all I can think about it sausages…

We are, absolutely, our own worst enemy.

Yes, us. Not the measurement issue. Not the lack of client knowledge. Not the ever-shifting landscape or the fight to be taken seriously. Us.

It happens every time we agree to ghost write a blog and pretend that we’re someone who really cares about a business. Every time we blindly recommend the full development of a blog when we’re pretty sure the client won’t be able to follow through with it anyway. We promote Twitter and Facebook fan pages when we know (and yes we do really know) that follower and fan count don’t mean that much. But hey, they’re a number we can bring back to the client!

Maybe all of this is just a reaction to the fact that “social media” as a marketing practice is coming of age in an economic downturn, and people are going to do whatever they can just to get the business. I’m not trying to take the moral high ground here either, I completely understand that situation, but where does it end? We can we stand up to the client and tell them we won’t spam tweets, or when will we stop pitching borderline strategy just so clients can say they’re “doing the social media stuff”?

Needless to say, there are always going to be smart people out there, people who push the thinking, have the client’s best interests at heart, and generally just fight the good fight. In my opinion, it seems like we could use a few more of those kind of people.

I just posted about this a little bit over at The New Necessary (my digital thoughts) and thought it was legit enough to expand on this here.

Yes, I know this is old news, etc. but it’s still pretty awesome. A lot of people have jumped on the “takes guts to be the leader” aspect of this and while it’s totally true, I like Seth Godin’s angle a little better.

Here’s my take: Yes you have to be brave to be the leader, yes it’s scary to be the first one, and yes it’s lonely waiting for everyone else, but this guy wasn’t worried about any of that. He was just trying to rock out. If people joined him? Fantastic. If not? No big deal, he’s still going to go at it just as hard.

It’s tough, when you’re doing something new, not to be concerned if everyone jumps on the bandwagon. “Guy Who Started The Dance Party” sounds much cooler than “Random Weirdo Dancing By Himself”. But in all honesty, sometimes it doesn’t matter.

We give people reasons to visit a web site. We give people reasons to tell a friend about a great product. We give people reasons to try something outside their comfort zone. We give them reasons to keep clicking through, to read the instructions, or to just pick up the box.

And while this seems simple, you’ll soon find you need a better and better reason. “Because I threw enough money at you” or “Because I interrupted so many times, you really couldn’t help it” are not going to be good enough.

It gets called different things, dressed up, and complicated, but in the end our job is simple. We have to give people a reason to do something (buy, join, act, etc.).

And when all you have is a reason, you better make sure yours is a good one.

I didn’t bring my camera with me because I knew there would be people there that were better photographers with better cameras. Which you’ll find is completely true if you check out the Flickr Group.

So I’m going to approach the whole “lessons learned” thing in the very same way. There are better writers with better blogs that can fill you in on the all the goodness. As of this writing I’d check out (if I missed you, let me know) John Wall, Amanda Gravel, CK, Steve Woodruff, Lori Magno, Darryl Ohrrt, and yes even Verdino.

But I will say this. There is absolutely no substitute for face-to-face interaction. (F2F? idk my bff jill?) No matter how great the tools get on the web, no matter how many times they let us “connect” with people, it’s all just preamble to really meeting someone.

photo credits shashi, verdino

This is a bad thing.

A lot of times little things will happen (the kid who built furniture out of FedEx boxes, or Starbucks closing their doors for a night of training), and these little things represent a big opportunity. But the problem is that most big companies can’t react quick enough to do anything meaningful about it. The bureaucracy slows them down.

Big companies need to develop a rapid response group. A small group of marketers with different talents that have a small (but actionable) budget and the ability to execute their initiatives.

You can call it the Brand A-Team, Captain Brand-it, or The Fellowship of the Brand (if you’re a nerd), it really doesn’t matter. As long as they have the right people, a small budget, and a direct line, bat-phone style, to the CMO, that’s all they need.

What do you think? What are the problems? Would this work and would you like to be on a team like this?

By now many of you have heard of Twitter, the micro-blogging/status network that’s popular with a lot of marketers right now.

Regardless of how you feel about Twitter or it’s use, you can’t deny it’s Zen quality.

When you’re using Twitter and in the “Twitterstream” you’re in. When you’re out, you’re out. There’s no searching the archives, no paging back for hours reading the comments of everyone you’re following. You have to accept the fact that the information thats happening now is the most important information there is. As they say, “The past is past, The future is yet to be”.

At first it may seem unsettling because there’s a tendency to feel like you’re missing something, like you’re out of the loop. But soon you begin to realize that everyone’s out of the loop.

Unless, of course, they’re in the loop.

Happy Twittering (and follow me if you’d like)

The above may be one of the top 10 greatest marketing statements of all time. I honestly believe that, chicken salad and all.

The message is what’s really important. We often get so caught up with what we want to do, or what we’re already doing that we never stop to just ask why?

Sure its cool to have a Superbowl commercial running, but why? Budwieser, Underarmour, GMC, I understand. But didn’t anyone at Careerbuilder or Salesgenie stop and think “Wait, are we sure this is the best use of 50+ % of our marketing budget?”

I guess not.

My first rule of marketing: Know Thyself.

Now did Dave Chapelle intend to give us a marketing lesson with that line? My guess is no, but they’re wise words none-the-less.

If you want people to share your message, to pass it along, then you need to make sure it’s in the right format.

Take the latest car insurance commercial from Nationwide, which proclaims “Switch to Nationwide and you could save like 500 bucks.” Grammatically incorrect? Sure is. Little big of slang? You bet. Sound like something almost anyone you know would say? Exactly!

It’s much easier to hear yourself saying “Hey, Brain. Did you know with Nationwide and save like 500 bucks on your car insurance? than “Were you aware than the average savings for customers switching to Nationwide for their auto insurance was 489 dollars?”

I’m not saying we should eschew all grammar and sentence structure in the name of “speakability”, but if you want people to run with your message, you better make sure it’s something they can carry.

We all talk a lot about new marketing (see blog title), conversations, engaging customers, interaction, building relationships, etc., but is that what people really want?

I don’t think so. At least not all the time.

For one thing, consider Dunbar’s Number, which says that 150 is the theoretical limit to the number of relationships any one person can maintain. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard enough time managing relationships with my family, friends, acquaintances, and co-workers, let alone companies and brands. So what happens when my sneaker or frozen vegetable brand starts jockeying for position with my good friends? Sorry Jolly Green Giant, you’re going to lose that battle.

You’re going to lose it almost every time.

And you’re not alone. Because the truth is, for any given person, there’s only an extremely small number of brands that matter enough to be on their radar. For me it’s Polo, Google, XBox, Blue Moon, eBay, and Seth Godin. If you’re not on that list, then I really don’t have the mental/emotional bandwidth for you all the time.

Keeping the capacity for relationships in mind, we need to avoid forcing a relationship on people who don’t want one. It’s similar to banner ads versus contextual advertising. Sure you can use the old “spray and pray” method, but it probably wont do much good (the average banner CTR was 0.2% in 2007). We need to figure out a way to make sure people only get something when they’re looking for it, a way to have “targeted conversation” (hat-tip Adam Snider).

Most new marketers (myself included) spend their time trying to figure out how to get their brands on people’s short-lists.

And that’s where we’re all wrong.

We’re trying to figure out a way on, but just like 30 second spots, people tune us out. Call me cold-blooded, but no matter how much my toothpaste brand tries to become a meaningful part of my life, it probably won’t happen. They can be personable, smart, genuine, and thoughtful, but in the end, they still don’t matter enough to me.

So where does that leave us? With the people that care, the people looking to interact with you, your fans.

Our focus needs to be with these people. Make yourself easy to find and your fans will find you. Make yourself easy to interact with, and your fans will interact with you. Don’t worry about everyone else, if you’re brand is good enough and you treat your fans well enough, that will bring more people around.

The trick is to take care of the right people, and the rest will take care of itself. That’s what new marketing is really about.