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I’ve been blissfully married for quite a while now but I still remember this specific date from hell: She was gorgeous. She had the same interests than me. And through a mind-numbing dinner, she only talked about herself. Her concerns. Her dreams. Her life. Never asked a question. Never engaged. Never showed any interest in me.

Does that remind you of your brand’s social media presence?

Broadcasting messages about yourself is fine for specific channels. It’s not acceptable for social platforms. It continues to astonish me how many companies still apply the broadcast model to a non-broadcast medium. Blasting messages through their bullhorn at a cocktail party. Where is the Social Media Security Force when we need them?

If a friend asks you if he should buy a BMW or Mercedes-Benz, would you send him a glossy brochure? Would you annoy him with special offers, sweepstakes and spam emails?

Of course not.

Somehow, when people put their marketing hat on, they lose some of their humanity. That marketing hat must have secret powers because suddenly it’s okay to target people, spam them, annoy the living daylights out of them. Once the hat is off and the office door is closed, the same people go home, regain their humanity and are as annoyed about these marketing tactics as all the other humans not wearing a marketing hat.

The simple truth is, Social Media is not a new channel. Social Media changed the rules of the marketing game: New players, new strategies, new tactics, new values. Too many brands are trotting out the Vince Lobardi’s Green Bay Packers and their playbook from 1961 and try to compete with today’s New Orleans Saints. Just to be guaranteed a total beatdown.

The purpose of a business and its marketing remains unchanged: create a customer. The way to achieve this goal has dramatically changed and is evolving as we speak. Brands need to understand these new rules, the new players and the new playbook.

Frankly, it’s not that hard. Just leave your marketing hat off and be human. Help people. Add value. Give. Build brand karma.

My date from hell cost me $100 and, more importantly, 2 hours of my life. Being a date from hell on social platforms will cost you customers for life.

I was just reading Nicholas Carr’s “The Big Switch”, especially intrigued by the chapter discussing Edison and Insull. As a brief reminder:

Unlike many inventors, Edison didn’t just invent individual products; he created entire systems. This sets him way above lesser inventors who focused on products first before they tackled integrating these new inventions into the overall system. Edison first imagined the whole, then he built the necessary pieces, making sure they all fit together seamlessly. Edison talking about the vision of his electricity system:

“It was not only necessary that the lamps should give light and the dynamos generate current. but the lamps must be adapted to the current of the dynamos, and the dynamos must be constructed to give the character of current required by the lamps, and likewise all parts of the system must be constructed with reference to all other parts, since, in one sense, all the parts form one machine.”

To develop this system, Edison had to pursue technological breakthroughs in every major component of the system. He had to pioneer a way to produce electricity efficiently in large quantities, a way to transmit the current safely to homes and offices, a way to measure each customer’s use of the current, and finally, a way to turn the current into controllable, reliable light suitable for normal living spaces. And he had to make sure that he could sell electric light at the same price as gaslight and still turn a profit.

Despite his visionary genius, Edison couldn’t see beyond his licensing and components business. It took an employee of Edison, Samuel Insull, to perfect the economics of the technological system. What Insull understood was that utility-supplied electricity could serve a far greater range of needs than it had up to then. Electricity could become a true general purpose technology, used by businesses and homeowners to run all kinds of machines and appliances. But, for electricity and electric utilities to fulfill their destiny, the way power was produced, distributed and consumed would need to be transformed. Insull’s biggest challenge would lie in convincing industrial businesses that they should stop producing their own power and instead buy it as a service from central plants.

Which brings me to VRM.

Doc Searls just posted a few blog posts, discussing the state of VRM. Check them out here, here, here and here.

We’re in the early stages of VRM. In Edison terms, we’re about to invent indascent light. We’re still far away from developing systems and even further from integrating these systems for Fortune 500 companies, dramatically changing their business model. That leaves us with some time to think through and discuss what systems need to be developed to make this a smoother transition. Much smoother than the disruption experienced in the music and overall publishing industry.

Advertising/Marketing

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, global ad revenue will climb to a half trillion dollar business by 2014. That’s a lot of revenue. A lot of jobs. And, even more important, deep integration into the overall fabric of our global society. What will happen to all of that when VRM takes off and becomes the dominant expression of the marketplace? What will advertising transform into? How can advertising support the VRM concept? Doc Searls states that “the amount of advertising that does nothing for customers is usually close to one hundred percent.” (I don’t agree with that statement at all. Good advertising still delivers value to people and creates demand. And always will. Unfortunately, good advertising is rare these days.) How, as a community can we bridge this gap between Doc Searls statement and the advertising industry? I’m concerned that pushing advertisers into a partisan corner might lead to obstruction and pointless territory fights. Instead, we should work collaboratively with advertisers how to make the VRM model work for each stakeholder.

It might be my own bias as a life-long marketer but I don’t believe the attitude “Marketing messes everything up” is productive and won’t get us where we want to be.

Sunk-Cost Fallacy

Rob Knight wrote brilliantly about the challenges of persuading companies happy with the current Status Quo to consider VRM as a viable concept. Larger enterprises have invested billions in CRM systems they expect to improve their ROI for decades to come. Executives have put their career on the line believing in these systems, convincing boards to spend a pretty dime. For VRM to become more than a niche concept, we need to convince Fortune 50 companies to buy into this concept. We can’t just rely on small companies with limited resources for CRM systems to create a groundswell that will force global enterprises to participate. We have to develop systems that help CRM-centric enterprises to transition into the VRM world. For many companies, Social Media was just another Second Life until the big boys (Ford, Best Buy, etc.) showed up. Doc Searls makes a good argument that VRM gives CRM systems more to relate to, and we’re not fighting a religious fight of CRM vs. VRM. Still, as we experienced with the advent of digital marketing and its challenges to be a partner on the marketing table, there are struggles ahead with people staying on the pure CRM side as long as they can. And we should be prepared for it.

Human Nature

One of the pillars of VRM is the ability of individuals to take charge of their data instead of managing them via a platform and exchanging that data for the functionality that the platform might provide. For VRM to succeed, adoption rate has to be huge. And that concerns me. We rely a lot on the willingness of individuals to participate and co-create these new systems. Let’s not forget: intelligent people post their full birth date on Facebook and check frequently on Foursquare into their own homes. My point: We can’t just rely on the individual. We have to take into account human nature which often includes laziness and carelessness. We need to invite anthropologists and behavioral psychologists into the discussion and allow them to help us in the effort. Some of this will happen organically since the VRM discussion starts to flare up more and more. But some organic planning for a more collaborative development wouldn’t hurt.

Warren Bennis once said:

“Innovation – any new idea – by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience.”

Right about now, we need the courageous patience of Samuel Insull.

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It’s tragic but true: Seduction is never easy when you’re seducing someone you actually like. When we fall in love with someone, we see them in the light of perfection. When we seduce a person we don’t really like, we put on the seduction mask, and desire to elicit a sense of inferiority.

Over the decades, most companies have shown all of us that they really don’t like people. They try to push them away with phone trees, form letters, and bureaucracy. People perceived to be inferior and felt the need to lie or take on a different persona to deal with companies. A soft-spoken person can turn into a raging tyrant after 20 minutes on hold.

With the advent of social technologies, people feel they regained some of their power back and that makes it harder for brands to seduce. Resulting in an emerging demand for transparency. People want to understand what companies are standing for, they want to share values. Ultimately, they want companies to love them and see them as equals. Not as inferior targets.

Too many brands are still using the seduction formula. Since seduction is a form of acting, brands need to have a concept of the audience’s expectations, understand what people will want to hear. The age-old problem with seduction aka advertising is that brands often don’t know what the audience will actually be touched by. More often than not, we guess why people fall in love with us. And brands are as clueless. It might be time for brands to put away the seduction masks and use the ultimate trick: be yourself.

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Comparing my friends in real life and friends in my Social Graph, I had an interesting revelation: most of my “real friends” are outwardly similar to me. We have common interests, tend not to be very interracial, multicultural or intergenerational. My Social Graph, on the other hand, is a totally different game. I find myself exchanging thoughts and feelings before even acknowledging, even less caring about skin color, gender or age. I have people in my network young enough to be my kids and significantly older than me. I hear from atheists, evangelists, wing-nuts, unemployed, independently wealthy – you get the point.

This is especially true for new platforms. When I first discovered Twitter, I just followed anyone that sounded remotely interesting. Over time, social networks start to develop specialized groups (at the worst, cliques) the longer these platforms are around, and the more time communities had to develop. That might be the reason why networks die over time: communities become stale and too much like our real-life networks.

Fresh networks help me to build relationships I never dreamt of when I grew up in a small in town in Germany with two TV network channels, a few awful radio programs and a fading signal from the Armed Forces Network. (Have you ever listened to the Super Bowl at 3am on the top of your house in 35 degrees because that’s the only place you could get a decent signal? Well, I did.)

Interactive Marketing is too often defined as selling things. The real potential of interactive marketing is relationship building – whether it’s groups of unbelievably loyal consumers sharing information, companies supporting online events and services that people use, making useful information available (not shilling information to sell) or interacting directly with consumers. The goal of each brand in the interactive space should be to give people choices. Nobody wants to be told what they want and what to do. The moment the ‘Mute’ button was added to the remote, people used it to have a conversation during commercials. When DVR’s started to become ubiquitous, people started to skip commercials altogether. And we got even more sophisticated when display ads reared their ugly head: We just became blind to them. No technology needed.

Besides some outliers, most marketers have accepted the rules have changed. But, we still play the outdated demographics game of trying to squeeze people into little boxes and messaging to them with even smaller messages. When traditional media reigned supreme, brands like Lexus targeted affluent professionals in their late 30’s and early 40’s. Print, TV and Radio could deliver that audience on a silver platter.

In the new marketing reality, I would rather build lexusbook.com or mylexusspace.com (I was never good at naming things) and connect with the fanatics of my brand. Develop relationships. Develop a community. Develop the brand through people.

Rather than lamenting the demise of traditional marketing and decline of performance metrics, brands need to grab this opportunity by the horns. The glass might be half-empty for selling things through marketing. But it’s overflowing for building relationships.