Social marketing means: let the people do your marketing. And marketing not only means advertising. Primarily, marketing means to know your market! And who does know your market better than your customers? So it seems to be obvious to let the customers do the marketing.

Trust the customer!

The problem always was: companies don’t trust the customers – however, the customers should trust the companies’ brands. In a transparent world where access to information is not limited by space and time this strategy can not work. The question is: where do customers get the information about a product and – more important – where do they criticize the product?

• On the companies’ websites (perfect, but not realistic)
• On their blogs (which is no problem, because blogs can be monitored and commented),
• In online forums (which to handle is somewhat more complicated)
• Or – at worst and what becomes more and more the case – in social networks via chat and instant messaging (which is a horror, because you can neither listen nor reply!)

Wikinomics

The only way out of this dilemma is to “wikinize” your business. Handle it like a Wiki. Don Tapscott calls this Wikinomics in his equally named book, to which I’m listen (as Audible audio book) at the present. Share your ideas with your customers, your partners and your suppliers, listen to them and they’ll provide you with new insights.

Self-experiment

We did that. We talked a lot about our ideas and concept with our friends, partners, colleagues, class mates and yes even with strangers. Everybody was so fascinated about the concept that they instantly helped us with further information, contacts, ideas and even with their spare free time.

Apropos: Thanks a lot, dear friends!

Blogversation

This blog is another instrument for us to talk to people. Blogs are conversational tools and our aim is it to establish a “blogversation”, a conversation via blog, with interested people all over the world. We already have a plenty of readers, but only a few commentators, yet. We hope to change that in the future. If you have any suggestion how to transform our blog from an informational tool into a conversational tool, let us know! We really appreciate that!

And have a good time!