It's the Blogs, Stupid

"Blogging is forcing firms like ours to shut up and listen." says Mike Manuel in the latest interview posted over Naked Conversations, formerly the Red Couch.    If you don't listen, you WILL LOSE.

Like it or not, we are living in the next generation of marketing characterized by networks, connectivity, decentralization, easily available content and knowledge management tools, swarm attacks, memes and guerillas.  Companies would do well to learn from the lessons of the  Pentagon.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon began to adjust its thinking and infrastructure.  A decade of terrorist attacks culminating in the unbelievable horror of watching the World Trade Center's two towers collapse before our eyes, exposed our vulnerability to small cells of fanatical Islamofascists or other terrorists using easily available weapons.  The lesson the Pentagon learned at a terrible cost was expensive, high tech surveillance can not beat "humint" - human intelligence from people on the ground and in the secret cells.

The power of a networked meme shared by ordinary people changed governments in the past year.  In Georgia, the students said "Kmara" -Enough and the Rose Revolution began and resulted in honest elections in March.  In the Ukraine, it was "Pora" - It's Time and the Orange Revolution began with free elections last December.  In Lebanon, the Cedar Revolution with its "Independence 05"  banners mostly ended Syria's occupation.  Free elections in Iraq and Afghanistan were unthinkable a few years ago.  Everywhere people are speaking freely, many for the first time.  Free Iraqi blogs with a banner, "I was not living before the 9th of April and now I am, so let me speak".    What we thought was not what people in their heart of hearts hoped for and wanted.  The Arab Street is quite different from anything we had been led to believe and is now a vanquished cliche

Enough networked people speaking their minds and the result is whole countries have changed and are becoming real democracies.  It's called freedom.  And it's happening here too.  In the US, we have a political and economic democracy, but until recently, the mass media was a dictatorship of culture.  Oh, there was competition but it was ABC vs. NBC, Universal vs. MGM, the New York Times vs the Washington Post, Time vs Newsweek, Coke vs Pepsi.    Today, an attack can come from anywhere, by a single nobody on a blog, connecting to other nobodies with more information and expertise, creating together a body of facts that can topple a network news anchor like Dan Rather or a cable news producer like Eason Jordan. 

Today,  John Podhoretz writes about the democratization of the media causing a mass-media melt-down,  Hollywood, newspapers, television, talk radio and the music industry are all suffering rapidly declining audiences.  The market now speaks in a million different voices to say in countless ways they don't like what they are getting. 

Or as Hugh McLeod in the Gaping Void writes, the external conversations of the market are talking back to companies that used to talk only to themselves in self-referential internal conversations.    This is not bad news for companies, this is GOOD and IMPORTANT news.

Just as the Pentagon had to discard its MAD theory of Mutually Assured Destruction, companies are having to discard their MAD theory of Mass Audience Demographics.  There are hundreds of thousands of niches to be listened to and served and it can be done with a healthy profit.

How can a company possibly keep track of and listen to thousands of niches? 

To rework a cliche that won a Presidency - IT'S THE BLOGS, STUPID. 

If you use Technorati to follow blogs,  employ search feeds and allow corporate blogging, you've got your human intelligence.  When you comment on other blogs, you're playing court to and building relationships with other bloggers, each of whom is the tribal chieftan of its own audience.  You also have the tools to deal with blog swarms or a corporate attack.  While you have to get used to a lack of control, you get a much better grip on reality and what's happening on the ground. 

There has been an astonishing collapse of trust by Americans in traditional sources of authority.  People are placing more trust in people like themselves according to Dick Edelman and are creating their own Personal Web of Trust.  The only way to get into anyone's personal web of trust is to listen, to be real and honest, sometimes fallable, and always learning.  Most importantly, it's being on their side, not just your side.  It's being their advocates, putting their interests above yours.  It's doing well by doing good.

So get out in the countryside, listen and serve to win over the hearts and minds of the people.  They are not just wallets.  They want to be known and dealt with as the complex people they are, not just as consumers who buy products.  The reward is much bigger.  When you align with your customers, understanding where they are and what they need, and then giving them solutions to problems they have, making their lives easier, you've created customer evangelists who will do your marketing for you, just by word of mouth. 

This new generation of networked marketing is collaborative, It's Blog or Die.