Thanks for setting this up. It's great to get some hands on blogging experience.
It seems to me that blogs, podcasts, forums, etc. are built around special interest communities (not unlike this one). As we think about how to market to these special interest communities, I wonder what we could learn from more traditional grass roots marketing techniques?
Welcome to the GSMB Web 2.0 Blog
Feel free to post your thoughts and comments to others' postings. Or create one yourself - it's easy - just click on the 'New post' link at the top of this blog. Let Val know if you need publishing permissions: vseid@digitas.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Eric:
Good questions about grassroots marketing. My sense, and I got here from listening to Carl, is that Web2.0 IS traditional grassroots marketing, just online. Traditional grassroots is about approaching the communities your target belongs to. Want to reach African-American voters? Reach out to the Baptist churches. One congregation has a good experience and they pass you along to the next, and a member of the third church brings you to their social organization, and so on and so on. Because of that personal touch – getting your information passed through the trusted advisor (preacher) in an open environment (church), rather than through a TV – makes the contact particularly effective. But because it’s such a work-intensive model (you need to know and reach out to a lot of churches, rather than just buying TV from a couple networks who you already have contacts with), it’s never been used except for niche targets (and in politics, which is all based on free labor anyway). The beauty of Web2.0 is that it enables us to use the effective grassroots model much more cost effectively. First, there are a lot more groups than there ever were before, some communities of interest and some communities of practice. Secondly, reaching them is practically seamless – you can find them for free right on the web and most of them have an email contact.
The biggest thing we need to take from this model is that it’s a specialized media type that has a staffing model different from both advertising/direct mail and site building. Advertising and direct mail are all about waves/campaigns – make plans, make creative, deal with a small number of distribution channels (networks, websites or USPS), crank it out and hope. Site build is the same, except there you don’t even have to deal with the external distribution channel. With grassroots, the channel is the whole point. First, the channel is going to deliver the message (as opposed to TV where the channel is just carrying your message) so you need a much tighter relationship with them than you do with a network, which just wants the dough. Second, there are a whole lot more channels so you can’t centralize all the buying like you can on TV. Third, social networks don’t have seasonality like TV does. All of which means that to do Web2.0/grassroots you need to look at staffing not as a cyclical, campaign based thing, but more like a sales/relationship model. You need people who are in touch with and interacting with the communities all the time, whether there’s a launch going on or not.
Post a Comment