OPEN

Image: A bunch of really good listeners…

In a similar vein to John Hagel’s reevaluation of what advertising is and will be in the age of networks, make sure you’ve caught Umair Haque’s HBS article on The New Economics of Brands, which jumps off from the point that the number one brand in the world, i.e., has been built without advertising itself much at all and selling advertising that is inherently more useful…

At the most basic level, instead of carpet-bombing consumers with traditional ads to build its brand – “Google is Search Done Right”, a glisteningly plastic spokesmodel tells you ad infinitum – Google makes a revolutionary strategic decision: it doesn’t actively advertise much, if at all.

That decision, in turn, opens the path to a second, even more revolutionary decision: to implicitly invest in consumers instead of advertising to them.

How do you invest in customers with your marketing. At iCrossing we’re often talking about the importance of listening as a first step.

Listening, really listening, to what people are saying not just about you but what is important to them on topics related to you – whether that’s their attitude to companies’ efforts to be more environmentally responsible, where to get the best bargains or just what constitutes good customer service – isn’t a simple thing. But it is a human thing to do, a social thing to do. Like I say, it is a good beginning. Umair Haque says this of listening:

Listening more is a radically different source of advantage than yesterday’s inert, stale brands – those were, remember, ways to compress information to be able to talk to consumers more efficiently. Listening more demands building the capacity for emotion back into the robotic industrial-era firm…

There you have it: listening is a humanising actiivty which can help brands which have sometimes had the humanity engineered out of them to start learning to behave socially in networks.

It reminds me of that brilliant analogy from Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown, who uses a cocktail party scenario a cocktail party scenario to remind us of how our social instincts are the ones to follow in a social media:

….when you first arrive, you gravitate toward the people you know, but as the evening wears on, you end up talking to guests you’ve never met before. You may be introduced by a mutual friend, or you may just introduce yourselves….

You will hit it off with some of these people, but not others. With someone who’s fun and shares your interests, you may want to develop an ongoing relationship. But when you’re caught with the guy who talks, incessantly, about himself or his stamp collection, you’ll probably want to escape as soon as you can. And you may approach a few people who appear promising, but after a few minutes, you conclude that they have nothing to say.

But bringing something of interest or value is just the “price of entry.” A brand needs to reach out to people, not sit and wait for people to seek it out. It needs to initiate conversations, not just react to them. And of course, that’s the trap for most brands. They confuse social media with traditional communication channels, and they do what they know: talk atpeople instead of with them.

Being a good conversationalist is as much about being a good listener as having something interesting to say, in an engaging way. It’s certainly the best place for people to start… in fact not listening would be, well, anti-social.