Supernova2008 just wrapped up this past week. If you’re not familiar with this conference, you may learn more at conversation hub. Last year, Umair Haque (Bubble Generation), Liz Lawley (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jerry Michalski (Sociate) engaged the audience in a lively and insightful summary. You may watch the video that closes the interactive loop here.

As I listened to these passionate interpreters extrapolate from the experience, a few points jumped at me:

Access is ubiquitous - access to capital, relationships, resources.

Things get better the more people use them - these are betters, not goods.

All of your metrics are crap (they do not look at measures of devotion) - eyeballs and buckets don’t tell you the details about what matters and what’s going to be successful.

We don’t have a culture of getting good data - we have data filtered through the people who often have the least reason to give us accurate information.

Backchannels matter - at the event and to your business. If you’ve failed to engage, you will know because the backchannel will boycott you and join another conversation.

We need to pay attention to humans - we need to make things available to customers. They are people in their normal lives, not consumers, targets, or impressions.

Silence has value - we talked about how silence has a sound and a place at Conversation Agent last year.

Purpose beats profit - craft a strategy by who and why and bake that in the DNA of your business.

Your company can be a platform for customers to remix - firms are one economic component. The others are networks and community.

Plastic beats specific - today the economy is made up of plastic things. Things that can be duplicated and remixed and tweaked and hacked into in many ways.

If relationships are liquid, flows beat assets. How do you harness the power of these new forces for your business? Ask ourself, is there a DNA build underneath these technologies? How does what you do provide an experience, how does it make your customers feel? That is the component that is game-changing, not the technology.

The other week, I attended KOOZA, an experience in intense storytelling by Cirque du Soleil. It was the shortest two and half hours I ever spent - that’s because I invested them. My return was a full immersion in the passion and joy of the actors and athletes who shared the product of their love for the art of movement and skill. Plus one insight.

The Juggler

Who could not identify with someone handling multiple items at the same time? Let’s do five, then seven, how about nine? The speed and agility were truly impressive, I think I did not hear a blink in the tent. Yet, the most impressive part of the performance was the smile on his lips.

He was not acting as the juggler, he *was* the juggler. An expression of radiance and an act of love. The rapid-fire movements only added charm and elegance to his performance. There were no boring repetitions, just grace and enchantment.

Can you?

Can you look at your products and services in the every day routine with the same kind of attention?

Can you deploy the same kind of concentration while under pressure to deliver?

Can you display the same level of passion about what you do?

Then you are a creator - of product, price, place, promotion; of experience.

There is Love in Creation

In marketing 2.0 experience is key. When you open the door to conversation, what comes through is your stance, the smile on your lips, the belief in your mind, the love in your heart. That is the passion that triggers participation, inspires empowerment and leads to purpose, the four Ps of new marketing.

How do you learn to love the stuff you market? In the same way you learn to embrace the marketplace for the stuff you’ve got: by letting your customers be part of the action. They call it 2.0 for a reason - you are the second, they are the first.

[The Juggler is at about minute 5:30 of this 7:36 minute video]

I was looking over the posts on this blog and realized that we are asking a lot of questions. We’ve covered a great deal of ground in a short span. Some would say it wasn’t fast enough. After all The Cluetrain Manifesto was published in 1999 - well, it’s still very much news today.

Others tend to take the new ways for granted. Chances are that some of those others are your customers. Thanks in large part to the downsizing, right sizing and readjustments that are still going on in corporate America:

“Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.”

Thank you, Web. As marketers, many of us are starting to ask a series of good questions:

• Is the mobile Web dead?
• What is the role of corporate marketing in multi-brand environments?
• Can a community be successful with low brand awareness?

Does the answer to those questions matter to us as customers? I started challenging myself to answer this last question every day at work. What do you think?

Harvard Business School professor John Quelch once said “The purpose of marketing… should be geared to changing and reinforcing customer actions rather than customer attitude.” I recently revisited this quote and feel it still holds true. But in the age of social media, it is likely to come under siege.

Within his quote is the idea that we as marketers need to focus on driving fundamental shifts in customer behavior. Using tactics like pay per click advertising, you can effectively do just that. One well-placed Google AdWords can get prospects to engage in the exact behavior you want them to! It’s short. It works. And John would be pleased!

Other forms of media, however, can no longer deliver a captive audience. Customers and prospects have plenty of reasons to dislike media these days: irrelevance, interruption and just plain clutter.

But now factor in social media. The media balance is shifting from push to pull. Content creators represent 13% of all U.S. adults online. That means command and control of exact behaviors just gets harder every day.

So to think marketers can really affect customer behavior with social media is a dangerous idea to hang your hat on these days. Sure, marketers can perhaps influence behaviors with forms of social media like communities. But to me, it seems like we are getting further and further away from where Professor Quelch was directing us.

What’s your view?