In a post on my own blog yesterday, I wrote about how companies should not think about how to leverage social media as a new channel for doing marketing, but instead realize how social media has transformed the marketing game. I promised to expand on the topic and decided it made more sense to move the conversation to the marketing 2.0 community so we can continue this discussion until way after this post will have disappeared below the fold.

In yesterday’s post I said:

Social media is what transformed the rules of marketing. By providing a platform of participation to your employees, customers and prospects, social media has changed the fundamental pillars of the marketing game. Not only have the rules of game changed, so have the players, the scope, the tactics and the added values - to use the game theory elements of the game.

I further said that the end goal of marketing - creating a customer - had not changed.

Let’s take a quick look at the different elements of the marketing game and how they changed.

The New Rules

1. People do not want to hear from companies anymore
2. People want to hear from other people

Some people will argue that this has always been like that, and they are right. The problem is that prior to this platform of massive participation called social media becoming commonplace, you could not hear from other people in a scalable way - and so you had to listen to what companies were telling you.

The New Players

• Customers
• Employees
• Prospects

Except for competitors not being on the list, it sounds like the old players - doesn’t it?

The difference is what Clay Shirky calls “here comes everyone” in his latest book - which is a must read if you are in marketing. It is not just the employees that are in your direct line of command who are playing key roles in your decision making processes, it is all employees. And it is not just your largest customers, or those you pay to advise you, who will participate in your decisions - it is all of them, including people who have not yet bought from you.

The New Scope

The scope of marketing for many old school marketers was everything pre-sales. Many corporate marketing executives are not even in charge of product innovation - where you bring the voice of the customer back into the process of defining your next offer.

The new scope of marketing is everything pre-sales all the way to post sales customer support and new product innovation. And that for global tribes of people who talk to one another instead of just those who bought from you.

The New Tactics

• Business communities
• Social media & social networks
• People-speak and authenticity
• Speed of response

Those are big changes in how marketing departments will have to think and work in order to create new customers. No more corporate-speak, no more interrupt-based marketing programs, and no more targeting. It is now all about attracting customers, building relationships and trust by helping them and letting them help one another, and leveraging the tribal nature of people.

Is this how the marketing tactics should have been all along? Absolutely! But how many companies were doing that when they did not have to? Almost none.

Now they will have no choice if they are to survive.

The New Added Values.

• People’s attention
• People’s trust
• Talent in employees and customer champions
• Externalized business process that include employees, customers and prospects
• Retell-able stories to market with you customers instead of at them

So out are the switching costs, the better mousetraps, the big advertising budgets, marketshare and other added values that determined your marketing competitive value in the marketplace before social media shifted the power away from companies and into individual’s hands.

Summary

So while the end goal of marketing has not changed, the game you play to get to that end goal has forever been transformed. You can argue that whatever marketing 2.0 becomes is what marketing should have been all along, as I did before, but the reality is that for most companies it never was like that because they did not have to.

And the changes that need to happen are so fundamental that many will not make it.