The Church of Web 2.0: fertile grounds for marketing evangelists

By Mike Hart,  Managing Editor, ViaMetric

On some level, marketing is about evangelism, about preaching the gospel of your goods/services in an attempt to create believers. In traditional marketing, that can create a number of problems since – in general – faith doesn’t come cheaply. In addition, lots and lots of marketing messages (and media) begin to look and feel the same after a while. Consequently, you often end up with a message that’s very expensive and very familiar and that doesn’t convert well. However, for a growing number of savvy marketers, the interactivity of Web 2.0 technology offers a new medium capable of delivering a new kind of message, and often at significantly reduced expenditure.

It’s one thing to have a customer-base, but it’s even better to have a group of dedicated customers who actually participate in your marketing. Web stategist Jeremiah Owyang argues that a person running a social-media marketing campaign creates those kinds of dedicated participants. In his discussion of “Customer/Community Manager” (could mean the editor of a blog in my context), he says that such a marketer “teaches the community about the company and it’s products, often in a non-invasive manner” and does so using “the tools and communication style of the community,” which he agues are blogs and other online collaborative environments. That means that a blog preaches to potential clients in a format they want to engage, and that facilitates their reception of the message.

Social media can couple with traditional marketing media to bolster your message, too. Consider the Miller Brewing Company, for example. Miller runs its own blog called Brew Blog to reinforce their brand identity, create a sense of community among consumers and even to promote new advertising campaigns, as they do in this post. Or in their words,”to give beer people daily analysis, commentary and some original reporting on the current state of the alcohol-beverage industry” (from their blog’s About page).

Similarly, Sony BMG is using a blog’s sense of community participation to streamline and consolidate their A&R submission process. Now, instead of sending demo tapes and CDs in the mail, prospective talent is required to create a sub-blog within Sony’s larger blog. The end goal is to create an online community that actively draws participants in and encourages the grass-roots, viral marketing of their own product. Sony will “use the process [of blogging] in a creative way to encourage, discover, and communication with new artists” and to create their own evangelistic campaigning (from The Blog Herald).

At it’s best, this kind of marketing evangelism puts the evangelist among the people rather than over them. As Jeremiah Owyang puts it, a Web 2.0 evangelist will be “an advocate for the customers, and will often go ‘join’ the community, rather than try to build it.” In other words, blog-marketers will preach best when they understand the needs and expectations of and when they place their message on those consumer’s level. Unlike traditional marketing, the message shouldn’t be delivered down from on high like some divine mandate. Instead, it should come from within the people themselves as in the form of an Web 2.0 community.

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