I had several great conversations over the past couple of weeks with Ooga Labs‘ people. Very interesting company. They are:

… a group of software engineers and designers developing several consumer Internet businesses at the same time. We come up with the ideas ourselves, and once a company finds its product/market fit, we might raise outside capital for it. We like to build digital consumer services that have a chance to touch tens of millions of users and make the world a little better than it was.

They have several cool properties already (PlacePop, MedPedia and WonderHill) and are about to launch a new one soon. I’ll leave it to them to announce what their new property is, but I’ll add my 2 cents–it’s going to be very cool.

Anyway… After meeting with them, I doubt they’ll mind my putting these words in their mouth–they probably define marketing in the 4-letter word sense. I can’t blame them. There is a lot of reasons why marketing has gained this reputation, even though there are a lot of great things that marketing professionals have done to positively increase their customer view of them.

What do you do when your profession starts to be viewed this way? What all do people with this view see as “marketing”? Do they realize that marketing is more than advertising? Many don’t. Many think that marketing is trickery–a plot to get people to buy stuff they don’t want or need. Unfortunately, there are companies that operate that way. But we marketing professionals have a choice. You can step up and say, “Marketing (as a 4-letter word) is dead. The conversation, the customer and audience engagement, the honest interaction, the straight-forward information, and the genuine listening and caring about what people need and want is King. Long live the conversation!”

As a marketer, to adopt this mind set and make it effective as an approach for your company/clients it may mean going back to your business and marketing plans. You may need to alter, adapt or amend your brand identity and certainly you’ll need to embrace some new technologies to allow your customers to freely communicate with you (2-directional conversation). You’ll need to release some control over your message and embrace what your audiences say, both good and bad, and face them head on.

The best advice I can give you is to jump in and start listening to the marketing industries market conversation. There you’ll find out the disappointing news of diminishing Return on Investments for many activities, but also the incredible upside of emerging tactics. As a starting place here is my Twitter Marketing Conversation List. Check it out. You don’t need to spend oodles of time participating if you don’t want to, but listening to what people are talking about, sharing and exchanging of ideas will jump start you into a new way of approaching your profession.

5 Suggestions to Help You Be Successful with Social Media (with little money and/or few resources)

1. You don’t need to boil the ocean–it’s not necessary to have an account or fan page or profile on every single social network. Figure out where your customers and potential customers are. Often the best place for you to engage in the online conversation is in smaller niche networks/communities. This site might help you research. http://sites.google.com/site/socialmedialistproject/networks
2. You don’t need to spend a lot, but you’ll want to spend some money to create a plan on how to participate. Social networks and online communities are usually free to sign up, but you don’t want to waste a lot of time figuring out which network or community to get involved with if you aren’t familiar with them and once you’re set up, you need a plan for what to say, when to say it, who to listen to, how to respond to questions and mentions, etc. so that it actually benefits your business. I recommend hiring a consultant to help you do this.
3. You don’t need to spend a fortune on social media applications or tools. There are many free social media management, engagement and research tools available. Check out my Delicious bookmarks for Free SM Monitoring tools, SM research tools, and see the Social Media Project wiki for other 3rd party tools and social media locations.
4. Be sure to keep the 5 keys to conversation participation in mind:
   • Listen to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalize what you hear to improve your business.
   • Speak to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
   • Care about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs.
   • Share your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
   • Build relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.
5. Spread the work out among more than one person. As a small company or non-profit, you don’t need a full-time person to make social media efforts work. Many of the social media management tools, even free ones, will allow you to create logins for multiple people and assign tasks to different people. Encourage your staff to help spread your word. Talk about guidelines for speaking out so that you’re all on the same page. I’ve set up CoTweet for a couple of small companies and non-profits. It works great for them to manage their Twitter stream.