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.

• Listening
• Speaking
• Caring
• Sharing
• Building relationships

Lately, I’ve been talking with a number of engineers from startups who are in Alpha stages with their products, thus they don’t currently need to generate leads/awareness/purchases, etc. They’ve got great ideas for new software and some smart engineers on board. They’ve done enough market research to know there’s a market for the type of product they’re developing, enough to convince funders. But they’re still putting the marketing horse before the cart wanting to zero in on how to do lead-gen programs.

My advice to anyone in this situation is to do a solid dive into Listening first.

1. Use online web and social media monitoring tools (many free as well as paid for options out there) and do some basic Googling and blog searching to hear what people are saying about potential competitors products. What do they like or not like about features, etc.
2. What are experts and other industry influencers saying about the best solutions for fulfilling the need or want you expect your product to fulfill?
3. Really dive into what people are talking about, outside of mentioning current brands, about the need or want they have.
4. Start figuring out who the Influencers and market conversation Participants are, how that influence manifests itself and how they like to share information and receive information. What networks and online tools do they use to communicate?

This research will start to show you who to build relationships with as you work toward having a beta to show them–these are the people you’ll want to invite into your beta initially. They’ll give you the best feedback and help you generate awareness later on if your product meets there needs and you’re good to them. The optimal marketing mix that will ultimately achieve the best lead-gen results, generate the most awareness and trials of your product and sustain you for the long-run as you tweek and add to your product come out of the initial research. So start by listening and don’t forget to hear what is being said. Oh yeah, then be sure to internalize the info you deem important.