Following the great content from BlogOn and the buzz about the infamous Forbes article, I've been struggling with sharing, with my fellow marketers at Petro-Canada, how to understand and respond to consumer-generated media.
I realise now that I (like Dorothy) never really needed to look any further than my own backyard. A former colleague of mine (and very smart guy) Michael Fergusson has said it best: Don't butt in! A more context-ful quote:
Most marketing people I meet are frightened and confused by the explosion of user-generated content. It turns their whole world inside out and they don't know how to make heads or tails of it. They feel like they've walked into a room full of strangers all involved in deep conversation and they don't know how to butt in.
[...]
So, the moral of the story? Don't butt in. You can't control this conversation - it's not yours to control. Buy them a drink so they don't need to break the flow of their conversation. Give them a place to talk, give them something to talk about; make it compelling and you will be at the heart of it more surely than if you crash the table and break the spell.
Exactly.
This then leads to conversations about issues of brand control and brand democratization. It's not a company's brand anymore. It's a customer's brand. Customers are the ones who imbue a brand with meaning. As a marketer I can pay attention (repeat: I can pay attention) to what expectations a customer brings to my brand and what experience they take away from it -- but it is still *their* expectations and *their* experience. And the customer is moving faster than we are.
Hugh MacLeod from Gaping Void illustrates it best, I think (so much so that I ordered a set of Street Cards with this design)
Hi, my name is 
