Let’s say it’s 1889 and a businessman comes to you, the consultant, and says, “I hear about this thing called the telephone. I think it’s going to be big. How can I develop a telephone strategy?” Of course, the telephone isn’t the strategy, it’s a means to an end. It’s a way of having conversations with your audience.

Like the telephone, social media can be abused. Do Not Call lists have sprung up to prevent interruptions at dinner and the general annoyance that comes from script-reading telemarketers. Social media such as blogs and Twitter may be opt-in, but it can be equally annoying to stumble upon contrived sales pitches and SEO keyword stuffed articles. Disingenuous conversations are the ones people leave.

In other words, social media is, above all, about keeping it real.

Some perspective

I’ve attended the last two CM Summits in San Francisco. For a marketer, they’re great events. The conference focuses on the changing of the guard: leaving the old school marketing techniques like direct mail, big company PR, and 1-way communication, and turning instead towards creating open dialogues with customers, creating fan sites, and generally keeping it real.

In other words: it’s not about marketing anymore, it’s about creating conversations.

Enter the JIRA

In 2003, before Facebook and other social network sites captured our collective imaginations, Atlassian built a website that allows anyone — customers, prospects, partners, journalists, etc. — to submit product bugs, feature requests, and other issues, which are visible to the entire community.

In our lingo, it’s called JIRA. Nothing was (or is) censored. While most other B2B enterprise software companies in the world spent energy obfuscating problems with their products or services, Atlassian listened to it’s customers, built a loyal fan base, won over thousands of customers, and beat most of the big-name venture capital-backed Silicon Valley companies (in fact, most of them are customers now!).

And to be clear… JIRA is a product, not a marketing tool. And yet, it has been a platform for thousands of conversations in the last 6-7 years.

One of the things I’ve learned on the job is the power of listening, and responding, and building trust (as opposed to the old school marketing of just ‘spinning’). The folks at the CM Summits call it ‘marketing’but Atlassian has called it ‘just doing good business.’JIRA has given us an incredible feedback loop, it’s allowed developers to speak directly with customers (as opposed to the typical situation where developers are locked in the basement* while the marketing types filter conversations to them), and in turn it’s fostered trust between customer and company, something that other companies have pushed aside in the name of an obfuscating public relations strategy.

Of course, this is in hindsight.

When JIRA was first being used, it was also a dog food mentality. As a product JIRA has improved immensely under seven years of heavy use, from novice and seasoned users alike. No one ever thought of it as marketing, it was (and still is!) an issue tracker.

Being transparent and open makes you vulnerable, too: there are lot of feature requests, suggestions, gripes, etc., that have not been closed out. Mike wrote about a rather infamous issue some time ago. But that’s the conversational marketing dilemma: criticism is part of being open, it’s part of winning the trust of your customers.

On the whole, JIRA has been of incredible service to the company. As Laura wrote the other day, Atlassian is surpassing $100 million cumulative sales revenue in just seven years. I have to think that that figure isn’t just based on JIRA sales, but also JIRA transparency and lots and lots of conversations.

Links:

• JIRA, the product http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
• JIRA, the “conversational marketing” site http://jira.atlassian.com

• Most of the presentations I saw were quite high-level, whereas I had hoped to hear about innovative case studies.
• The conversation with Evan Williams of Twitter was just odd and didn’t go anywhere. John Battelle asked feature/function level questions of Williams, but why devote so much time to that? Why not have asked about ways people are using Twitter to get their messages out and engage in conversations?
• The panel with Digg, SocialMedia.com, and Cisco was vague. All three speakers would have been terrific by themselves speaking in-depth about one topic, but the format diluted any message from getting through. And like everything I heard, there was very little depth.

At the end of the day, I feel Atlassian has done a better job at so-called conversational marketing by being itself: non-marketing, open, transparent, and, um, conversational. Ironically, not being marketingish has served conversational marketing brilliantly.

Repetition and annoyance.

Then he put up the title slide for his presentation: “Marketing in the post-apocalyptic, converged, fragmented, and blogrific world.” I may be missing a word; he flipped to the next slide quickly.

According to Hayden, while the rule of thumb is that money follows eyeballs, there’s a 19% gap in media spend and consumer behavior. Consumers have moved online, but advertisers aren’t there yet.

Next slide: “Mind the gap”

I think he then next talked about the influence of the blogosphere by showing Matthew Hurst’s diagram. (Hayden’s awesome description of the blogosphere: the blogosphere is savage, violent, and vast.)

He then showed some videos by Peter Hirshberg on Blogging, Big Media and the Shoe Shine Man. If the Shoe Shine guy gets it, shouldn’t everyone?

Okay, then he talked about some other things (Conversationalmedia.org, the iPhone price reduction debacle, word of mouth marketing, suggested that companies should start hiring Chief Listening Officers, said Sun was an example of a company doing a good job of listening to their customers…), but what interested me most was his discussion of ideas versus ideals.

All PR and ad firms have a philosophy. “Obliquity,” which Hayden defined to mean you make more when you mean more, seems to be Ogilvy’s.

ideas = share of mind
ideals = share of culture

The exercise they do is to fill in the blanks on this sentence: “NAME believes the world would be a better place if_______”

Some examples he cited are:

Apple: “if people had tools to unleash their potential”
Coke: “if we saw the glass as half full, not half empty”
J&J: “if people took care of each other”
Dove: “if women were allowed to feel good about themselves.”

And then a humorous example:
Lynx (makers of a deodorant that is marketed to 14-year-old boys): “if men could have sex, very, very easily.”

What big ideals teach us:

1. Do unto others as if you were the others
2. Play nice and share (the example he cited: when working with other agencies, as they often have to do these days, they get into a room with the other agencies and “tear up their business cards” because they have to put their egos and companies aside to focus on the ideal)
3. Focus on making a difference

A big ideal can keep your long tail from falling off. A big ideal gives you the prefect entry point into the conversation.

He’s exactly right. Marketers cannot hide behind hype or “stay on message” anymore and hope that that alone will sell product. That was Huckster marketing. Today, it’s about the conversation. If the company is focused on an ideal that is bigger than themselves, their message will be amplified by consumers.

And that’s a huge shift.

Later that day, Carla Hendra, Co-CEO, Ogilvy North America, did a presentation about the Dove campaign for real beauty to illustrate this concept, and I think it hooked everyone in the room. The evolution video was just fascinating.

• Cook’s bad advice to Jeff Bezos: don’t include user reviews of products and books… who would be interested in reading those? As Scott said, it was a good thing Bezos didn’t take the advice
• The three most important tasks a company should undertake:
  • Deliver a delightful customer experience
  • If you accomplish that, drive people to the web to convey their experience
  • If you do that too, then it’s possible to create other rich experiences for customers, such as Intuit’s (free) Tax Almanac.

Ask a Ninja closed out Day 1. That was when attendees got to ask THE ninja. Frightening stuff. I hadn’t watched Ask a Ninja in a while, but after seeing their presentation (my God, the carnage, the blood, the blood!), I went to their site to watch a few episodes. What a great success story of two guys going for it and making it.