Marketing Backwards is a collaboration of Margie Clayman and myself. We’ve spent the past few months looking at our idea, poking and prodding it, and finally deciding it was time to announce it. Actually, neither Margie nor I are the most patient people, and, the more we saw things starting to come together in advance of the established announcement date (today), the more we wanted to share something, anything about the project.
Thus, we introduced Puffin last week. Puffin could be termed our mascot, but he is much more the bumbling guide and guardian of Margie and me as we journey down and through the idea of “marketing backwards.” While he may not receive much attention outside some antics – such as replying to comments every once in a while or providing some jumping off points or advice – he is a part of the Marketing Backwards team. He is a visual reminder of some of the ideals Margie and I seek to examine or applaud and exemplifies that business writing doesn’t have to be dry. It can be fun. It can be creative.
What, though, is Marketing Backwards? It starts with a question posed by Margie during our conversations about presenting at SXSW and her reading of Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: What if online media is turning people into robots? If that statement is true, what are the possible outcomes? How does it affect marketing and business? What about creativity? How can creativity be important if value is being placed on sheer mass and volume of content? Those were questions we posited and continue to pose along with another: “How do we get back to the more human side of business and marketing?” Our question isn’t about “humanizing the brand” or “humanizing the business”; it’s about what it means to remain human in a world that is seemingly turning into a wasteland filled with robots and automation.
Our journey can be followed at Marketing Backwards. We’re also on Twitter and Facebook.
I’ve read Turkle’s book and don’t see a real practical side in what she is saying. She leaves too much unsaid. The robot scenario she paints holds little water in reality, and doesn’t paint a picture of anything even remotely related to what I have observed. In fact, it paints somewhat of a picture in direct contrast to the research that Pew has done on “being alone” and “technology.” She falls a bit too heavily in the technological determinism camp.
KenMueller Perhaps that’s where we come in. I haven’t read the book as of yet, so I can’t really speak to it.
KenMueller Her book actually really resonated with me, Ken. I have encountered a LOT of people who turn to the online world for their sense fo well being – whether that is ego massage, confidence boosters, or feeling loved. When the online world is no longer enough, i have watched these people crumble. It is tragic. And it doesn’t take watching that too many times to realize that the world of social media can be a seductive siren if you are not careful.
We will be touching on some of that, but our main premise is actually that people are investing less of their true selves into the online world. All of the talk is “be human” but are we really? How much have Twitter conversations dissipated since Triberr and Buffer came out? Most people I know who used to be active online now have Triberr or other platforms spitting out posts they haven’t read. How is that something businesses can really use in building relationships?
We have a lot of ground to cover – Turkle’s book is just part of our muse 🙂
margieclayman I agree up to a point, but I think Turkle more than misses the mark. As many have stated over the years, technology merely magnifies our own inclinations. If there were no social media, we’d do the same things elsewhere. Technology is just the issue du jour. As a communications sociologist, and you look back, the same arguments were made in regards both radio and television.
I think those people who turn to social media for their ego boosts or well being, would do the same thing in other settings if social media didn’t exist. I have one person in my newsfeed who is an insufferable egomaniac with an opinion on everything. And sadly, he has an entire crowd of people fawning at his feet in the comments, etc. I also have the privilege of knowing people who know him in person, and have known him for a long time, and they say he is and was, the same way in person.
I’m in the process of writing the intro for a book that two friends of mine are writing. The three of us met online, but are friends “in the real world” as well. In talking to one of them, he said something that mirrored my own experience: that the large majority of his friends, the people he hangs out with and does stuff with, are people that he met first via Twitter or Facebook.
I admit, my Twitter conversations have dissipated like you sad, but that’s because I’ve taken the conversation elsewhere. Mostly to Facebook, and more recently, for a variety of reasons, to private backchannels. I use Twitter in terms of output, in the same way I use it for input. More as an RSS feed (publishing and consuming) with smatterings of conversation.
I think where we make the mistake with this is the same way that a lot of businesses make mistakes with how they approach social media: in a vacuum. We can say that someone is using Twitter “wrong” but that doesn’t take into account the overall experience. My mantra over the past year or two, and people are sick of hearing it, is that none of this exists in a vacuum, and therefore we need to integrate everything. All channels, online and offline.
By looking at how people approach one channel, or even how they use all of social media in sum total, is still only a partial picture.
So my point is, none of us invests all of our true selves in anything. When we are in groups, how we present ourselves is dictated by our role in that group; i.e. who those people are. When I go to church, there might be some aspects of my life that show up more than others, whereas when I’m at a ballgame with strangers, I might appear differently. We do ourselves a disservice if we look at one aspect of someone’s life and think we know them. It’s why I got kicked out of more than one English class in high school, when I objected to that kind of reading of literature in terms of creator and creation. But I digress…
But that doesn’t mean we aren’t being authentic or transparent. We’ve bastardized the meanings of both of those words when it comes to social media.
Me? I think, given time, social media actually makes us better people, and from a larger standpoint, better businesses, because of the connectivity, our close at hand crap detectors, and the accountability of the crowd.
Sorry for the rambling, but this is me thinking out loud.
KenMueller I think you’ll find that margieclayman and I are most definitely interested in the larger picture with social media being one part of it. Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it does bear similarities to concerns in past centuries – I was just telling Margie that something she wrote put me in mind of Swift. Turkle is one of many of our jumping off points. I think we find some of her relevance in that the online world can create a sort of numbness in much the same way that the television or the radio can. It’s this sort of white noise. We’re wondering how to break through that a long with a number of other questions. Perhaps I didn’t state the point in this piece, but the project Margie and I are undertaking is a journey. We don’t have all the answers. We just want to start asking questions in hopes of getting to the right ones.
Congratulations! I hope you and margieclayman are very successful with this effort!
geoffliving margieclayman Thank you, Geoff!