The Distributed Grassroots Marketing Team: Letting Your Community, Advocates, Evangelists, and Fans Do the Heavy Lifting moderated by Marnie Webb, featuring panelists Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt, and Chris Messina speaking at the NetSquared Conference 2006.
People have been trying to harnass the power of the successful viral marketing campaign by encouraging people to spread the message themselves. This technique was served to great effect for environmental causes with the (anti) Chevy Tahoe campaign, which generated a lot of buzz to the effect that environmentalists had turned Chevy's marketing on itself. However, it's an open question as to who took advantage of whom. Did Chevy's marketers actually expect this to happen? How could they not anticipate it? And who gets the last laugh? Surely, more people heard about the Chevy Tahoe thanks to the environmentalists, just like you're reading about it right here and now. And one might argue that the environmentalist community was never going to buy Tahoes anyway, so nothing lost there for Tahoe, but by getting their ad campaign in the general press, the environmentalists ended up selling a bunch of SUVs. Moral: A virus is not only hard to control but hard to understand in terms of unintended consequences.
Two recent campaigns that certainly did not backfire were SpreadFirefox and the outreach for the first BlogHer conference. These efforts reached large audiences, without expending large advertising budgets. According to the Pinko Marketing Manifesto, you have to believe in your product or message, and then let those with the passion go spread the word for you. Give the power of communication away, don't try to control it.
Presented by NetSquared in collaboration with Link TV.
Funding of Link TV's video coverage provided by:
Surdna Foundation Leland Fikes Foundation Care2.com
Bio
Elisa Camahort
Elisa Camahort: is the co-founder of BlogHer LLC, and its President of Events & Marketing. BlogHer is now the number one guide to women bloggers, and its initiatives include a blog network, online community, consultancy arm, and conferences, including BlogHer Conference '06, taking place this July in San Jose, CA. A marketing executive with 16 years of experience in Silicon Valley, Elisa opened her own high-tech marketing consultancy, Worker Bees, after a successful career in the cable broadband sector.Camahort has been published numerous times and has extensive public speaking experience, most recently regularly presenting on the What, Why and How of Blogging to various technology and marketing organizations.
Tara Hunt
Tara Hunt: has been in online marketing for the past seven years, has run her own company (RogueStrategies) and, most recently, hails from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her blog, Horsepigcow, covers topics such as marketing, living the online life, 'web2.0', social software, technology theory, feminist theory and consumer advocacy...amongst the other mishmash of topics.
She is also a contributor at One Degree (Canadian Online Marketing Blog), at Newtopia (activist zine) and is a member of the Web 2.0 Workgroup. Consequently, Miss Rogue's undergraduate degree was in Communications and Culture.
Chris Messina
Chris Messina: has worked on Flock, Spread Firefox, CivicSpace and other open source projects and is currently consulting for Adaptive Path and other Silicon Valley startups providing strategy and vision with, hopefully, a dose of reality.
In his free time, Chris works on his hobby -- open source world liberation -- including Bar Camp, Mash Pit, Coworking and WineCamp. "Open source -- because I want control over my life, my time, my future, my present. And it seems like other people should have that control, too." And as much as possible, he spends whatever remaining time he has with Miss Rogue.
Marnie Webb
Marnie Webb is the Vice-President of Knowledge Services of CompuMentor. She manages 25 technology activists tackling systemic nonprofit technology issues.
Webb works with her team to orchestrate a series of goal-oriented community-wide engagements that help nonprofits, technology consultants, and mentors engage with one another, solve systemic technology problems, and build technology capacity.
Marnie is also driving a CompuMentor project to understand how weblogs and related technologies can be used by individual organizations and by the nonprofit sector to promote social change. She blogs on technology, serendipity, and social change at ext337.
Marnie is one of the founding members of the Nonprofit Emerging Technology Exchange and an organizer of the NPTech tagging experiment. She is also a frequent speaker on topics involving nonprofits and technology.
I love the BlogHer idea of organizing conferences for women bloggers! Yes, it is so true that at many conferences there are less than 10% women. I am so tired of that being the case!
I hadn’t realized that Americans lag far behind Asians in internet use. According to Zuckerman, 36% of internet users are from Asia, compared to only 23% from North America.
It is amazing how the internet has empowered grassroots movements like “citizen journalism.†I would have been interested in learning more about methods to assess the accuracy of sources produced by individuals on the net. Even a resource like Wikipedia—which is absolutely wonderful—has at times been criticized for not having stringent enough standards.