Speaking to marketers recently, two ideas seem to be really resonating with people.

Digital listening

The first is that listening is as big a part of digital marketing as creating things like blogs or social networks. And there are two ways to listen: passively, reading blog posts, listening in to social networks, subscribing to consumer generated media analysis services; and actively, where you make it easy for customers to talk with you and your company, which might take the form of communities, or a more inviting way to find and contact the right person in an organization instead of just being directed to info@acme.com or customerservice@acme.com. If a company doesn’t make it easy for me to talk to a person who’s interested in what I have to say, does the company really care about listening? Probably not. The good news is that’s easy for companies to fix.

How to involve people

The second concept is that the purpose of marketing is to involve people with your organization so they can get to know you, trust you, and do business with you. What is most likely to involve people are fresh ideas, conversations, stories and entertainment that are relevant, framed in new context, and elicit emotions. Successful union organizers and educators have used this approach to involve people and children for years.

So where do social media and digital marketing techniques fit into this picture? This chart suggests which techniques are best suited to deliver on involvement. (Blogs only get half a check because some have a lot of conversation via talk backs, but most don’t.)

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