You can’t do everything that’s a fact, yet we try. Its a big thing for me but last year I learnt a huge lesson; distraction clutters the mind it doesn’t clear it! I spent 2010 trying to clear it. So 2011 for all of us, for all sorts of reasons needs to be about focus. We can’t afford from a cash and time perspective to go down blind alleys and avenues of little reward. Don’t get me wrong we need more ideas than we ever had before, the trick is to keep focused on the goals. I offer five marketing resolutions to guide:

1. Think about building a business community around your brand rather than a database of customers. You will need to encourage and facilitate a more participative and engaged customer in the future. Building a community will not only enable that but encourage the deep relationships you need to create. It does mean being more imaginative and creative.

2. You can’t do everything but what you can do is think about online first and offline second. In the last few years you needed an offline presence to develop an online one, its switched. Think SEO, content marketing, social media, online PR, reputation management and investing more in that website.

3. Get your messaging right. People, even in a B2B environment buy emotionally yet all our marketing literature and sales pitch is built around the physical aspects of our product/service. As there is so much ‘sameness’ out there, people are becoming increasingly interested in emotionally bonding themselves to your brand.

4. Move on from ‘customer service’ to ‘customer experience.’ There is a huge difference and its linked to building a business community. Some would argue that its the only competitive advantage we have left. We know that intense and intimate relationships with customers is of paramount importance. We have gone beyond buying customers through traditional marketing to increasing our loyal customers and that means labour intensive work on a people to people level not abdication marketing!

5. Return on investment. Not just financial returns in fact I don’t mean that. What I mean is increased customer retention, improved customer acquisition, cross and up selling, number of connections, number of interactions, number of influencers in your community etc etc. If you get those bits right, the financial returns will fall out the bottom.

2011 will be challenging. Getting the marketing formula right is a priority. Focusing on the key elements of marketing will help. Its changed radically and so does your marketing activity. That doesn’t mean doing more, it means doing the right things!

Our approach to innovation and creativity is changing in a new environment. We can create new things quicker than ever before, we can get that new product to market around the world with almost the snap of the finger and, we can via websites, market that product instantaneously.

This means new approaches, flexible processes and an openness to ideas creation many of us feel more than a little uncomfortable with. In the future, we will be creating and building communities around ideas and themes our brand is interested in and associated with. I envisage the demise of the traditional customer relationship management system. It being replaced with several ‘live’ platforms that are populated by our user base, some of which we will own and others, like Facebook, we will not.

With the development of the Internet, broadband and social networking, we can experiment, collect and curate significant communities of users who can help us create and undoubtedly play. This will mean a huge shift from the days of ‘closed innovation’ to ‘open innovation.’ This new emphasis will require new skills; facilitation and enablement, mobilising gatherings, connecting people within and across communities, providing offline and online platforms for connection and encouraging cross-functional innovation.

At their best these communities assembled around our brand will become self-organising systems. We won’t totally control the generation of our next product offering but we may facilitate the process to get it to market. There will be little timeline between design and installation/implementation. There will be fewer product/service failures, as the user group will have created it. As we grow towards mass innovation as Charles Leadbeater suggests, we will perhaps head onwards to ‘mass customisation.’

For all of this to be successful we are going to have to unlearn a lot of stuff. Become open, transparent, understand that control and power has shifted and use leadership skills rather than management ones. For it to work, we will need to be highly engaged with those communities, trusting, honest and energetic.

Innovation will not be the rigid process it was before, only arising internally in our organisation. It will increasingly and abruptly rear its head as a small community of users shout ‘eureka’ and then expect us very quickly to get it to market. So as well as recruiting ideas people, we’ll need to recruit people who can really curate these business communities by gently, subtlety and gracefully guiding them towards true and successful innovation for your brand.

I fear for social media at the moment. As the masses start their reserved adoption of social media and the ROI agenda heightens, are we not going to lose the original intent of social media? That is to engage, connect, participate and converse. Something the early adopters have found so exciting. Seriously, why is there a gripped frenzy to make money out of social media?

In the early adoption phase, the playing field tipped to an almost horizontal level as genuine and sincere conversations were abundant. I’m feeling an unnerving tilting towards money making activity now with broadcasting running through its veins now that the masses have sat up and noticed. People de sensitive to fun, human, people to people and social activity who are keen to exploit the economics of social media rather than its ecology.

For every ‘community’ with common purpose in social media, there is an opposite, someone striving to make cash. The next two years are going to be far more interesting than the last, revealing more about our society and how we have been conditioned to operate. The tension between making money and having an impact will be a ‘see saw’ battle. In an ideal world the two should be able to co exist but I’m not so sure whether we’ll see a polarisation. We have a fascination in our culture with ownership. Who owns social media? The participants and content creators or the corporates? A question Facebook will need to answer soon enough.

Perhaps, unusually I’m being cynical, or perhaps realistic? But as soon as spaces, places, people, individuals and content are seen as property, where the main value is money, will be the moment we potentially lose the true sense of social media and centralised, corporate behaviour will ensue.

I’ve been privileged to be part of the beginning of the phenomenon and will continue to engage through social media with some fascinating people and inspiring content. I’ll avoid the money making pirates who will start to steal the bounty that is people to people connectivity. I’ll remain motivated by its sincerity and occasionally buy because of peer to peer discussion. But what I’ll repulse against is the broadcast, money, de connectivity of the activity we will see more and more of as the masses stick their head above the parapet and indulge themselves in something they have been underrating for a while now.

My purpose in social media is to connect and converse, the masses had better make sure they don’t start to shout, control and broadcast to me! I’m on the ‘making an impact’ end of the continuum not the ‘making money.’ Just wanted to be clear about that!

Guns don’t kill people, people do. Computers don’t throw out crap, people do. Spreadsheets don’t truly measure success, people do. Bill posters don’t grab peoples attention, people do. Marketing doesn’t sell more, people do. Products don’t sell themselves, people do. Systems don’t get more out of people, people do. Connections don’t happen on their own, people initiate and develop them. Relationships don’t happen all by their self, people make them happen!

People make bad decisions, they make great decisions. People miff and they motivate. It’s all about people, its all about being social, its all about respect, its all about true connections. Always has been, always will be. Blaming the system is a naive, unintelligent way to go. The way we do things now in business and the communities we live in was created by people, is endorsed through behaviour by people and continues because of people.

We know the system is broken, we know it needs replacing, we know it needs to change but we just can’t bring ourselves to do it, not the masses anyway. We are so conditioned and scared. Well the more scared you are of something, the more you should embrace it. Otherwise, you are perhaps just leading an existence!

A level playing field| People rather than products| Gifts| Air of excitement| Nervous trepidation| Unorthodox thinking| Too much coffee| Not enough change| Screen time| Insomnia stimulating inspiration| Inert organisations| Flair| Straight jacket actions| Google| Creative remixing| Bags of ideas| Little impact| Trouble at the mill| Going slow fast| The miracles of innovation| The stupidity of arrogance| Making noise quietly| Fields of turnips| The lack of grace| Twitter| Inconvenient trouble| Broken promises| Plaster solutions| Launch and learn| Perfection is subjective| Ecosystems| Absurdity of naivety| The shape of business| Exploitation| The futility of resistance| Connection not networking| The significance of difference| Facebook| False profits| Fragile trust| Community not brand| A mass of individuals| So its all about intent| Linkedin| The same thing on repeat| Profit rather than being human| Initiating history| Art| The abundance of the phony| Vulnerability| Foursquare| Deep down feeling it more| Ironic expression of indviduality| Frozen relationships| Nudge advocacy| Non financial influence| The future of conversation|

I’ve said it many times “all customers are not equal.” I’ve even delivered whole seminars on the topic, but lately I’ve decided I was wrong! All customers are equal especially if you are beginning to build a business community around your brand. How exceptionally arrogant of me to think otherwise.

Customers are equal, they contribute something different to your business. The basis of how healthy your database is should not only be measured by its profit generating capabilities. The benefits some customers bring are not, and should not, be totally profit centred. Sometimes its influence, occasionally it will be knowledge, other times they will act as word of mouth operators. We need to recognise the non financial value adding aspects too.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t focus on the profit generating customers, not at all. What I am saying is that we need to be encouraging all customers to collaborate with each other to ensure the best prospects for everyone rather than pursue the short termism of money! What I have effectively been advocating is for businesses to act like faceless corporations instead of people. I’ve firmly wrapped my own knuckles!

So all customers are equal, just some may, at a particular moment in time, have more of a priority depending on the needs of the business. I accept in times of low sales, you chase the profit/cash generating ones, but its only a temporary measure, If you have an effective customer experience process in place, it means your other value givers are never forgotten and constantly engaged with you. Not all customers will bring you financial value, some will bring influential value…..and that’s just as important!