“2. There are six billion people in the world. Even if your market is hand-made spoke shaves for left-handed woodworkers, there are more people in your market than you can ever hope to track down.”

I’ve been working on a 24PageBook called Learn To Market, Fast. It’s my distillation of what I’ve learned about marketing in the past three years or so. My grandiose vision is that you throw out everything you think you know about marketing and focus on two things: your reputation and reaching out to people who are publicly seeking a solution for a problem that you can fix. Your reputation gets you in the door and your response to their problem gets you the business. Simplistic? Yes, when compared to the arcane brand strategy mumbo-jumbo marketing and ad agencies are pitching. They offer secret sauce in a world where nothing is secret.

The best thing about this 24PageBooks project is the discovery that subjects like this, which have had millions of words written about them over the years, can be distilled down to a brief format without really losing much, if anything. My approach is to show a business owner exactly how to do marketing in a socially connected world, regardless of the size or kind of business they have. And I’ve discovered a measurement for the success of that marketing, a very concise measurement based on some serious research by a guy named Frederick Reichheld. More about that shortly. The book should be out in a few weeks if I can pull my business partner Mike out of the sea of work he is swimming in.

Naming things is hard. I’ve been paid to create business and product names over the years and it is a big challenge. A great name must be unique, memorable, protectable and compelling. For a business it also really cannot be a common word or phrase. When you add in the need to own the name as a dot com URL you really narrow the field. Buying your URL has become a start-up expense for many businesses and it can get expensive.

Because my start-up is a project rather than a typical business, my title needs are a little different. The need to find a new title has worked out however because it helped solve another issue that came up. I was given input by a publishing insider that using the words ’social media’ in the title and sub-title was a problem as there are a rash of books out there on the subject. This jibed with my thinking as I’m increasingly realizing that social media is just a piece of the revolution, albeit a significant one. So right now my draft title and sub-title is: Real Time: Redesigning Your Business for a Socially Connected World.

Disclaimer: This title is subject to change at any time!

Franke is a designer who started out blogging a few years ago when she and her husband decided to sell their SUV and go carless. Her blog posts combine great illustrations with an almost comic-like personal story backed by the facts. The blog started to get a lot of attention which led to a book, Bothered By My Green Conscience (New Society Publishers 2009) and a growing reputation as an environmentalist.

Franke’s use of personal experience to tell stories and distribute them via social media demonstrates the power of viral story telling to drive change on a global basis. As I write this, Franke is in Copenhagen for the World Climate Summit.

I’ve been looking for a start-up to get involved with in 2010. I’ve also been working on a book proposal. It dawned on me that the book proposal is my start-up. The proposal is a business plan. The literary agent is a business development person. The publisher is both an investor and the distributor. I am the founder, developer and chief marketing officer.

The book is called The Experience Architects: How Social Media Visionaries Are Redesigning the Way We Do Business. It is about people and companies that understand the positive potential of social media and are using that potential to completely revamp the way their businesses operate- on all levels. It is not about companies stumbling into social media because of some PR catastrophe nor is it about self-described social media gurus who have never actually changed a company with their knowledge.

Because the book is about entrepreneurs, it made sense to me to treat it and its related ‘products and services’ as a business. Once this concept clarified in my mind it made putting the proposal together a much more intuitive process. It also made me realize that my marketing plan consisted of a simple concept: Drink The Koolaid. In other words, use the Experience Architecture concept to build buzz about the book, to research resources and people to talk to, and to virally get others excited. So you’ll be seeing a lot of social media activity around this subject.

In addition to the proposal (business plan) I have written a social media ‘blueprint’ consisting of a set of 30 action items that will build a fully integrated social engagement for the ‘business’. I’ll be sharing that plan, open source style, here over the next month.

If you know someone who has redesigned their business (any size, any type, any location) because of social media please connect with me via MartinEdic.com.

A prominent college professor interrupts one of his doctoral students three times during his first major presentation at a prestigious conference, effectively bullying him in public. The professor’s behavior makes many participants angry and/or uncomfortable.

Prior to social media this professor, who is a leading expert in his field, might have pissed some people off but it would probably not have affected his overall professional reputation. This time, however, those angry observers are Twittering their anger in real time. Bloggers who cover his subject matter Retweet and Post about the incident. Others who have been the subjects of this person’s arrogant behavior recount their experiences and the word spreads.

This is where it gets interesting. All of this chatter is on the ‘permanent, public record’, and it is searchable forever. Anyone considering working with this guy is going to Google him and get a sense that he has a reputation for being a cretin. His true reputation is revealed.

This is a true story. The individual, who was a Director of a prominent program in his field, was recently asked to step down. I doubt he has any idea why his reputation has suffered.

Back to marketing. Your brand can be that individual. If there are problems with your product or the way you treat your customers, your brand reputation will be tarnished permanently (unless you address those problems meaningfully and in as close to real time as possible).

Note three things implied in that last paragraph:

• Marketing no longer controls the message
• Product development and quality are integral to marketing (reputation)
  
• Customer experience is integral to marketing (reputation)
  

In social media product development, customer service and communication are inextricably bound up with each other. Companies should no longer run these as separate business functions. The only way to ensure that your brand reputation is respected is to be holistic about every aspect of the public response to your brand and products.

Update: Facebook has 300 million users and is now making money.

That’s a good question and I think I can partially answer it. Facebook is all about real time. You literally can’t save things that are hours or even days old without a lot of searching. It’s a stream, not a content manager. So when you need to store content that you and others want to recover in the future, FB is probably not the place.

Facebook Groups and Pages are quasi-websites that can be information sources but they are not searchable by the engines and you must join to get updates- so they don’t replace conventional websites. My recent project for an area business association was built on a wiki platform as that was the easiest way to handle the type of info it distributes. I was asked about a Facebook Page for them and we may do one just for event announcements- and embed it into the wiki site.

Though it isn’t perfect as an informational site or a transactional site, Facebook is rapidly becoming the point of entry onto the web for many, many people- a sort of infinitely expandable portal. If they can’t build a major business around that they should give me a call!

Money quote:

“I’m going to quote a competitor to Mediapost, Advertising Age, but its packaged-goods reporter, Jack Neff, said it best: “BlogHer helps solve the mystery of how marketers will manage to spend money on social media despite showing relatively little interest in ads on Facebook or MySpace and the numerous free opportunities available everywhere.”

Neff than goes on to quote Jill Beraud, the Global Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, who explains that wooing the mommy bloggers is a long-term ROI effort. As for the entire roster of advertisers at BlogHer, it reads like a who’s-who of the blue chip: Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Gymboree, Unilever, Kodak.”

Last night I went to our local social media club get-together. We had a good turnout and there were no gurus there. A few job seekers, the CMO and Brand Communications Directors for a major consumer brand company, some consultants (lots of those around these days) and various PR and marketing people. No pontificating, just real conversations about how people are actually using social media. It was refreshing after sifting through all the tweets and blog posts out there by the ‘experts’.

I’m going to state something unequivocally: You are not a social media expert unless you have done social media marketing for actual clients or brands with measurable results that go back at least a year. By measurable results I mean actual sales, turnaround of negative opinion, growth of markets, successful product launches that can be attributed to the use of social media communications, etc. I want to see the numbers in case study format.

If your company is hiring a social media marketing person, this should be your only criteria. Appearing at conferences, blogging of opinions without actual experience, having thousands of followers- these are not indicators of value for your company. They are indicators of someone whose primary interest is their own status as an ‘expert’.