A personal mission of mine is to wane brands off their paid media habits by encouraging a shift of effort to homegrown, organic sources for promotional and customer retention efforts (i.e. employee participation in blogs, message boards, social nets, virtual worlds etc. and programs that elicit audience feedback/particpation in shaping the brand). To date, I haven’t been that successful. Made in-roads fer sure by leading brands into the blogosphere, Facebook, Youtube, etc. But these activities  - budget-wise - pale in comparison to what some of my clients continue to spend paying for placement.

Certainly I’m not taking this on the chin - as there are so many client-side factors that prohibit/inhibit such a radical spending shift: lack of belief in organic marketing, cooperation gaps between marketing and other departments like IT/Customer Service, lack of internal resources so on and so on. I feel it’s important though to take some amount of responsibility - keep skin in the game. One of the reasons I believe brands are not responding to the organic media shift is the lack of convincing data or case-studies proving it works and laying-out some sort of road map towards successful change. Yeah - there’s lot’s of studies reporting on the publics media habit shifts to the social web, but everyone is waiting for the Harvard Business Review type story that makes it okay to say “okay - let’s do this”.

Well, I was encouraged after reading AdWeek’s QA with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. His firm belief in the reputation economy - that’s todays brands are built on transparency, values resonance and listening - has been the cornerstone of the company’s successful marketing strategy.

“Our whole belief is in today’s world companies are becoming more transparent whether they like it or not. One disgruntled or happy employee can write something on a blog and have that read by millions. It’s the same thing with a customer. Our belief is a company’s culture and brand are two sides of the same coin. The brand may lack the culture but eventually it will catch up. You can’t control every touch point like you could 50 years ago. The only way to do it is instead of trying to “control the touch points” is to get the right people with the right attitude, build the right culture and the rest will take care of itself. If I were to ask you of the brand of the airline industry, most would say something about bad customer service. No airline went out and said they wanted their brand to be about that, but that’s the brand of the industry.”

Of course we’ll also have to consider the impact this type of transition will have on agency-side business. We should take notice of Andrian Ho’s opinion: “Agencies, which must be concerned with their business success as well as the business success of their clients, may find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Advising clients to engage in social media for themselves is far less lucrative than creating communications campaigns for them. As a result, agencies will likely claim (as they are already) media neutrality and treat social media as simply another channel.”

Fight the good fight, people.

- Keith Gerr