The Internet is a largely unregulated place. Sure, corporate lawyers try and throw their muscle around when they sniff a suit, but the reality is, there are no rules. Rotten.com still exists over a decade on; spam continues to infiltrate from the darkest corners of the globe and short of selling kiddie porn, you can get away with anything you want; no matter how bizarre, how random (WTF?), how sick or how depraved. It’s the interwebs. That’s the way we like it. The less rules, the better, just as long as you’re not hurting anyone.

Daniel Oyston, my favourite Canberra-based writer since the late (great) Matt Price, wrote a lovely little piece yesterday about the rules of social media engagement - the ones that have been made up by social media commentators along the way. He questioned whether we should try and follow them, or just give up and let the marketers do what they want.

He knew the answer of course; dumb marketers will corrupt anything to make a quick buck. As former Naked exec Mat Baxter said over at MumBrella the other day: “We’re aware of the hypothetical rules in this sphere - there are a lot of people out there who claim to have the rule book. But the reality is that it will be shaped by what the consumer will tolerate.”

If a client ever comes to me asking for a stategy their consumers will ‘tolerate’, I will resign, on the spot (not once the press gets hold of it, not after no-one can believe what I’ve said anymore because I’ve lied to them in the past) because I will know right then and there that I have failed in my fundamental role as a marketing consultant, whose fundamental job is to build relationships with people; long-lasting ones. Profitable ones. Ones built on mutual respect.

Go to any party and the most popular person is the one who talks the loudest. They’re the one with the best stories (even if you know they’re lies); the one you tolerate because they’re good for a laugh after a few beers. They have the most friends when everyone is drunk and doesn’t care, but when people need someone to rely on, when they’re moving house, breaking up, falling in love and falling over, they’re the person you call after you’ve spoken to your real friends. If you want people to rely on your brand, you don’t want to be that person. You don’t want to lie to people.

You want to be the first person they call.

I’ve been lucky in the last few months to work with a bunch of clients who understand that fundamental value - that in an age where customer recommendations fly around the planet at the speed of light, 87% of people trust their friends opinions and only 14% trust ads any more (Source: Neilsen Global Trust in Adversiting urvey, 2007), any marketing strategy not built on trust is doomed to fail. I get to launch two massive social media campaigns in the coming months. One involves a company with a bigger presence in this country than McDonalds - another one involves a drink brand that outsells Coke in Queensland. It’s going to be interesing to put my money where my mouth is for those, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share the rules of social media engagement as I outline them to clients. These rules were born out of The Cluetrain Manifesto (a must read for anyone who thinks customers are happy to ‘tolerate’) and have grown up quickly after watching countless stupid marketers fuck their clients over by recommending social media strategies that take consumers for granted.

If you’re running a social media campaign, or a business for that matter, forget any other rules you’ve heard. Forget what the latest, greatest theory is, forget what your new Twitter hero said last night, forget what your lecturer said at uni, forget what your mate said at the pub, forget what your boss recommended, forget what the client says they want. These are the rules you need to obey:

Rule 1: Treat your customers the same way you’d treat your friends.

That is all.

1. Marketing budgets will be slashed by 35%.
2. Marketing expectations will be raised by 35%
3. Facebook will not be sold, Twitter will not be monetised and MySpace will grow at precisely the same rate as the American Economy.
4. A major Australian corporation will get its first social media marketing officer/director.
5. Someone you know will be made redundant and start a new web-based consultancy with a mis-spelled domain name before moving to Northern NSW, assuring you they always had an interest in permaculture.
6. The following will officially be declared dead and later discovered to be, in actual fact, alive:
   1. Advertising
   2. The American Dream
   3. Fidel Castro
7. The following will finally be exposed as having been dead since June 2005:
   1. Banner Ads
   2. Kim Jong Il
8. You will wake one morning to find that Google has bought your competitor and now makes a version of your best-selling product.
   1. And it’s better than yours.
   2. And it’s free.
9. Radio. LOL!
10. You’re not in the car or housing industries are you?

Read these five books and you’ll know more about social media and the state of marketing today than everyone else in your marketing department/ad agency/lectures/company/circle of friends/blogroll/pub.

1. Purple Cow - Seth Godin’s most-famous work explains how ‘remarkable’ has changed the way marketers must think about the world and the products they spruik.
2. The Cluetrain Manifesto - Explains why your market is smarter than you thought it was and how people’s expectations of marketers have changed.
3. Join the Conversation - Joseph Jaffe wrote the book on word of mouth and social media marketing and this is it. It’s an eye-opener for anyone wanting an overview of what this whole social media marketing thing is about and why it applies to pretty much everyone.
4. Conversational Capital - Bertrand Cesvet explains how to create stuff people love to talk about - a hugely important lesson when you’re trying to market the (seemingly) unremarkable.
5. The Long Tail - Chris Anderson’s seminal work on how the Internet has created infinite supply and infinite demand is a must-read for anyone scratching their heads and wondering where the world has got to.

1. Make your customer service truly remarkable. No, seriously, you don’t understand. Not good. Not brilliant: remarkable.
2. Find time to get active in your industry association. Offer to be secretary and do an amazing job. Do extra stuff that no one wants to do and do it really well. You’ll be a captain of industry in six months.
3. Read everything you can get your hands on. Whether you are the head of marketing for Coke or an Iranian potato farmer, right now, this very second, there are 100 insightful people blogging about ways you can grow your business and 100 book titles on Amazon which you’ll be recommending to your friends as ‘must-reads’ in 12 months time. Get an RSS reader and get to work 15 minutes early to read blogs. There are new distribution channels and opportunities popping up all the time, but you won’t know about them if you don’t read.
4. Start a blog that establishes you as an expert in your area of expertise and publish something useful EVERY day. If you can’t write, draw. If you can’t draw, make videos. If you haven’t got a video camera, make audio recordings. If you’re a deaf, blind mute that’s no excuse - you and I both know that Helen Keller would have been the world’s most prolific blogger if she was alive today. Stop whinging. Get over it. Start blogging.
5. Stop watching fucking Lost.
6. Hire someone to do something that is taking up too much of your time. The more time you have to think about marketing your business, the better off the business will be. Be brave. Take a risk. You’re smart. It’s the old adage — work ON the business, not IN the business. It will pay off now more than ever. Your competitors will be cutting back and you’ll be investing in idea capital. If you work in a large corporation and the powers that be won’t spend a cent hiring someone new in this current economic climate, convince your boss it’s a good idea by taking a big pay cut now in return for a big bonus when your work pays off. If you don’t believe in yourself enough to do that, what the f–k are you doing?
7. Engage your customers properly, start conversations with them online and offline (you know, like, when they’re in your store) and do it because you want to, not because it’s the latest fad. Smile like you mean it.
8. Create partnerships and do people favours. If you’re a wedding photographer, set up a deal with a local catering firm to send each other work. If you are a local catering firm, find a boutique local winery and help them set up a restaurant in the vineyard on Sunday afternoons. If you’re a boutique local winery start sending lots of free wine to local tour operators. If you’re a local tour operator, get a local wedding photographer to take a professional photo of everyone at the end of the tour and email it to them with a thank you note. What goes around, comes around.
9. Ask everyone in your company what the best thing about your company is and make it better. Ask everyone in your company what the worst thing about your company is and fix it.
10. Make your company a great place to work, give your employees free lunch, love them, not literally, and they will tell all their Facebook friends how amazing you are and their friends will tell their friends. If you want to find people to blog about your product, the guy in the mail room, the girl behind the reception desk and the lady with the mop are the greatest brand evangelists you’re ever going to find. Henry Ford paid all his workers double the award wage. Guess what they did with all their extra money? Bought cars. Think about that.

I was playing around with Wikipedia on behalf of a client this afternoon and was not exactly surprised to see that Tarnya Dunning from Telstra’s public affairs department had been doing the same. Unlike many unscrupulous contributors though (and by god there are many) it was nice to see that she had clearly declared what she was up to and appears to have done so with only the best intentions. Nice one Tarnya. If only Optus were as active and polite in the social media space as you (not to mention Vodafone).

Editing Your Own Wikipedia Article is frowned upon by Wikipedia, but it’s not banned and it can be done well. Social media marketers could do well to follow Tarnya’s lead. If you’re interested in the topic, check out the developing discussion on the rules of engagemen for social media marketers and bloggers here.

I was in a strategy meeting today with the head of online marketing at an accommodation reservations company. They’re kind of a big deal, but for the last two years they’ve been getting at least three complaints a day from members of the public who have tried to use their system and been pissed-off because some of the prices they were initially being quoted weren’t, in fact, the prices they would be paying. (I won’t bore you with details, but basically, they were showing a list of hotel rates from a particular source, but they were often three days out of date).

The head of online marketing is a pretty switched-on guy, and he knew that pissing people off was the best way to ensure they never visited his website ever again (you don’t want to annoy any customer, but you especially don’t want to annoy tech-savvy early-adopters of your product who have the potential to tell hundreds of others). He’d been having trouble convincing the CEO that the system had to change because there was a lot of development cost involved, but finally, after a year of trying, he’d got the change approved and a new system was in place that showed accurate prices. He had been conviced that the change would result in more sales, but he was at a loss because after a few weeks, the conversion rate had barely shifted at all. The GM told him that he’d have to break the news to the tech team that the costly change he’d implemented hadn’t been effective and it had been a bit of a waste; he was disappointed.

“But…” I said.

“I’ll bet your returning visitor numbers are up.”

His eyes lit up: “Hmm?”

“That’s your metric.” I told him. “I’ll bet you any money your returning visitor numbers increase dramatically over the next few months because people are going to be much happier with your product and they’ll want to come back. They’ll probably even tell their friends. And once you get more and more returning visitors, your conversion rates are going to keep going up because they’ll stop shopping around as much.”

This was good news.

Very good news. I think he wanted to hug me…

If there’s one web metric you want to see curve upward, it’s your returning visitor numbers. More new visitors are great, but what you really want to see are more people coming back. 1,000 visitors who come back ten times are worth far more than 10,000 visitors you never see again.

The best way of getting them to come back is figuring out why they’d want to leave in the first place; think about what they’re NOT getting and give it to them. If the solution sounds expensive, think about what a lifelong customer is worth to you, over time, and I’ll bet you’ll change your mind.

A friend of mine has developed his marketing mantra. It’s quite good and it goes like this:

1. Markets are conversations
2. Conversations happen around social objects
3. Social objects are products or services that are remarkable
4. Remarkable is not just something special, but something worth being remarked about
5. A great product, and even better customer service are the most remarkable things you can offer.

I like it (although I’d change the first point to read “your market is conversing”), and it fits in with pretty much everything I hold to be self-evident: The TV-industrial complex has crumbled and in an age where advertising saturation makes it almost impossible to push your message out, the best way of marketing your product is to get people to talk about it. Social media, as a form of word of mouth marketing, works, but what if you’re not remarkable? What if no-one wants to talk about you?

What if you make brown shoelaces, or you have a brand of aspirin that does the same thing as all the other brands of aspirin? What if you don’t really have a story or you don’t have a chance to really impress your customers with amazing service… What do you do? Do you just give up and start something else?

Nope. You invent a story.

If you make brown shoelaces you get Bear Grylls to explain that if he was stuck on a mountain and needed to create a makeshift parachute, he would only recommend using your brand. You would start a YouTube channel with a series of videos detailing other amazing uses for your brown shoelaces and explain how they are the best. You would find bloggers who talk about running shoes and dress shoes and adventure shoes and you would send them free product samples. It would be so successful that people would start buying your laces to put in their brand new shoes because they would think that shoe manufacturers didn’t know enough about lace technology.

If you make a new brand of aspirin you would create a 1300 number that people could call and whinge to; you’d remove their headaches. This number would be advertised, radio presenters would copy the idea. You would setup a social community where people can talk about their headaches and you would get experts to jump online and give advice.

If you think your product isn’t remarkable, you’re not trying hard enough.

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft provide solutions to people with video game problems. The trouble was, in 2006, the proportion of people who realised they had a gaming problem in need of a solution was very small in comparison to the population of the earth. Worse still, most people with video game problems needed to get hold of their mom’s (sic) purse first.

Rather then come up with the next fastest/loudest/baddest/blue rayest/most violent/most banned/most wanted new gaming console in the history of the world to date, Nintendo, instead, were smart. Very smart. They created Wii. Kids like it. Mom’s love it, heck, even the Queen of England has one. In fact, Wii sales now account for more than both main competitors combined.

If you’re going to develop a new product, think outside the (X) box. It’ll pay off. Especially if you back it up with customer service people rave about.

Have you ever wished you could find out everything people were saying about your company in blogs, forums, online media and on third-party websites? Better still, have you ever wished you could be notified via email when new information or comments about your company are published anywhere on the world wide web?

Media Monitors offer a paid service which is great if you like being sent newspaper clippings to stick in scrapbooks (scrapbooking is very popular these days). But did you realise that Google offer a very similar thing for free? It’s called Google alerts. It won’t send you dead trees, but it will email you any time the keywords of your choice appear on the web. It’s dead simple, and dirt cheap. Use it. Now.

OK, so you’ve got yourself a blog, congratulations! You’re blogger #50,000,001, welcome to the fold; I hope you enjoy yourself. I’m presuming you’ve got a pretty little orange RSS icon on your site somewhere so people can subscribe to your wisdom and/or ranting? Good. If not, get one, syndication is kinda’ the whole point.

…Except; do you know how many people: a) know what that icon does and b) know how to use it?

Answer: 2

If you’re going to go to the trouble of writing a blog, make it easy for EVERYONE to get your content; provide an email option. If you don’t know how, go to Feedburner. You’ll be far more popular that way.