Running up that hill

This post was sitting in my drafts for quite a while now, but a discussion in MarketingProf’s Book Club made me think of it again. This is about a thought I shared with quite a few people already before I got the time to write it down here. I had some great discussions about it so hopefully I can continue some of that over here as well. This has nothing to do with Kate Bush by the way ;-)

When I was watching Stanley’s Route on television a while ago, it basically made me think of this analogy with some of the things happening in the web2.0 evolution today. But to understand this correctly, I need to tell you first what the television show is about, so you see what I want to say (hopefully). Hang in there…

Stanley’s Route is a television show (in Belgium) where about a dozen people are spending some time in Africa, you know these kind of reality TV survival shows. The participants need to travel long distances between villages and get tasks in each village. Every few days, someone is voted out. What happens in that the physically & mentally stronger candidates are slowing down (or going back) to help out with these candidates that don’t have the energy anymore. They will carry their bags, support them, … This makes perfect sense as well since they all need to reach the village before the game can continue. And in many cases, they are kept in the game longer than other as well.

Now going back to social media, citizen marketers, … what do they have in common? I think that marketers like myself who believe in this new marketing need to find ways to reach out more to traditional marketers to help them figure this out. Just like with Stanley’s Route it made no sense for 2 contestants to reach the top telling eachother how good they are (or how well they understood the conditions) when no-one else will join them. They all had to finish before going moving on. Sometimes I feel like you have this bunch of people running up that hill of new media, new marketing without looking back… and I’m not sure if we don’t lose people along the way.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m an enthusiast and it’s amazing to see how consumers get into all this… it’s marketers & advertisers I’m worried about.

Tags: marketing, advertising, social media, stanleys route, tv, bookclub, marketingprofs, citizen marketers