I feel almost like Jesse Jackson, with my tittle’s rhyming.

Joseph and New Marketing 

Today I’m going to tell you a tiny bit about about Joseph Jaffe. Joseph is a kind of mentor to me. He does a “new marketing podcast” now known as Jaffe Juice, formally Across The Sound. New marketing would be marketing in, basically, the interactive / digital / social media space. Why is this subject important? To big business and brands, they way consumers interact with brands is changing. The world is changing at an amazingly fast pace, the disruption is huge, and the question of what this might mean to the marketing profession, and business in general, is an important question. In marketing, Joseph is one of the folks leading the charge.

Why Joseph Jaffe and New Marketing Matters to Us 

Now why is it important to us? I suppose there’s the question of “who exactly is us?” I have no real idea, of who my readers are at this point… so “us” will be an imaginary idea, having more to do with my idea of what I’m doing here, then what you’re actually doing here, reading me.

I’m interested in, among other things, the future of culture. I’m particularly interest in culture from the artists / content creator’s perspective. The relationship between the way markets operate, and the culture they help drive, is a long story in media criticism. It seems to me that new marketing offers us something new. Artists have a new opportunity for thinking about new existential relationships between content and markets. This is, in my view, insainly exciting for the future of culture.

A kind of 101 of it runs something like this: Social media marketing’s biggest expense is the time and energy it takes to do it. Anyone can do it, with barely any budget at all. Consequently social media marketing is very well suited to the guerrilla. If you’re an artist, and you learn to do this well, the implications could be great: In music as a mass media art form, it #1 costs about a million dollars to bring a band to market, which is to say to build there brand. #2 In order to recoup the expense of bringing the band to market, the record label/artists have to sell a hell of a lot of cd’s  to recoup there investment. This has many effects like the subtext of the question “does this music have commercial potential” and what that means to what sorta music we we hear on the radio.  Are you bored with what’s on the radio today?

If you do your own social media marketing and, as a solo artist, are able to sell the equivalent of 6,000 CDs per product cycle, you are now eking out a living. Of course most revenue is probably not coming from CD or download sales, and of course selling 6,000 CDs is not an easy thing, but it does “change everything.”  Also, let us not forget that we are still in the early days of this transformation.

So, my suggestion to artists and content creators is to tune into the conversation, that’s going on in podcasts and blogs like Joseph Jaffe’s Jaffe Juice.

More Places to Turn for Information on Marketing and Communications In New Media 

Here’s a quick list of other podcasts I highly recommend you check out:

• Six Pixels of Separation
• Managing the Gray
• For Immediate Release
• New Comm Road
• Marketing over Coffee

And that’s just for starters

My Participation in the Join the Conversation Project 

So why am I talking about Joseph Jaffe today? Well Joseph has a new book out called “Join the Conversation” which would have something to do with “conversational marketing.” There is a somewhat new-ish idea, in the world of marketing and business, that markets “are conversations.” I’m not saying everyone buys into this idea, but it is something worth thinking about, though I’m not going to go exploring that rabbit hole today..

As a part of promoting his book, Joseph is giving away books to anyone who has a business / marketing / media related blog or podcast, if you agree to write a review on it.  I forget how many copies he’s giving away, I want to say 150? (click here to find out more)

I want to get my butt in gear, as far as executing my own social media strategy, on multiple fronts, and for working with other people in the social media space. For this reason, reading a book on the subject, is something I want to do. Being a fan of Joseph makes we want to read his book in particular, and being an artist of limited means… well how could I pass up an opportunity to participate in Joseph’s efforts?

No Really, I’m a Truth Teller 

At this point you may well ask, “just what sort of objectivity can we realistically expect from Matt on this subject.” My first answer is “I have no idea,” a more considered answer runs as follows… or better yet, this is what I plan to do:

This blog is dedicated to meditations on whatever subject I’m meditating on, at the time I write and post stuff. I expect that as I read Join the Conversation, I will be reacting to it, in one way or another. I am not an uncritical consumer of information, as a cursory review of this blog will no doubt show, so I suspect what you’ll get from this blog will be nothing but my honest, authentic, reactions. Even if they should be colored one way or another, I want to be transparent enough so as to provide to you, what you need in order to be critical, in your consumption of what I have to say.

Ok, so that’s about it for this post, lists end on some related links:

 

• Join The Conversation (The Book) on Amazon
• JoinTheConversation.us (The books blog) 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 2:26 am and is filed under Media / Arts Business, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.