The Next Generation of Business Engagement aka Dave Evans

November 30th, 2010

Many moons ago, I evangelised the need for companies to move from a world of Interruption to Engagement. That resulted in Tomi Ahonen and I co-authoring the book Communities Dominate Brands: business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century. The year was 2005, the same year Facebook, YouTube and myspace came onto the scene, with bebo, and faceparty lingering with intent either before or after the event. All, the poster children for something that had in fact been long in gestation. But these platforms were the “gestalt switches” which mean’t there was no…

There is No ctrl + z

Not that you would believe it – the roll call of companies, and even industries that lined up to be deniers, defenders, accusers, litigators, jailors even, were emphatic. Yet the transformation (or the emergence of transformative cultures, enabled by communication technologies) of nearly society on this planet cannot now be ignored. I argue we are in a process of renegotiating what kind of world we want to live in. Something Richard Sennett believes is a return to the Enlightenment but on terms more appropriate to the world we live in today. The spectrum is extraordinary, those that embrace what this new non-linear world can bring and those that wish it dead, like a Parrot in a Monty Python Sketch. The end is inevitable for companies premised upon a linear world – that refuse to embrace a new world view. But how are they going to transition? How are they going to get stuff done?

Pragmatism in these times is always a worthy companion, and so I commend to you a book and project by Dave Evans called: Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement. (“The Next Generation of Business Engagement” shows you how to apply collaborative, social technology to business, shortening the innovation cycle and building stronger relationships with your customers, partners and suppliers.) I met Dave Evans two years ago in Austin Texas @sxsw, via Andy Hunter. Dave struck me from day 1 as a unique person, low key and modest but it was quite clear he had a clear perspective on the world. We connected and although approaching the world from different perspectives, I felt we had arrived a the same place.

Dave’s new book is a true ‘how to’ in a sea of hyperbole, it speaks of how to tack your organisational mainsail as the turbulent end of the 20th Century goes on around you. I asked Dave where he had come from and what has changed for him on the journey he has undertaken. Our conversation will be episodic.

I was thinking where you started with social media and hour an day to this next project.

“Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” was a starting point for two ideas, important for both marketing–where I’ve spent about half of my career–and for business in general, which is where I’ve spent most of my time. It became clear to me (and of course a number of others) that the Internet, and the web in particular, had changed the context in which businesses operate and as such changed in a fundamental way the mechanics and many of the truisms of marketing. The leveling of the playing field between those with information (sellers) and those who needed it to make smart choices (buyers) for example underwent an upheaval as the web made the spread of information nearly frictionless. So, my first book focused on how a marketer might make sense of this–shifting thought patterns from “talking” to “listening” for example–and then, once that mindset was adopted, to how this new form of media may be incorporated into the existing planning models and measures that guide business marketing.

This necessarily led to the second book: “I’ve got my head around this, and I’m actively participating on the consumer-facing social web. Now what?” My second book, “Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement” tackles the “now what” and asserts that the same technologies that connected consumers in the marketplace can be used to connect entire businesses with their supply chains, with their influencers, with their employees and of course (in even stronger ways) to their customers.

The result is an holistic look at the relationship between businesses and their marketplaces, and a redefinition of the concept of engagement as it is used in a business and marketing context.

Bookmarks: