包括广告宣传，公共关系，品牌管理以及企业传媒在内的传统营销手段已经失效。很多还在干这一行的人们似乎还未意识到他们所在的部门或者组织已只剩下躯壳——我们可以从很多方面认识到这一事实。
第一，购买者们已经不再给予关注。研究已证实买家的决定跟传统的营销沟通基本上没有任何关联。采购者们通常用自己的一套路子来获取产品和服务信息，其中最常用的是网络，当然还有企业之外的信息来源，比如人们的口头表述或者是客户反馈。
第二，CEO（首席执行官）们已经没那么多耐心。根据2011年伦敦Fournaise Marketing Group对600名CEO和决策者的调查显示，73%的人认为他们的CMO（首席营销官）缺乏商业信誉并且无法驱动收入增长。72%称很多人只是嚷嚷着要钱但却无法解释这些投入如何带来新增收入。77%的人表示他们天天跟你谈品牌资产和其他类似的东西，但他们却无法将这些工作与真正的市场估值或是其它重要的金融指标联系起来。
第三，在日益发展的社交媒体环境中，传统营销不仅起不到作用而且也没有意义。我们可以这么想：一个公司雇佣很多人，包括员工,代理，咨询顾问和合作伙伴——他们都不是买方，他们的利益与买方也不完全一致——那么我们如何希望用这群人去劝说购买者将他们辛苦挣来的钱用在宣传的产品上？在社会媒体的世界里，传统营销已失效。看看Facebook，他们到现在还在讨论是否要进行营销宣传。
事实上，这种讨论有点多余，因为传统营销手段无论在哪儿都发挥不了作用。
于是，很多人就在思考怎样去取代这个过时的模式——就仿佛是在猜测未来营销模式可能的样子。但实际上，我们已经很清楚的知道新模式的样子，很多企业也开始使用这种模式。以下就是它的关键点：
恢复社区营销。只要加以合理运用社交媒体，就可以加速购买者在当地社区寻求购买体验的趋势。比如说，当考虑买一个新屋顶，一个液晶电视或者找好的外科医生时，我们不可能去找推销员商量，也不可能去通读某公司网站上的内容。一般情况下，我们都会向邻居或是朋友打听——这是我们自己的关系网络，里面每个人都是可询问的对象。
企业们应该将自己在社交媒体上花的工夫尽可能地用于复制这种社区指向的购买体验。而像Facebook一样的社交媒体公司更应该把它作为自己的长项——通过扩大消费者自己的关系网络，让更多的人提供他们对某一产品或服务的购买体验。
比如一家名叫Zuberance的新公司就可以让忠实的客户们轻松愉快地帮助他们在社交平台上做宣传。一旦某个客户在接受调查时认为自己可以做“推荐人”，他们会立刻收到一张表格邀请他们在某些社交网站上填写使用感受或推荐，当他们完成后，Zuberance会将它转移至某一指定网站，然后“推荐人”的交际圈会很快知道他对于这家公司的看法。
找到能够影响客户的人。很多公司都把大把的资源耗在追求外在的影响者——那些在网站或是社交媒体上受到追捧的人。其实更好的方式是去找寻和培养能够影响目标客户的人，让他们来帮忙做宣传。这就涉及到一种新的顾客价值观，与顾客生命周期价值不同的是，它并不是仅仅基于客户的购买。除了钱之外，我们还有很多其它衡量客户价值的标准。比如，客户的关系网络对公司有什么战略影响，有多大的影响？或是某个客户受到多少尊重。
微软的MVP（最有价值专家）的用户中有一名被大家称为Excel先生的人。他网站的访问量有的时候能超过微软Excel界面——这意味着他对于微软有着举足轻重的意义。于是微软开始透露给Excel先生一些内部消息并且让他提前试用他们的新产品。而作为报答，Excel先生和其他的MVP们帮助微软开拓新的市场，这可以省很多钱。
帮助他们建立社会资本。新型社区导向型营销的实践者们也许会反思这种利用MVP（“客户维护者”或是“明星客户”）的顾客价值主张。过去的营销通常用金钱奖励，折扣或是其它小惠小利来获得顾客支持。而新的营销方式在为拥护者和有影响力的人创造社会资本：帮助他们建立社交关系，提高他们的声誉还让他们获得新的知识——一切的一切都是这些影响者渴求的。
美国国家仪器公司（NI）曾经用过一种特殊的创造性的方法与他们的顾客影响者——IT公司的中层经理合作。通过向他们提供强大的研究和财务证明，这些经理可以向他们的高层展示NI的战略优势，NI也因此可以接触最高管理层。而同时，中层管理者的声誉也会随之提高，他们会被认为是战略思想者，可以为高层带来新的想法。
让拥护你的客户参与你的解决方案。其中最引人注目的例子来源于非盈利机构。一些年前，全国青少年吸烟的人数已到达警戒值，于是佛罗里达州开始重新思考他们为了缓解该问题做出的长达十年之久的努力——有什么会比说服青少年戒烟更困难的呢,连马尔科姆•格拉德威尔都说不可能了。但是通过建立同伴间可相互影响的社区，佛州解决了这个问题。他们找到青少年中有影响力的人，比如学生领袖，运动员或者看起来酷酷的孩子，这些人要么不抽烟要么就是想戒烟。之后他们会请求这些学生的参与和帮助他们而不是仅仅传达一个信息。
这一新的方案使得600名青少年出席了关于青少年抽烟问题的峰会，在那里他们告诉官员们之所以过去为戒烟所作出的努力会没有效果，是因为吸烟有害健康的可怕警告或是把吸烟看做恶劣的行为都不足以给孩子们留下深刻印象。当时，这些青少年还头脑风暴出新的解决方案：出于对烟草公司老板针对用青少年取代死去的年纪较大的顾客（通常死于肺癌）的文件感到愤怒，他们组成了一个SWAT（学生反抗烟草）小组，通过组织火车旅行，讲习班，出售体恤以及其它吸引人的活动来将他们的信息传达给当地社区。而最后的结果，除了受到大型烟草游说公司恶劣的反击之外，佛州青少年吸烟的数量在1998年至2007年间下降了差不多一半——这也是至今反青少年吸烟最大的一场胜利。
换句话说，佛州从比它强大很多的对手那里赢走了一半”反对青少年吸烟“的“客户”。他们的成功源自他们利用了买家最有效的购买动机：同伴影响力。
这也是你可以做的。传统营销已失效，建立于同伴影响力和社区导向的新型营销手段已登上舞台，通过真正的顾客关系，它将为企业创造持续的增长。
Traditional marketing — including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications — is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they're operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is clear.
First, buyers are no longer paying much attention. Several studies have confirmed that in the "buyer's decision journey," traditional marketing communications just aren't relevant. Buyers arechecking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.
Second, CEOs have lost all patience. In a devastating 2011 study of 600 CEOs and decision makers by the London-based Fournaise Marketing Group, 73% of them said that CMOs lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth, 72% are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and 77% have had it with all the talk about brand equity that can't be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.
Third, in today's increasingly social media-infused environment, traditional marketing and sales not only doesn't work so well, it doesn't make sense. Think about it: an organization hires people — employees, agencies, consultants, partners — who don't come from the buyer's world and whose interests aren't necessarily aligned with his, and expects them to persuade the buyer to spend his hard-earned money on something. Huh? When you try to extend traditional marketing logic into the world of social media, it simply doesn't work. Just ask Facebook, which finds itself mired in anongoing debate about whether marketing on Facebook is effective.
In fact, this last is a bit of a red herring, because traditional marketing isn't really working anywhere.
There's a lot of speculation about what will replace this broken model — a sense that we're only getting a few glimpses of the future of marketing on the margins. Actually, we already know in great detail what the new model of marketing will look like. It's already in place in a number of organizations. Here are its critical pieces:
Restore community marketing. Used properly, social media is accelerating a trend in which buyers can increasingly approximate the experience of buying in their local, physical communities. For instance, when you contemplate a major purchase, such as a new roof, a flat screen TV, or a good surgeon, you're not likely to go looking for a salesperson to talk to, or to read through a bunch of corporate website content. Instead, you'll probably ask neighbors or friends — your peer network — what or whom they're using.
Companies should position their social media efforts to replicate as much as possible this community-oriented buying experience. In turn, social media firms, such as Facebook, should become expert at enabling this. They can do this by expanding the buyer's network of peers who can provide trustworthy information and advice based on their own experience with the product or service.
For example, a new firm, Zuberance, makes it easy and enjoyable for a firm's loyal customers to advocate for the firm on their social media platform of choice. At the moment one of these customers identifies himself as a "promoter" on a survey, they immediately see a form inviting them to write a review or recommendation on any of several social media sites. Once they do, the Zuberance platform populates it to the designated sites, and the promoter's network instantly knows about his experience with the firm.
Find your customer influencers. Many firms spend lots of resources pursuing outside influencers who've gained following on the Web and through social media. A better approach is to find and cultivate customer influencers and give them something great to talk about. This requires a new concept of customer value that goes way beyond customer lifetime value (CLV), which is based only on purchases. There are many other measures of a customer's potential value, beyond the money they pay you. For example, how large and strategic to your firm is the customer's network? How respected is she?
One of Microsoft's "MVP" (Most Valuable Professional) customers is known as Mr. Excel to his followers. On some days, his website gets more visits than Microsoft's Excel page — representing an audience of obvious importance to Microsoft, which supports Mr. Excel's efforts with "insider knowledge" and previews of new releases. In return, Mr. Excel and other MVPs like him are helping Microsoft penetrate new markets affordably.
Help them build social capital. Practitioners of this new, community-oriented marketing are also rethinking their customer value proposition for such MVP (or "Customer Champion" or "Rockstar") customer advocates and influencers. Traditional marketing often tries to encourage customer advocacy with cash rewards, discounts or other untoward inducements. The new marketing helps its advocates and influencers create social capital: it helps them build their affiliation networks, increase their reputation and gives them access to new knowledge — all of which your customer influencers crave.
National Instruments used an especially creative approach with its customer influencers, who were mid-level IT managers at the companies they did business with. NI engaged with them by providing powerful research and financial proof points they could take to senior management, showing that NI solutions were creating strategic benefits. That got NI into the C-suite. It also increased the reputation of the mid-level advocates, who were seen as strategic thinkers bringing new ideas to senior management.
Get your customer advocates involved in the solution you provide. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this comes from the non-profit world. Some years ago, with the number of teen smokers nation-wide rising to alarming levels, the State of Florida thought anew about its decades-long effort to reduce the problem. What could be more difficult than convincing teen smokers to quit — a problem that Malcolm Gladwell had said couldn't be solved. Using the techniques for building a community of peer influence, Florida solved it. They sought influential teen "customers" such as student leaders, athletes, and "cool kids," who weren't smoking or who wanted to quit — and instead of pushing a message at them, they asked for the students' help and input.
Approached in this new way, some 600 teens attended a summit on teen smoking, where they told officials why anti-smoking efforts in the past hadn't worked — dire warnings about the health consequences of smoking, or describing the habit as "being gross," left them unimpressed. On the spot, the teens brainstormed a new approach: they were outraged by documents showing that tobacco company executives were specifically targeting teens to replace older customers who'd died (often from lung cancer). And so the teens formed a group called SWAT (Students Working Against Tobacco) who organized train tours and workshops, sold T-shirts and other appealing activities to take their message into local communities. The result: despite a vicious counterattack by Big Tobacco lobbying firms, teen smoking in Florida dropped by nearly half between 1998 and 2007 — by far the biggest success in anti-teen-smoking in history.
Put another way, Florida won half of the "non-buyers" of its anti-teen-smoking "product" away from its much bigger, much better funded competitor. They did so by tapping the best source of buyer motivation: peer influence.
So can you. Traditional marketing may be dead, but the new possibilities of peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing, hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.
