Dateline: London, UK
Yesterday was one of those rare super enlightening days that comes along once every year or two. I spent a full day in Paris with my colleagues from Europe who specialize in online communications. It felt like a UN summit. Around the table we had representatives from France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Poland. I learned more in this single day than I have from virtually any Web 2.0 or social media conference I have ever attended.
Since joining Edelman I have made it my personal mission to take a global view of social media and conversational marketing. You probably can sense this in my writing the past few months (who here is sick of hearing about the Flat Earth?). While so much of our focus as bloggers and marketers lies in the US, the conversation is indeed global. Nevertheless, there are significant local differences market by market.
For example, I learned that Germans love YouTube. Yet, they don't publish a lot of videos on the site. They like to gawk and watch what others are uploading but then they gravitate to German-language sites to participate in conversations.
In Italy Beppe Grillo's tearing up a storm. He's one of the top-ranked bloggers in the world. Part of the reason he's a blogger is because he's not welcome on TV. Beepe was huge on TV for awhile but then he annoyed the government and so he's rarely on the tube anymore. But nobody stops him from blogging.
Meanwhile, broadband access in Poland is nothing like it is in the US, yet even here the social media revolution is taking hold. The largest newspaper in Poland, Gazeta, attracts millions of forum posts and the country even has a big social network in Grono.net.
However, the more we swapped stories, the more we found common ground despite our vast differences in culture. Control is the lingua franca that unites us all. Every single person around the table shared an experience of how communicators are concerned about losing control. They simply don't want to give it up. While it was somewhat refreshing to hear that we all are dealing with similar issues, you could also see that the dominoes are starting to fall. We shared lots of inspiring success stories that give hope that bit by bit, we are all changing mindsets together.
I don't blame marketers/PR pros for being afraid to lose control. Nobody wants to. However, the genie is out of the bottle. We can't put it back. We need to look this gorilla in the eye and accept it. We need to embrace this change and do so globally.
As I sped through the Chunnel today on Eurostar, I ironically got to the part in the World is Flat (sorry gang, another plug for the book) where Friedman talks about how JFK was able to inspire millions to get involved with the space race with a single speech. There was a lot of fear then. We were nervous the Russians were kicking our butt in the Space Race. Yet Kennedy inspired us. We got motivated and we rallied around a common goal. Similarly, Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" remark was one of the events that contributed to the end of the Cold War. We need a similar spark - a global one - that inspires us to not fear a lack of control. As agency professionals, it's our calling to help our clients embrace this new environment.
Unlike the 1960s and 1980s, however, today a rallying cry will not come from one individual no matter how charismatic he or she may be. The power to inspire is now decentralized and distirbuted. It comes from the entire global network of conversations. If control is the lingua franca of marketing worldwide, then it's up to all of us to "tear down this wall" together. To the degree clients will allow we should share our success stories within our firms and beyond. Success helps marketers feel at ease. There's safety in numbers.
While it can be hard, we must not lose faith. We must continue to encourage our clients to experiment. With each small success they will become more accustomed to living in this new environment and one day this will all be a memory. It may take more time in some countries than others. But make no mistake. It's inevitable. The control "wall" is falling. As Friedman says, we are moving from an era where value was created by command and control to one where it's all about collaborating and connecting.
Marketers and PR pros will learn how to thrive in an era where they no longer control the message. It's a global imperative and it's being driven by tools that empower people to find and converse with each other in an open environment.
My time in Europe has been well spent and I see this challenge expands far beyond our shores. I'm really energized by my visit here and I am looking forward to working hard side by side with my colleagues from around the world to continue to build and learn from successes one by one. The wall is coming donwn. Let's continue to chip away at it.
