“Dead”-On Business Rules: Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, part 2 of 2

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Lose control of your marketing messages. A Grateful Dead concert was about having fun, meeting friends, checking out great music, escaping the everyday, belonging. Each person defined the experience a little differently, and the group defined the whole. There were interesting subgroups wandering along as part of the larger odyssey that was the Grateful Dead experience.

In building a community, the Grateful Dead were willing to give up a large degree of control over how they were defined and instead hand it to their fans. While this approach is highly unusual, it is also often very successful. When organizations insist on operating in a command-and-control environment with mission statements, boilerplate descriptions, messaging processes, and PR campaigns, their strategies can both hamper growth and backfire in execution.

Let your community define you, rather than trying to dictate what’s said – and how – about your company. When you let others define and talk about you, it is more likely that a community will develop.

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About the Authors

Since his first Grateful Dead show when he was a teenager in 1979, David Meerman Scott has seen the band perform over 40 times. David is a marketing strategist and a professional speaker. He is the author of the BusinessWeek bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and several other books. He speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world. He loves to surf (but isn’t very good at it), collects artifacts from the Apollo moon program, and maintains a database, with 308 entries at this writing, of every band he has seen in concert. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he listened to a heck of a lot of Grateful Dead in his dorm room.

Brian Halligan has seen the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. He is CEO & founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company that helps businesses transform the way they market products by “getting found” on the Internet. Brian is also coauthor of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs and is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. In his spare time, he sits on a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is learning to play guitar.

“Dead”-On Business Rules: Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, part 1 of 2

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Viral marketing and social networking have arrived on the scene after a long, strange trip indeed. The Grateful Dead were much more than a bunch of rock-and-roll geniuses; they were pioneers of the digital age marketing landscape.

When you think marketing visionaries, what companies come to mind? Apple? Google? Maybe even Microsoft? It’s true that each of these companies in one way or another has come to define marketing in the digital age. But the practices they’ve been pushing – viral marketing, social networking, giving away products or services, asking for and acting on input from customers – have somewhat, well, groovier roots than you might imagine.

These marketing ploys were born on the road with one of the most iconic bands of all time – The Grateful Dead.

Everyone knows the Grateful Dead as rock legends and amazing musicians. But not as many realize they were marketing pioneers. In the 1960s the Grateful Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts that businesses across all industries use today. Every business can learn from what the Grateful Dead has done over a 45-year career.

The Grateful Dead is one huge case study in contrarian marketing. Most of the band’s many marketing innovations were based on doing the exact opposite of what other bands (and record labels) were doing at the time. The Dead pioneered a “freemium” business model, allowing concert attendees to record and trade concert tapes, building a powerful word-of-mouth fan network powered by free music. It’s a model that has influenced many of today’s very best marketers. For example:

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About the Authors

Since his first Grateful Dead show when he was a teenager in 1979, David Meerman Scott has seen the band perform over 40 times. David is a marketing strategist and a professional speaker. He is the author of the BusinessWeek bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and several other books. He speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world. He loves to surf (but isn’t very good at it), collects artifacts from the Apollo moon program, and maintains a database, with 308 entries at this writing, of every band he has seen in concert. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he listened to a heck of a lot of Grateful Dead in his dorm room.

Brian Halligan has seen the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. He is CEO & founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company that helps businesses transform the way they market products by “getting found” on the Internet. Brian is also coauthor of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs and is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. In his spare time, he sits on a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is learning to play guitar.

The Secrets To Winning GSA Contracts

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As a small business owner you may have heard of a General Services Administration Federal Supply Schedules contract, more commonly known as a “GSA contract”, but what is it exactly? How does it work? Is it difficult to obtain? Is it worth the time and effort to research, submit and manage?

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About the Author

Deborah Alston has worked for many years with small businesses, helping them with all aspects of federal government contracting. She has consulted with small businesses from many different industries, working closely with them to submit their GSA Schedule proposal; the Department of Defense’s ‘E-Mall’ proposal, and several other industry-specific federal procurement programs. In 2008, she co-authored the successful book Winning Government Contracts (Career Press 2008) with Malcolm Parvey. The book showed small businesses how to get involved in selling to the federal government, taking a step-by-step approach, and assuming no previous knowledge of this marketplace. In 2010, she partnered with Malcolm Parvey again to co-authored The Definitive Guide to Government Contracts (Career Press 2010) which included details on how to research, submit and maintain a GSA Schedule Contract award. Deborah can be reached at [email protected].

Make Your Business 1st Choice at Four Decisive Customer Moments

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Throughout the history of buying and selling, purchase has been a challenging experience for both buyers and sellers because purchase is a lengthy progression with three phases: consideration, negotiation, and transaction.

Buyers have always been in control of their consideration phase and sellers have always been in control of negotiation and transaction because they “owned” every bit of valuable information relevant to the purchase. Today’s buyers, no longer dependent on sellers’ information, have taken control of the entire selling progression including negotiation and transaction.

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About the Author

Robert H. Bloom is the author of The New Experts: Win Today’s Newly Empowered Customers at Their 4 Decisive Moments (Greenleaf). For more information or to contact Robert Bloom, please visit www.TheNewExperts.com.

Conquering the Communication Challenge with a Whiteboard

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One of the greatest challenges managers and CEOs face is effectively communicating with their employees, clients and stakeholders. Whether by email, phone call or conference room presentation, the corporate world is inundated with more communication input than ever before. We’ve all become complacent to the noise. We’ve all heard it before, but it bears repeating: a key player in the communications challenge is the PowerPoint presentation. This presentation go-to is often a crutch that leads to glazed eyes, big yawns and undeniable apathy. Let’s look at how we got to this point.

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About the Author

Corey Sommers is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of WhiteboardSelling, a provider of tools, best practices and technologies that enable field personnel to communicate and demonstrate core business value propositions to C-level buyers in a confident, compelling and consistent fashion… all without slides. Corey has more than 15 years experience in sales and channel enablement, account manager certification and training, and competitive intelligence. He is passionate about bridging the gap between marketing and sales within large organizations. Prior to founding WhiteboardSelling, he developed and executed VMware’s channel enablement strategy globally, across VARs, OEMs, Distributors, ISVs, and Corporate Reseller channel segments. He had shared responsibility for sales enablement and training for BMC Software’s world-wide direct sales organization. Corey also founded Ventaso, a leading provider of sales-ready messaging software and tools. To read Corey’s complete biography, click here.