It dawns on me that my worlds are colliding. While marketing has always been about relationships, businesses have always had to listen to their customers and the experience of the customer has always been critical, social media is changing how this can be done.

What really struck me is how the marketing that I’m learning in this course sounds so much like community development, the are I’ve studied in the past.

This little video was part of how I came to this realisation:

So the latest book from the authors of Groundswell is Empowered. Straight away the title struck me as familiar language used all the time in politics and community development. My sceptical brain tells me this is about empowering companies, managers or employees, but no.

Empowered is about empowering customers! Not in terms of a simply empowering them with the information and confidence they need to make a purchase, they’re talking about empowering customers within your company. Bring critics in to the company and get them to refine your products, have creators make your advertising, allow collectors to organise your website, make sure there’s something for joiners to join and good content for spectators to absorb. You might even make some inactives inactive if there’s something for them too.

The principles of community development and welfare teach us that people have the skills they need to assist themselves and communities know what they want and often have the resources available to get there. It is often just a question of teasing out the ideas, creating the space for them to be discussed and developing and implementing a plan for change.

As the schools of thought in marketing and management converge with community development, what an exciting world of opportunity opens up. Not only in marketing strategies that actually hand power and control over to customers, but in companies recognising that they too are communities and are part of the wider world. The principles remain the same – empowerment is key, devolving power works and people should be the first consideration.

Technology and social media provide some great tools to make this happen, but they are just tools – it’s the principles and objectives behind the strategies that matter.