Starbucks, China World Trade Center 2
Chilling by the window
0946 hrs.

Shanghai-based Yann Lombard Platet gives vociferous voice on ChinaTechNews to something I have been telling my clients for some time about running online campaigns on social networking sites.

He says "just listen."

He's right.

He and I differ in our ideas of what it means to listen - I favor a much more passive approach to engagement on social networking sites, but in direction we agree.

There is an old saying that we were given two ears and one mouth, suggesting we should listen twice as much as we speak. Marketers are not traditionally wired to listen, but to find more effective ways of talking. Yann's point is that when marketing online, this is not appropriate.

My point is that with any kind of marketing, the relative value of a marketers ability to talk is plunging, and the value of his/her ability to listen is growing. It is not only the growth of Web 2.0 that is driving this change, but the skyrocketing importance of word-of-mouth, quantitative measurement, analytics, customer relationship management, and one-to-one marketing. Every single one of these is about listening, not talking.

Marketing changed since grad school, guys. Catch up.