You ARE a marketer. Deal with it.

It's so trendy to diss marketing. Especially if you're in engineering, product design, or virtually anything but marketing. A comment for me by pinhut on my "You're emotional..." blog entry reads:
"this started out being so interesting. then you reveal yourself as a marketer. please terminate yourself."

The late (and brilliant) comedian Bill Hicks was an early adopter of the "all marketing is evil" meme:

"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. No, this is not a joke: kill yourself . . . I know what the marketing people are thinking now too: 'Oh. He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market.' Oh man, I am not doing that, you f***ing evil scumbags." (asterisks are mine)

I was about to protest, "Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not a marketer!"

But that would be a lie. In this new open-source/cluetrain world, I am a marketer. And so are you. If you're interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the vacation you want to go on... congratulations. You're in marketing. Now go kill yourself.

The word "marketing" (and by extension, "marketers") has a bad rep for sure, as does "advertising" and "PR". But they all share a common goal--connecting buyers and sellers. Isn't that what we're doing?

Except with a Find and Replace:

"Buyers" becomes--> "readers" or "users" or "community participants"

"Sellers" becomes--> "authors" or "developers" or "organizations"

As Guy Kawasaki puts it, we're selling the dream.

But the difference between what we now consider "old-school marketing" (otherwise known as The Four P's -- product, price, promotion, and placement -- heavy on advertising and "branding") and the "neo-marketing" we're doing here is frickin' huge.

Here are a few ideas on some of the differences:

*See this Brandautopsy blog post on a brand hijack, or check out the book.

**Real is relative to the desires and perceptions of the user. And who's to say that taking better photos won't in fact lead to more sex?

***rhymes with "hit"

But even if we feel OK about doing some of these marketingish things, there's still the problem of the word "marketing". We need a word that distinguishes the kinds of things we (developers/programmers, ministers, realtors, authors) do from old-school traditional marketing. I just don't know if the marketing-averse among us can rehabilitate that word... it's been too heavily associated (framed) with old-fashioned, negative, sleazy and inauthentic practices (even if much of that was a misconception... doesn't matter).

My "neo-marketing" label is just lame. Open Solaris' Laura Ramsey and I were talking about it this weekend, and she came up with an alternative that might be a good contender: Modern Attraction. We're not marketers, we're attractors. I don't know if that's the right phrase, but it still sounds better to me than "marketing". (Personally, I was voting for "cheerleader", but for some reason I just couldn't get the other programmers to go along with that...cute t-shirt ideas, though... ; )

Others have come up with replacement phrases as well, but none seem to have truly taken hold, and the word "conversation" isn't enough. What do you think? If we believe in something, and we want others to share what we know can be a fun/meaningful experience, whether it's getting involved in our open source project, or joining our cause, or--yes--buying our book or software--we need to get past our "go kill yourself now" thing. If framing it with a new word/phrase helps, perhaps that's a better approach than trying to give the word "marketing" a massive makeover.

Remember -- when people are passionate about something, and in a state of flow--and you have contributed to that by helping users/members learn and grow and kick ass--these are some of the happiest moments in their lives. Trying to promote more of that is something we should feel wonderful about, not guilty.