Collaboration Marketing

John Hagel has an excellent blog post, "Mastering New Marketing Practices".

He describes this new marketing approach, " - collaboration marketing and define it in terms of three - A's:

• Attract †create incentives for people to seek you out.
• Assist †the most powerful way to attract people is to be as helpful and engaging with them as possible †this requires a deep understanding of the various contexts in which people might use your products and a willingness to - co-create products with customers.
• Affiliate †mobilize third parties, including other customers, to become even more helpful to the people you interact with.

In contrast to the - one to one marketing mindset of conventional marketing, collaboration marketing requires a - many to one mindset. The winners in this new world will be orchestrators who can mobilize rich networks of resources to serve customer needs."

As we move into the third year of implementing social networks for organizations, we're still finding that too few companies are willing to take the risk and open the network to customers. So, at this time, few businesses are practicing "collaboration marketing".

Mr. Hagel, "Few of them systematically ask how these tools might be used to increase return on attention for customers. Even fewer ask who else already has deployed these tools and how they might help their customers find and connect to these resources and perhaps where they might participate in existing environments in ways that provide more return on attention."