Livingston

Jun
22
2007

Now That Steve Rubel Said It, We Can All Participate

Steve Rubel wrote an excellent post this morning on participation is marketing. However, as much as Steve’s the gold standard for mainstream concepts and thought leadership, this is not a new idea.

As you know, I am a big proponent of the “Participation is Marketing” approach to PR. I’ve been pushing it, and I can tell you exactly where it originates: This is Chris Heuer’s idea — not Steve’s — as evidenced by this March 12 post.

Participation is marketing has been bantered about by Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, Todd Defren and others for months now. These folks should get credit for forging the “Participation is Marketing” concept, not Steve. Though I suspect Steve will get a lot of credit for this post. And in the words of Brian Oberkirch, not giving people credit for their work makes you a chucker.

Chucking or not, it’s great to see more people buying into the Participation mentality. Now if we can just get the brick & mortar practitioners to see it that way.

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by Geoff Livingston | Internet Marketing |

6 Responses to “Now That Steve Rubel Said It, We Can All Participate”

  • Steve Rubel Says:

    June 22nd, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    I hadn’t seen those before I wrote the post. Thanks.

  • Geoff Livingston Says:

    June 22nd, 2007 at 5:11 pm

    Thanks, Steve. I take my chucker comments back…

  • The Buzz Bin » Blog Archive » Sports Starts Outmuscle Beat Writers Says:

    June 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 am

    [...] The extra voices are good. Even better, the new found media forces accountability for all parties (See Steve Rubel post) - including journalists. Journalists objective point of views are needed. There will always be a need for journalists and great publications. The ones who can’t be objective or offer some valuable insights will likely fade to black. And rightly so. [...]

  • Geoff Livingston Says:

    June 24th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    Actually, now that I read Chris Heuer’s comment feed on this particular post, I sincerely doubt the authenticity and sincerity of your comment, Steve. Here’s the quote:
    “Thanks for acknowledging the many who have lead the way before you, whose ideas and quotes you are able to use to get attention for yourself without attribution. When I talked to you about “participation is marketing” at Gnomedex last year, you weren’t very interested. I don’t have a problem with you or with your promotion of this very key idea - in fact, I am very happy for the fact that you have come around.”

  • Chris Heuer Says:

    June 25th, 2007 at 2:14 am

    It really doesn’t matter to me one bit about this, but attribution is a key form of currency which some people are more willing to put into the karma pool than others. Without it, the intention economy and our social media sphere doesn’t work effectively.

    Personally, I believe he doesn’t recall who or what informed him of those ideas and that phrasing - while I don’t personally recall exactly when I started talking about it myself (probably shortly after the first BarCamp), I am sure other people were thinking and saying the same thing around the time, but I never met them.

    The key is getting to the heart of the matter and helping people understand what it really means - you can only truly benefit from participation when it is genuine, when you are contributing more than taking and when your intentions are related to being a member of the community - not someone who is exploiting the opportunity to sell instead of have conversations. I have seen way too many ‘advanced networkers’ at different events in the valley who were jumping from person to person pitching whatever they had at the moment to sell, never stopping to find out who they were talking at, and never talking ‘with’ anyone.

    I suppose I need to write a post on this now to explain further… maybe you and I should just do a skype call to talk about it and we can post it as a podcast?

  • The Buzz Bin » Blog Archive » The A-List Phenomena Says:

    July 23rd, 2007 at 9:03 am

    [...] usually brilliant, and Steve Rubel can be brilliant or really off, and borders on plagiarism at times. Does it matter? Obviously not! Look at ToddAnd’s Power 150! We love our marketing [...]

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