"But that's enough about me... what about you? What do you think of me?"
Source: Your most recent social gathering

Somewhere along the lines, we - as marketers - have really lost the plot. If you are reading this blog, the chances are that you already familiar with the idea that marketing is no longer a one-way (broadcast) street and that the brand is not the centre of the universe.
 

And as increasingly empowered consumers challenge (or just ignore) traditional marketing approaches, so the depth and varieties of this brand hubris affliction become apparent. The obvious examples are, well... obvious. It is interesting however, to observe the more subtle forms, particularly in the new social media channel channel itself.

Some examples that we have observed in and around social media:

• Designing an online community that crowds out "user space" with push messages from the brand or prioritises brand content at the expense of user content (user content generates far more traffic than brand content...)
• Customer competitions (iSnack2.0) where popular sentiment is ignored
• Ensuring that legal requirements dominate the online user experience - requiring for example, 24 hour turn-around on moderating (authorising) all comments
• Ensuring that IT requirements dominate the online registration experience or make it difficult to access or even find "social sites" sponsored by the brand
• Agonising over (& delaying) brand content as if copy should be "press release" perfect for social sites
• Allowing digital agencies to "have their heads" with the latest whiz-bang social media design - crowding out any customer impulse to contribute on-line

Now you may have observed that these questions are mostly issues of balance. However, the problem is that most of us have internalised the traditional marketing paradigm to some degree... by osmosis if nothing else. The end result is an inside-out view of the world with very little outside-in (customer) view to compensate.
And as my colleague, Tim, asks rhetorically: "Which particular day in the past 50 years did we, as marketers, wake up and find that we were afraid of our customers?"