Dandelion marketing
how t o in crease y our
Your Time Is
Valuable.
Why To
Spend It
Here.
There is a HUGE difference
between how you can use
social media as a marketer
and what its arrival means
for you. This e-Book is
about the latter. The changes
that social media is forcing
upon us as marketers are
quite significant.
What you will walk away
with is:
•  A better understanding of
those changes
•  How you need to adapt
your marketing function
to thrive
Hint: it involves a flower.
Never Stop Marketing
o d d s of “goi ng vi ral ”
I n t roduct ion
Was It Only
A Printing
Press?
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, there were
those who said:
“Great, now it costs less to print my ideas.”
There were others, however, who took a more expansive view. They said:
“Whoa. Information can now get in the hands of the masses and not just the
elite. There will be some sweeping societal changes that will come about now
that printing is really cheap. What will they be and how can we capitalize?”
Guess which group was ready for the monumental societal transformation that
subsequently rocked Europe?
So, Which Group Are You In?
We are facing a similar historical moment with the advent of social media. Only
this time, instead of the printing press, the tools are blogs, Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, LinkedIn and all the others.
The Massive Change?
EVERYONE is a communications channel and “everybody can talk to everybody,”
as Clay Shirky writes. There are 1.2 billion people online. There are 4.8 billion
cellphones. Those numbers are not going to decrease.
This tectonic-sized shift in communications and channels affects the audience of
our marketing efforts (you already read that whitepaper, right?), but it also raises
the much larger question:
How must organizations evolve their
marketing functions to exploit these
changes and opportunities?
Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” |1
 sparking the viral inferno
The traditional job of a marketer seeking to drive sales was fairly straightforward:
“Get the word out.” In that model, we could measure media consumption Li ke what
fairly easily. you’re
But, “getting the word out” implies that it is on your shoulders to tell everyone. reading?
Now, since “everybody can talk to everybody,” the marketer must focus instead Cl ic k on any of
on “having the word spread.”
t hes e icons to
This is an important shift. With the channel fragmentation from a few into billions,
sha re t hi s wi th
it is difficult to know what people are consuming. But even beyond that, people
a friend .
have so much choice now that it has become much harder to understand how
they will exercise that choice.
In this new model, the best way for “having the word spread,” as you know, is
when our stories “go viral.”
Remembering that viral is the effect, NOT the cause, we want to do all that we
can to increase the likelihood of a “viral inferno.”
There are a lot of things that we cannot control to accomplish this, but there are
a few that we can. The three biggest ones are:

1.  Be Remarkable
Nobody talks about things that are boring. If your stories are not worth
sharing with friends and colleagues, they simply will not spread.

2.  Create an “Ignitable” Environment

Make it as easy as you possibly can for people.
•  On a very tactical level, you can add a TweetMeme, ShareThis, or Send to
a Friend button to your site..
•  On a strategic level, you can cultivate a community of Raving Fans
(stage 2 of CDM) so that when the right activity is placed in front of them,
they are there to see it, embrace it, and spread it.
Sign up to get the upcoming e-Book on Community Cultivation Best Practices.

3.  Make Smaller Bets More Often

You never know-and cannot predict-which spark is going to set off the
“viral inferno.” You have to create as many sparks as possible.
Arranging your marketing function to increase the odds of sending
To snap the tag, go to gettag.mobi
out the right spark for the “viral inferno” begins, believe it or not,
on your mobile browser.
with a flower.

2 | Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” Never Stop Marketing
 Think Like a Dandelion
The advent of social media gives you the capability to experiment with new
marketing initiatives at significantly less cost. Combine that with the fact that you
(1) need to “have your message spread” and (2) cannot predict when and how
that will happen; you recognize that the era of only 1 or 2 big annual marketing
investments is over.

It Is Time to “Think Like a Dandelion.”

As Chris Anderson writes, the survival of a dandelion requires that it waste a
huge number of (cheaply produced) seeds in order that only a few may survive
and prosper.
Marketing initiatives today are very similar. Instead of seeds, though, you are
dispersing low-cost sparks into your ignitable environment to increase your odds
of generating the viral inferno.

The Dandelion Marketing Culture

The challenge for many organizations is to design a culture of marketing (be it
1 person or 1000) that is capable of rapidly tossing out low-cost sparks.
How convenient. That’s what is up next.
So, if you are ready to design a culture of Dandelion Marketing, you will want to
think about these six elements:
1.  Know the Commander’s Intent
s ta rt b y 2.  Everyone Is In Marketing
k n owi n g t h es e
3.  Brand: Feel Over Look
six e l em e n ts
4.  Agile Marketing Development
o f dan d e l i o n
5.  High Fault Tolerance
ma rketi n g .
6.  Rapid Feedback Loops

Let’s talk about each of these

and what they mean for your
organization.

Never Stop Marketing Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” |3
 What is Your Commander’s Intent?
Sha re
Your number one job is to instruct your team about the ultimate goal of your
efforts. Communicating that with the utmost clarity is at the core of
co mma nder’s
Commander’s Intent. Intent And
Much of marketing today is a systematic, process-oriented, linear set of activities.
t he ot her
“Our goal is Z, so first we will get to A, then to B,” and so on. da ndel ion
As we get into the thick of execution, unfortunately, things do not always work ma rket i n g
out as planned. The military strategist Karl von Clausewitz encapsulated it well; Element s
“no plan survives its first encounter with the enemy.” wit h a friend.
Despite that, our linear, process-oriented thinking persists. Stuck on point J and Click on any of
unable to get to point K, what do we do? We spend a lot of time, energy, and t hese icons.
resources figuring out a new way to get to point K!
This is not a good use of resources, IF we remember Commander’s Intent.
Instead….
“Hey, wait a second. Our goal isn’t to get to K. Our goal is to get to Z!!!!!
Maybe now, with new information about the market, we don’t even need to
get to K! Maybe we can go straight to Z. Or at least to W, X, or Y!!”

Everyone Is a Marketer
When you start looking for new ways to achieve the Commander’s Intent, you will
need fresh ideas. Humbling though it may be to us as marketers, these ideas can
come from anywhere.
In a Dandelion Marketing Culture, the entire organization (not only employees, but
stakeholders of all kinds, including Raving Fans and customers) can act as your
“eyes and ears on the ground.” They can spot new opportunities to achieve your
objective…if you let them.
In many cases, they are also better positioned to execute marketing activities
more quickly than a centrally-led group.
Here is one example:
Rackspace is one of the leading web-site hosting companies in the world.
The way they got there? “Fanatical support at every level,” according to one
of their founders, Morris Miller.
Author Jeanne Bliss sums it up this way:
“Rackspace decided to eliminate silos for customers” and unify
accountability for growth.

4 | Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” Never Stop Marketing

b ra n d is a b o u t
the e x p e ri e n c e .
If yo u sh a r e
co m m a n d e r ’ s
inte n t, ev e ry on e
can a c t lik e a
mar k e t e r a n d
you r br a n d
will f eel r i g h t.
To snap the tag, go to gettag.mobi
on your mobile browser.
Never Stop Marketing
In other words, they recognized that everyone is in marketing.
Why does recognizing that “Everyone Is In Marketing” make so much sense in a
world with billions of channels?
Because perfect conditions for a “viral inferno” may be present for only a small
window of time.
When identified, sparks must fly as quickly as possible. A controlled, bureaucratic
approval process will delay-and possibly forfeit-the benefit.
Everyone in the organization (regardless of role or title) must be empowered to
act as a marketer and do it rapidly.
How It Feels vs. How It Looks
I’ll guess your next question.
“If I empower everyone to act as a marketer, how do I maintain a consistent
look for my brand?”
You don’t necessarily need to. Gasp!
Stay with me here…
Olivier Blanchard blogged about Jack Spade (of Kate Spade) who offered the
following piece of branding advice:
Brand consistency is overrated. The brand doesn’t have to look the same,
but it has to feel the same. An element of newness and surprise is important
for any brand.
Over time, we’ve come to associate the look instead of the experience as the
defining element of the brand.
The brand, however, is an ephemeral feeling. It sums up the aggregate
experiences of the customer with the organization. The visuals can evoke that
feeling, but they don’t determine it.
Your experience with a brand is the result of a two-way interaction. More often
than not, it is an unscripted “improvisation” (shout out to Mike Bonifer for this
idea, that plays the organization’s representative off the customer’s opening line.)
Your representative is guided by Commander’s Intent and a solid understanding
of the desired feel of the brand. The employee may express the “look” differently
in the unscripted improv, but the positive trade-off comes in the empowerment to
think and act like dandelions, throwing the spark that may set off the viral inferno.
Enabling individuals to express themselves within a framework of Commander’s
Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” |5
 Intent has big benefits, according to internationally acclaimed conductor Roger
Nierenberg:
“The executive doesn’t own the music. Instead of demanding mindless
obedience, communicate a larger vision that invites people to draw on the
full range of their talents. Allow employees to feel ownership of the whole
piece and not just their parts.”
You are the conductor of the marketing orchestra. Communicate that vision and
let the entire organization draw on their talents, feel ownership, and provide
customers with a positive brand-building experience.

A gree wi th
Agile Marketing Development
Roger
If you are going to exploit the moments for a potential “viral inferno” and draw Ni erenber g?
on a full range of talents from your organization, you will need a high degree of
Go ahe a d and
flexibility and creativity.
Click an Icon
This is where Agile Marketing Development (AMD) kicks in.
t o share this
Think of AMD like building a house with a modular approach. First, you just put a
wit h a fr iend.
bedroom with a bathroom attached to it. Then, you decide you want to add on a
full kitchen. Then, a living room, and so on.
The upside is that you get to live in the house pretty much immediately for a
low cost. You get to find out if you like the neighborhood, schools, etc. before
investing a ton of money in it.
The downside is that you may not initially foresee the need for a 2nd story. When
you need one, you have to spend more strengthening the roof than if you had
originally specified a 2nd story.
As it relates to marketing efforts, there are two primary benefits in your search
for the right spark to start the “viral inferno.”
1.  It is far better to make mistakes quickly, when they are small and cheap.
2.  You are confronted with pass/fail situations sooner before you
overcommit dollars for a bad initiative and after you have some actual
evidence of a good one.
Tim Brown calls this “failing faster to succeed sooner.”
Some of the most creative people in the world actually favor this approach;
first-rate designers just call it “prototyping.” When you prototype instead of just
plan, people can react, discuss, get feedback and most importantly, IMPROVE
very quickly.

6 | Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” Never Stop Marketing
 Agile Marketing Development is about sourcing ideas from ANYONE and rapidly
creat e Y o u r testing as many of them as you can.
o wn Agil e You can prototype your own AMD process in 5 steps:
ma r k e ti n g 1.  Allocate a percentage of marketing dollars for AMD prototypes
dev e l o p me n t 2.  Communicate the criteria for AMD prototypes (budget, timeframe,
Pro c ess scope, etc.)
3.  Make it abundantly clear that good ideas are welcome
1.  Allocate
4.  Implement the ideas you receive that meet the criteria
Marketing
5.  Measure their impact (i.e. amount of pipeline created, number and
Dollars
impact of prototypes)
Beginning with a “Beat the CEO” contest, JackBe, the leading mashup
2.  Set
budget development platform (disclosure: client), embraced AMD to grow its
timeframe Prototype Mashup Developer Community from 3 people on opening day…to over
scope
Criteria 3000 one year later. It has paid off in many ways, including recognition as a
Forrester Groundswell Award Finalist.
3.  Be Open What they found, and what you will find, is that beginning AMD is tough. But,
ID E A S
to Ideas you should hang in there…a few brave souls will come forth. Once the rest of the
organization sees that ideas are valued and acted upon, they will respond.

4.  Implement Tolerate (Even Embrace) Failure

IDE A S
Ideas The nature of AMD is that you will have significantly more failures than successes.
Preparing your organizational culture for this is critical.
In the technology word, there is a concept known as high fault tolerance.
5.  Measure This means that when a part of the system breaks, the whole system doesn’t
Impact shut down. For example, if one server crashes, the Internet can still relay your
messages for you.
When you think about “high fault tolerance” as it relates to marketing planning,
preparation, and execution, however, it reflects the type of culture you have built.
You obviously don’t want losers or non-performers on your team. You want
innovators who find and support dandelion efforts.
And, if you really, truly want innovators, you must have a culture that allows
them to experiment…and fail…without being punished for it.
Take a look at some of the big, successful corporate research labs, like Bell Labs
or Xerox PARC. These are cultures that tolerate failure.

Never Stop Marketing Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” |7
 Jeremy Elson of Microsoft Research offers this:
“Failure is not penalized, only a lack of success… Real-t i me
People tend to keep multiple pots boiling at once for this reason, to increase results
the chance that in a given year you have some success to report -- always of onl ine
with other stuff brewing in the background which may become successful and offline
next year, or maybe never. “ ac tivi t ies are
At some point, you need to show progress, but peers know that great innovation, a real ity.
like great research, means a LOT of failures along the way.
Cli ck a ny of
The challenge is to get your marketing function to behave in the same way. the se icons
One approach is to reward failure. t o share this
Steve Van Roekel is the managing director of the FCC. Prior to that, he spent wit h a fr iend.
18 years working at Microsoft, leading various initiatives, including one role
as a special assistant to Bill Gates.
Van Roekel instituted a “Take Risk” Award that was handed out every quarter
to the person whose failed initiative helped the organization learn the most.
By rewarding the risk-takers, Van Roekel sent a strong message. Taking a
smart chance is the best form of job security.
To drive innovation in your marketing efforts, you must obliterate the perception
that any failure is bad. Once you do that, you have actually increased your
chances of success.

Which Seeds Grow? Rapid Feedback Loops

The Cluetrain Manifesto laid it out clearly: “Markets are conversations.”
You say something, the market responds. You adjust, the market responds. You
refine and iterate until you have a story that resonates, which people can tell their
friends, and which give them reason to call you.
The dialogue used to move VERY slowly. It could take weeks or months to get a
reaction. Organizing and analyzing a focus group took a lot of time and money. In
a given year, you could only plan a few things to execute… at most.
Today the feedback loop is nearly instantaneous. Want a focus group? It’s
already out there ready to go, instantly. Bing and Google have integrated Twitter
into their search results. Facebook is now searchable. Real-time results of online
and offline activities are a reality.
Your opportunity to adjust comes sooner, which makes annual or semi-annual
campaign planning obsolete and makes ongoing, real-time tweaks a reality.

8 | Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” Never Stop Marketing
 Enjoy Instead of saying once, maybe twice, a year “here are the campaigns we will run for
the next 6 or 12 months,” your new approach is:

the read? “We are going to create a story about this product/service that people will want
to tell their friends.
Clic k b e l ow We will measure the success of the story by how often people talk about it (here
to J oi n the are 100 ways to measure social media) and if they don’t talk about it at RATE X,
con v e rsat io n well then, we will try a different way to tell the story.
on fac e b o o k And we will do this every 2-3 weeks until we get it right.
and g e t Because we can.”
eve ry d ay
in sights Marketing’s Darwinian Moment
on h o w t o The arrival of social media has created billions of channels for communication.
nev e r s t o p Much like those who saw Gutenberg’s printing press in 1440, you have a choice in
mar keti n g . how you adapt to this new technological evolution.
Either you use the new technologies but keep doing marketing the way it has been
done OR you begin to think about how society is changing and what you need to
do to thrive.
No pressure, eh?

be c o m e a fa n
Now what?
The Anthropology
of Your Marketing
How ready is your team for Dandelion Marketing?
Look at the culture you have. What are the strengths? The weaknesses?
Where should you begin to make the small, adaptive changes?
We do this through a Marketing Anthropology Assessment. You can
certainly drop us a line to find out more.
Or, do it yourself. See the Free Marketing Anthropology Assessment
Starter Kit on next page.

Never Stop Marketing Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” |9
 H er e’ s y o ur v e ry o w n

marketing anthropology W ho El se
assessment starter kit wo u l d benefit
1.  Commander’s Intent from t hi s free
a.  Are you clear about your Commander’s Intent? Write it down. M arket i ng
b.  Is your team clear about yours? Ask them to write it down.
ant hropology
assessment
2.  Everyone Is In Marketing Star t er k it?
a.  Do you know your top “non-marketer marketers?” Cli ck on one
b.  Identify them by name. of t hese icons
c.  When was the last time that you implemented or supported one of them? t o Share this
wit h a fr iend.
3.  Brand: Feel Over Look
a.  What is the essence of the “feel” of your brand?
b.  Ask your customers to write down what your brand feels like for them.
c.  See if the two match up.

4.  Agile Marketing Development

a.  Do you have budget set aside for AMD activities?
b.  What are your criteria for funding and implementing AMD activities?
c.  Have you communicated them? How did you do that?
d.  Ask your “non-marketer marketers” to state them back to you.

5.  High Fault Tolerance

a.  How do you reward failure?
b.  Identify 5 examples of people who have “failed forward.”

6.  Rapid Feedback Loops

a.  How many listening posts do you have set up? List them.
b.  How quickly can you gather feedback on your marketing activities?

No matter how you do it (as long as

you do it), good luck on the journey
and thank you for reading!

10 | Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” Never Stop Marketing

The r eal i t y
is yo u ca n
nev e r s t o p
mar keti n g .
It’s not a some time thing or
a “when we need it” thing. It’s
an “all the time” thing. If you
want to build a business that is
sustainable over the long haul,
you need to build a culture that
has marketing as a perpetual
activity. Like breathing.
Never Stop Marketing is a
mantra for how we work. More
importantly, it’s at the very core
of the marketing engines that we
build for clients.
To learn more, visit us online at
www.neverstopmarketing.com
and join others who share the
mantra on Facebook.
Email the author (Jeremy Epstein)
or follow him on Twitter.
Subscribe by email or RSS to
the Never Stop Marketing Blog.
© 2010 Never Stop Marketing.
All Rights Reserved.
Design: Amy Detrick, Tangible Group
Never Stop Marketing
if you want to read more
h e r e are some great book s
t o help you t hink
•  Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
The “Bible,” chock full of examples, of how to make your product or service
worth talking about.
•  The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
If I taught a class, this would be the first book in the “required reading” list.
•  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Puts “social software” into a context that helps you understand why it is
so important.
•  The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Great examples, anecdotes, and ideas for HOW to make WOM work for you.
•  Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and
Inspires Innovation
Helps you think about how to structure your life and your business for innovation.
•  Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
You need to tell stories that people remember. This book shows you how
to do that.
•  Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses
Talk with Customers
I enjoyed this book for the way that it foretold (in a practical way), how
conversations take place between companies and their customers.
•  Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Ever ask yourself, “I don’t understand how they will make any money?”
Read this.
•  Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
A great, hands-on guide to using social media to help you have your
stories spread.
•  GameChangers -- Improvisation for Business in the Networked World
Introduced me to the concept of improvisation for brand management and,
after a while, I realized…he’s right.
•  I Love You More Than My Dog
Great examples and a quick read of what companies (mostly B2C, but you’ll
get the gist) can do to inspire fanatical customer passion.
Dandelion Marketing: How to Increase Your Odds of “Going Viral” | 11