Friday, December 15, 2006

Co-creation manifesto

I enjoy a lot of the manifestos posted on ChangeThis, but this recent one by James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore is fantastic. The topic is co-creation, and the manifesto outlines 17 points for effectively working with customers to make your marketing effective. Reading this made me want to get to work right away at finding new ways to partner with patrons in my work. Some of my favorite points: Get Vernacular; Make Your Customers Look Good (big shiny star next to this one!); Make Mistakes; Play...ok, I could list them all because they're all terrific, so you're better off just reading it yourself. I think a lot of these points could also be applied internally to increase cooperation among staff.

Why bother with co-creation? The authors sum it up this way: "If we have to choose between engagement and control, we prefer engagement. We think that organisations in the future will do well to have the same preference when it comes to dealing with their own people and their customers." Co-creation is the main reason I'm so excited about marketing and about marketing libraries in particular. I'd love to see libraries as THE partner for anyone who wants to expand their horizons. So much of what Cherkoff and Moore recommend comes naturally to librarians (sharing "secrets," creating opportunity) that I know we can be leaders on this front.

Categories: creativity_and_inspiration | must_reads | neat_trends | tips_to_try

3 comments:

Jill said...

Hi, Johnnie! Thanks for the comment. I'm very optimistic about the trend in marketing toward involving customers. I think librarians are naturally cut out for this kind of approach and can do well incorporating the open source principles you talk abou into their efforts.

I look forward to reading more from you!

Tom Bailey said...

I liked that link but some of the article links were broken. There is some good content there.

http://sms100.blogspot.com/

Jill said...

Hi, Tom. I just tried the ChangeThis.com site and found that there was an Internal Server error that prevented me from downloading the PDF. Hopefully, they'll fix it soon! I have a copy I'll send to the e-mail in your profile. That's too bad - it was a really good piece!