Tech, Startups, Capital, Ideas.

Almost two decades ago, Bill Davidow, one of the founders of MDV, authored Total Customer Service: The Ultimate Weapon. Lane Becker and Thor Muller at Get Satisfaction are now taking it one step further with their declaration that Customer Service is the New Marketing. They’re putting on a one-day summit to bring together the best minds to talk about it. We’re excited to be sponsoring the event’s lunch with round-table workshops on February 4 in San Francisco. 

Demand generation the old way was a well-understood activity. Companies allocated a given budget. They then spent these dollars at conferences and events that people attended in-person, in print-magazines, and in getting placement of articles and quotes in trade journals and with leading analysts. Their customers called them or went to a store, bought the product, and everyone lived happily ever after. Except that customers were dissatisfied and disconnected from the companies whose products they bought.

The Internet and web marketing changed all that. A giant shift occurred, from product to customers. Today it’s not sufficient to build a great product. Getting product to market is like getting to the starting line. Building your community and interacting with your users and customers is where the real race occurs.

With Genius.com, we’ve seen first-hand how companies are marketing online. What started as a multi-step process – advertise in a search engine, drive traffic to a landing page, put the lead into a database, and then have a sales person follow up – has turned into an immediate interaction. With Genius, sales and marketing reps can now tell if a customer or potential customer is on a company’s web site and interact immediately, online. 

Web based forums, wiki’s, blogs, and other online collaboration and discussion mechanisms are providing a new way to interact with customers. Rather than trying to manage the infrastructure for their online communities themselves, as with so many other areas of IT, companies are turning to hosted software like PBWiki and Thor and Lane’s Get Satisfaction offering. By using these collaborative and open mechanisms, companies are turning what could be a support burden into an incredible asset, with users helping users. A loyal customer base is the result.

On the consumer side, individuals of every age are now managing their own online communities. Hi5, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, and other large social networks are a few leading examples. With hundreds of millions of users in aggregate, these networks illustrate just how important the ability to define and interact with your online community has become.

Bill Davidow was right: Total Customer Service is the ultimate weapon. Head over to the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference on February 4 to find out how to put that weapon to work for you.