He said, “I still hope for the solution everyone wants: “just spend some money and have customers start banging on my door”.

My response follows:

The technology would have to read your mind, glean through ESP the history of your client experiences and interactions (all those verbal conversations), as well as your aspirations and goals for your business, the common issues you struggle with (vs. others in your field), the unique challenges of your local market or diverse client base, and then it would interact with all the humans for you.

Because that’s what the new web 2.0 marketing is – not something you put up and walk away from (whether it’s automated or done by hand) but a constant, continual, ongoing set of interactions with people in your market and potential market. It’s social.

So the best way to create an automated solution is to replace you with a machine in your actual work, and replace your clients with machines. Then the machines can interact with each other. But as long as it’s human to human (h2h) business instead of machine to machine (m2m), it will require the ongoing, rational, concerted, interested, motivated, sincere, genuine, alert, responsive involvement of the human stakeholders.

The message of social media is that you’re never going to put this back in the bag and go back to just back-end SEO (tags and keywords) and throwing up an online business card (what most web sites used to be), unless humans themselves are universally replaced with machines in their core endeavors.

The machine-era of marketing is over. The humans won.

And now, we market to humans as though they were humans – social creatures – not as though they were machines (like we tried in the decade from 1994-2004). That was our 10-year experiment in “automating” internet marketing, and what we found is that people’s responses weren’t automated. And even when people did respond, they mostly got burned (buyer beware), and learned to ignore that kind of marketing. The come uppance of social media in 2004 changed everything – we’re back to not treating our clients like they’re brainless masses of androids who we can manipulate into purchasing whatever we make or sell. Now, we have to treat them like people again, and interact with them. We can’t dump flyers on their roofs from helicopters.

We have to talk with them, not to them.

That’s the new marketing.