Need to overcome control and fear of failure as challenges for engagement marketing – Interview with Henriette Weber

Another pre-conference-interview for our September events – this time with Henriette Weber, speaker, author, consultant for social marketing as she calls it. Her main statement about social media at recent conferences and interviews is the subject of her free e-book: „why every company should become a rockband“. For the Community & Marketing 2.0 SUMMIT we invited her to discuss the conclusion of this in the regards to put social media and engagement marketing in corporate practice.


Henriette Weber (picture taken by G. van Nispen www.flickr.com/photos/10508572@N00)
1) Henriette – you are part of our speaker’s line-up at Community & Marketing 2.0 SUMMIT and you’ll be talking about your visions of the „business unusual“ for doing the engagement marketing. Can you give us three tags that decribe best your visions?

Henriette Weber: change, action and remarkability

2) What is your understanding of the notion of „engagement marketing“?

Henriette Weber: Engagement marketing ( or social marketing as I call it) is the brightest path ahead where aim to engage people around you – but you need to be „cool“ enough to do that.. Engagement marketing is important because of one key thing that has happened: demand and consumption patterns has changed. Before it was a choice for companies to be „good“ now you can’t excist if you’re not. This is something that will increase dramatically in the future.

3) Recently you had a talk at Next09 about companies‘ need to become rockbands. Does this mean they have to immerge into „engagement marketing“?

Henriette Weber: Rockbandism is a key factor of engagement marketing. in my opinion engagement is 10 % about how you use the tools around you, 45 % who you are and 45% what you do. Rockbandism is a recipe for companies to be able to engage with people – where the desire comes from the people to engage and not from the company.

4) Ok now – why do you think „getting into engagement marketing“ is „doing business unusual“?

Henriette Weber: Because it’s breaking with every structure we have ever learned in business.

5) What’s the biggest challenge for companies doing this?

Henriette Weber: Control and fear for sure… fear of failing mostly – oh and the need to measure everything as usual – which can be done but isn’t effective in engagement marketing.

Thanks for your time and answers.

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Bjoern Negelmann

Björn Negelmann verantwortet die inhaltlichen Teile der Veranstaltungsaktivitäten von Kongress Media und ist darüber hinaus auch Kopf des an Kongress Media angeschlossenen Research-Hauses N:Sight Research. Er reflektiert seine Beobachtungen über die Entwicklung der Themen sowohl in den Corporate-Blogs von Kongress Media und N:Sight als auch in den Fachblogs Enterprise Digital Blog (zum Social Collaboration & Future of Work Thema), auf Espresso-Digital.de (zum Thema Social Kommunikation & Marketing) sowie im Digital Experience Blog (zum Thema Digital Experience & die Transformation in Marketing, Vertrieb und Service). Darüber hinaus moderiert und betreut er die diversen Online-Communities und Online-Veranstaltungen von Kongress Media.