Wear Blue Jeans if you are Gay

Seth Godin had an interesting post on his blog. He was talking about this sign these activists had put up at his college campus:

Wear Blue Jeans
On Wednesday
If You are Gay

A simple sign, but effective. Not so much because it got a lot of people to wear jeans, but that it started a debate. It started a discussion. In fact, as you can see the discussion is still going on - many years later.

And therein is the key to advertising. The audience must be first listening, and the best way to know they are listening, is to have them talking about it with each other.

And this is what SMO is - rather than ‘yelling’ at consumers, we talk with them. In fact, we don’t even treat them as consumers, we simply  make sure our product, service or content is valuable, and then make it easy for people to talk about it.