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Make your customers feel like owners. The magazine, Business 2.0, mentioned “Burning Man”, America’s biggest counterculture jamboree. The Burning Man community is an unusually smart, well-knit, and well-heeled social network. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google are regular attendees.

WHAT ARE THE LESSONS FROM THE COUNTERCULTURE?

My point is, MAKE YOUR CUSTOMERS FEEL LIKE OWNERS. More than 80% of the city of Black Rock and their volunteers for Burning Man feel like OWNERS. They contribute because they feel like the event is “THEIRS”, not a source of entertainment. I’d say this is a huge motivator.

LET YOUR PRODUCTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

Burning Man discourages any kind of branding (drive up with a U-Haul and you might be asked to cover up that logo). That is what keeps the customers coming back says, Larry Harvey, founder of Burning Man. “People profit greatly from an environment where they’re not being huckstered all the time”. Are you huckstering your customers online? Get authentic and huckstering will cease. Remember, this doesn’t mean frequently emailing your customers is a curse. It’s all about relevant messaging to your audience that reduces the feeling of being huckstered, not emailing frequently.

LAUNCH AND THEN LEARN AS YOU GO.

Burning Man http://www.burningman.com/ grew organically and funded itself entirely on ticket sales. The initiators behind Burning Man had to learn how to quickly adopt to business. Harvey says, “It turns out to be a pretty dynamic combination.”

You can do the same as an independent online marketer with a newsletter that contains the most precious jewels, tips, and gold nuggets of information behind what you offer to your customers. When my customers share with me and others just how authentic and valuable the newsletter is to their bottom line, it reinforces the importance of open active communications.

I have a dear colleague, Ruth Klein, www.ruthklein.com, a diva marketer who sends a snail mail newsletter that is loaded with so much added value that she is able to rise above all of the newsletter marketing noise and still gets paid for her efforts. She extrapolates from articles in building her content.. Brilliant!

Are you giving your customers the ability to feel like your company is theirs? An earlier post on Bluerpintblog.com showcases Home Depot who understands that customers are policing their brand by rating how well vendors who supply PC’s deliver on their promise. If you’re a small business, present a special survey and share the feedback with the audience. Perhaps you can send an email with a pdf or ebook that provides information on how you solve their problems.

One my clients at www.hartcreativemarketing.com, www.twistedsilver.com not only uses their blog to promote and distribute jewelry, but it also supports the people who wear the jewelry. Founder, Deb Mitchell, with each blog post or comment, she is on her way to developing content for her site and leveraging her blog as a marketing tool. This is Web 2.0 at it’s finest where others that give supplemental information to a post and comments attached to the posts give the customers the ability to feel like “Twisted Silver” is “THEIRS”!

It’s the new marketing online best practice, championed by Wikipedia, the content creation of the visitors are mirrored back.. How cool for Deb of TwistedSilver, collecting all that “Wisdom of the Crowd” content and very soon, opening a new page on the site called, “The How To Get Twisted Resource Center”. She can create an ebook just from visitors and fans who are wearing this junk jewelry and adding their comments to the ebook with what others are saying. How she leverages that ebook to explode her sales is another conversation.

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