Happy new year folks!
Just wondering if anyone has any good pointers for reading or courses in marketing? There’s so much corporate guff out there, and I am hoping to find something a bit more rooted in coop values.
Thanks.
Polly
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Only I can think of is looking into 3rd sector books like creating community. For example the way civiCRM is focused to work rather than how Salesforce works.
Also there might be something in the coop platform design toolkit
It might be worth looking at the Digital Business Academy, so you can assess their work.
The original format was directly based on modules from the CASS Business School, and studying them for the internal bias, you can easily see what is not being said.
There is NO mention of Co-operatives in the lectures about Legal Structures.
All of the lectures about Equity and Profits are based around Authoritarian Command’N’Control behaviours and company structures, with no discussion about the limits of these structures when it comes to dealing with internal bad actors.
The original developers of these modules, and the DBA website were paid public grant money, and the incomplete work that they produced was deemed as acceptable, as far as getting paid was concerned.
It means that there’s a space for another project to do this properly. 
Just received the latest mailshot from City University, and they explicitly mention Digital Marketing.
https://ddlnk.net/O4Z-770MI-7CA758B172B0E8C2RMA7OYB6BE6695DF743816/cr.aspx
Might be worth a look… 
Hello
I’m not aware of any co-op specific resources (maybe we should write some) so it’s the usual suspects such as Coursera https://www.coursera.org/search?query=digital%20marketing& (has some good courses and and especially if you want non-english courses), Econsultancy https://econsultancy.com/econsultancy-training/ (generally very good, reassuringly expensive) Google Academy https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/ (free, recommended for all their tools) and various sector-specific blogs and guides for SEO, CRO, analytics, PPC etc.
In general, the main point of difference I find in marketing for co-ops and non-profits is the great strength is in leveraging existing networks, particularly for social media but also SEO, and quite often richer and more actionable feedback you get from user research.
Michael
Happy New Year, although it hasn’t begun very well 
I think this is much needed, as ethics shouldn’t be incompatible with making your services/products easy to find. There isn’t any material about SEO in other Search Engines that are not Google. Advertisement should be more in line with https://www.ethicalads.io/ (but extended to non-developers profiles) than with Google Ads and Matomo should be used instead of Google Analytics for measuring the impact.
Marketing is a tipping point for differentiating social economy business from capitalist ones while reaching broad audiences.
If there is interest, we can organise a session for defining needs and tools for this.
I agree with your premise Pau, it is impossible no to. In reality what we are looking at though is building new ecosystems. Currently most organisations need to deal with the devil in one form or other.
In the UK, organic search is only about Google. So SEO is all about Google, although the work will also deliver for Bing etc, there is simply no choice there. The other main online channels for reaching new people is the social media giants or Google/Alpahbet’s Youtube. There’s only so far you can get posting on Medium or engaging with people on Quora or Reddit.
We can hope that an ethical and privacy respecting social platform or search engine or video channel will get mass take-up, but this seems vanishingly unlikely as things stand.
Web analytics is interesting as there are viable alternatives to GA, even below enterprise level. But I’ve yet to meet an organisation of any size that is willing to switch to Matomo, for example, due to the costs, additional work in tagging email, learning new reporting interfaces, loss of comparison data, and lack of integration with other tools. For example for a charity it is arguably a very bad use of funds.
I’m not saying CoTech shouldn’t have a position on this, and perhaps try to lead with a set of alternatives, but we would need to manage expectations about what is possible. Some organisations may be willing to run with a set of niche software solutions that don’t marry together, but most won’t.
It mirrors the area of open source software in terms of convincing people of usability and utility, and overcoming resistance to change, but with the added issues that if you ignore the web giants you won’t reach anyone with digital marketing.
It would certainly be interesting to talk Matomo, given the number of web developers and agencies in CoTech, as it is a mature and viable alternative to GA. How well do we understand it as a product, do we offer it, what are the barriers to clients adopting it? We’ve certainly discussed this at Agile in the past.
Thank you all for you suggestions - really useful.
I’m always up for leading on some more marketing/commsy stuff at the CoTech gatherings so I’ll reignite this thread when the next one rolls round.
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