Back in 2009, I was wandering the world armed with a BlackBerry and an itchy trigger finger on the voice memo button. Somewhere between Kangaroo Island and a Web 2.0 training course, I’d started recording fragments of thought; early-stage ideas, rants, marketing insights, and half-baked schemes that now, oddly, feel fully baked in today’s climate.
One of those memos marked the debut of something that would become a signature in my workshops and talks: my Oscar Wilde twist.
“There’s only one thing worse than being talked about,” Wilde quipped, “and that’s not being talked about.”
My 2009 remix: “There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not knowing you are being talked about.”
At the time, it was a clever way to frame the emerging tools for online reputation management, think Google Alerts, early social listening tools, and that wonderful wildcard of user-generated content that had begun popping up everywhere.
But that line also captures the essence of everything I was grappling with: How do we help businesses not just exist online, but matter? How do we move away from megaphone marketing to actual meaning?
Green Before It Was Trendy
I was also knee-deep in a sustainable tourism project on Kangaroo Island. We were working with an off-grid eco-accommodation business, and I was devising a voucher system to help locals (and eventually businesses across South Australia) access discounted eco-friendly products, like water-saving showerheads, dual-flush toilet upgrades, and low-energy lighting through participating stores.
The model was built on:
- Trust, not flash. Local stores paid a membership to join the program, and customers got a certificate to redeem. No spam, no pushy upsells, just value.
- Word of mouth over advertising. We knew if we built something useful and genuine, people would talk about it. They did.
- Education before persuasion. We didn’t need scare campaigns. We needed tips like “put a brick in your cistern” and visuals of dollar notes dripping down the drain to show just how much was being wasted.
Even then, I realised: marketing that helps people save money and resources is not only ethical, it’s magnetic.
Marketing Without the Noise
Many of those memos are full of me working out what still underpins my practice today:
- Make the information practical.
- Keep the tone conversational.
- Respect people’s intelligence.
- Show them what’s in it for them.
- And never underestimate the power of a visual cue, a little water meter ticking up, a light bulb glowing brighter for less.
What struck me, listening back, was how often I returned to listening. Not just in the tech sense, using tools to monitor what people were saying about your business, but in the human sense. Listening to customers, to community, to what’s unsaid between the lines.
So What?
This dusty archive of 2009 memos isn’t just a nostalgic trip into early eco-activism and “primitive” website planning. It’s a reminder that some truths in marketing never change:
People want to be helped, not hustled.
They trust consistency, not campaigns.
And even back when we were hunched over BlackBerrys and dreaming of widgets that dripped water and money visuals, the secret sauce was the same: build something worth talking about, then listen like your business depends on it, because it does.