Ed. note: This is the first in a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to modern marketing by Adam Metz. Here, Adam discusses the influences that shaped his view of business.
It's possible that many of the readers of this book will understand how I grew up, and how it has influenced my worldview, and how it can make their lives-and the lives of their colleagues, friends, and customers-a lot better.
Although I was born in 1977 during what became known as the first punk era, six days before Elvis Presley died, I was a child of the second punk era. I grew up in the confused late '80s and early '90s, in the middle of a DIY punk culture, in an affluent San Francisco suburb, Palo Alto, at the top of the Silicon Valley, at the beginning of the boom years.
I bought my first punk CD at the tender age of 12, at the CFY record store near the railroad tracks in downtown Palo Alto (it's long since been demolished to make way for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation). But I bought most of my "corporate" Clash and Sex Pistols tapes at Tower Records in the strip mall.
I spent my formative high school and college years of 1994 to 1999 promoting punk shows in California and Wisconsin. The reason I'm telling you all of this is because the culture I grew up in was one that was DIY: do it yourself. We put on our own shows, posted our own flyers, put out our own records, and hauled our own gear. We did these things because there was no one there to do it for us, and because the record industry in the '80s and '90s ignored what many of "the kids" really wanted, spoon-feeding us Madonna, Milli Vanilli, and Prince. The DIY punk scene responded with Nirvana and, later, the tech-geek DIY scene gave us Napster, and, well, you know what happened to the music industry after those guys hit it.
Even before that, however, DIY culture in the '80s, in my opinion, helped give rise to the social customer. Consider, for example, Los Angeles hardcore punk band Black Flag, who are frequently thought of as the first or at least the archetypal American hardcore punk band. Their cultural influence on DIY culture was tremendous. Black Flag not only influenced thousands of individuals to start bands and play music, but also to rebel against American cultural norms, to think different, and really act different, years before Apple Computer turned the phrase into advertising copy.
I don't think that the social customer, as we know that customer, today, could exist without that DIY culture that arose in the late '70s and early '80s. It wasn't just a "punk" thing; DIY inspired all of the computing culture, too-the geeks who got together and formed BBSs (bulletin board services), home computer developers, and even early computer graphic designers and video editors. Is Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg "punk rock"? Hardly. But the type of thinking it takes to create something like Facebook? Absolutely.