Where Do The Conversationists Come From?

Mike Taht asks the following over at Doc's place...

I love the idea of a "conversation department", however, how do you retrain or retask the marketroids that haven't a clue as to how to have a conversation in the first place?

Why do we need to retrain folks? Why do they need to be retasked? Let the clueless "marketroids" keep swinging the broadcast hammer if that's what they want to do.

You'll find the folks that are going to staff a Conversation Department coming from the ranks of the people who understand online communications platforms intuitively. Much like the first online agencies recruited heavily from forward-thinking colleges and universities, your Conversation Department is more likely to find the people it needs among the people who have been raised on computers, the Internet and online communities. In short, look to recruit them from universities with strong communications programs.

So I think we're looking at training folks to be consumer advocates long before they learn habits that they'll need to unlearn.

A Shout Out (And Some Constructive Criticism) From Doc

Doc Searls has some terrific Online Spin-related feedback for me in a post on his blog. First off, let me make the usual caveats. I'm just a contributing writer for Mediapost, so I have a bit less control over how the message is presented than I might like. That said, The Online Spin and the Spin Board are both things that me and the Mediaposters came up with several years back, so I do bear a bit of responsibility here.

Doc suggests a couple things:

First, get the Powers That Be at MediaPost to take down the annoying registration wall.

Preaching to the choir, Doc. And that registration wall has caused a good number of problems for folks who read my columns as they get passed around via e-mail and want to respond on the Spin Board. They can't do that without registering. And that probably stifles discussion, to say nothing of how it affects search results and the ability of interested folks to find us. I'll lob a suggestion at some of the Mediaposters and see what they say about it.

Second, syndicate the newsletters on the Web and not just via email. I see no RSS feature for OnlineSPIN.

This isn't the first time Mediapost has been accused of failing to practice what it preaches. It's a bit frustrating sometimes to give advice to marketing professionals in columns and it appears as if I'm not even following my own advice. We've had people post to the Spin Board, saying things like 'isn't it ironic that you wrote a column telling me not to do this, but then you turn around and do it yourself...'

I haven't suggested a feed (much less a series of feeds) to Mediapost, but then again, I'm just a contributing writer. But Mediapost needs to turn around and realize that most of their competitors are offering their columns, content categories and other information via RSS. I get information from iMediaConnection, MarketingVox, AdRants and many other marketing/advertising-related publishers this way.

So again, I'll lob the suggestion up to Ken Fadner and the rest of the Mediaposters and hopefully, they'll implement that feature.

Third (this is old advice, but it bears repeating), drop the old-media jargon: "consumers", "consuming" and "content", for example.

Yep. I'm trying to wean myself off the consumer-speak. The difficulty is that The Online Spin reaches tens of thousands of people in the online marketing and advertising industries and that's the language they speak. But I hear ya loud and clear.

Thanks for the constructive criticism, Doc. You're a guy I respect and admire, so thanks for the shout out.

Treo Weirdness

Anybody ever hear anything like this? Last night at the OMMA All-Stars reception, I looked down at my Treo and found that it had died. No signal, no flashing lights - the Palm screen wouldn't even turn on. Another attendee noticed that I was experiencing some weirdness with my Treo and came over to me. He said that HIS Treo had just completely died as well five minutes prior.

Very strange. I'm going to charge this thing up again, but I fear it's not a lack of juice that's causing the problem. I didn't get any low battery warnings last night.

Perhaps an errant electromagnetic pulse?

Bumper Stickers?

Now that I've got a vehicle that's appropriate to stick stuff to, I'm trying to think what bumper stickers I'd like to put on my rear window. My big thing is that I don't want to put things on there that are going to get my truck keyed or make cops want to pull me over. I tried making a Flying Spaghetti Monster hitch cover weekend before last, but the plastic hitch cover blank I have seems to be made out of some space-age plastic that hot glue won't stick to, so the printout of the FSM didn't stick to it. It's a shame, too, because it looked really nice.

Submit your bumper sticker ideas in comments.