Strumpette Says Conversational Marketing and PR Aren't Compatible

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Strumpette links to a column I wrote last year in a piece about why Conversational Marketing and PR aren't compatible. And Doc says here we go again... Interesting stuff from Strumpette, and I don't disagree with all of it. I do, however disagree with the following:

CM entered the geeky lexicon seven years ago with “The Cluetrain Manifesto.” In the hypothetical, CM is the bottom-up approach to communication where “broadcast” is replaced by connecting directly with customers. The book proposed that "markets are conversations,” and because of technology, i.e. the Web and the ability to scale, “In just a few more years, the current homogenized ‘voice’ of business will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.”

Hmmmm... Yeah if you lived in a pod commune on the planet Zork and bought food telepathically with radiant mednars maybe. Nice theory but almost totally devoid of the earthly realities of human nature, transactional dynamics and the legal traditions of property. But it sounds good and is a perfect constitution around which to rally the legions of Open Source have nots sitting in their underwear in their parent’s basement. Hell, this could very well be the rallying cry for disintermediated disintermediaries everywhere.

The truth of the matter is that commercial communication does sound foreign to us. In your everyday life online, how easy has it been for you and fellow members of your favorite online communities to spot the infiltrator from a PR agency or corporate communications department? How easy is it to spot forum-seeding dirtbags and compensated agents? It's been easy for almost everybody, which is why we see so many stealth marketing initiatives and covert PR operations exposed.

We know corporate-speak when we see it. We know talking points, spamola, fluffery and other spawn of the top-down marketing model, and we easily detect it when we see it in stark contrast to real, human speech. And I think that's what Cluetrain was talking about in the passage quoted. It's like second nature to us now.

It's too amorphous for people writing checks to buy and it's too amorphous to measure results.

Nah. I've got clients measuring this now. If you were at the iMedia Brand Summit and saw Jason Calacanis' keynote, he posted a slide about AccuQuote and the percentage of revenue Sean Cheyney (their VP of marketing and biz dev) was able to directly attribute to CM and his blog. The truth is that it's easy to measure if you're already used to measuring online ad campaigns - you use some of the same technology to measure your typical blog reader in comparison to your typical customer and your non-customer. It's easy to see a return on investment.

The "true believers" in Social Media continue to gloss over the overwhelming business risk

Nah, we know the risks. We disclose them. We talk nearly constantly about how negative comments and feedback are an opportunity. Yes, we know people like messing with brands. Admittedly, if you're Disney, this isn't for you. But if you acknowledge that you've never had control of "the message" or "the brand," then it's something to consider.

Sitting at the Airport

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I'm at the gate at Southwest Florida International Airport, but my flight's not for a few hours. I had to leave the iMedia Brand Summit a bit early, since I have client meetings in Jersey tomorrow. I had to check out of my room, so I figured I would head over to the airport and get some work done in the terminal. Work has certainly piled up over the last day and a half, and the week is jam-packed. I have a few assignments that need to be done before I go to bed tonight, so I'm jamming through stuff while I wait for my plane.

The summit, although abbreviated for me, was a blast. Tom Troja and I delivered a presentation on Conversational Marketing with Todd Riley from GM Planworks and Liz Vanzura from Cadillac. We got a lot of great feedback from the attendees, who packed the room and even stood in the rear of the room when we ran out of seats. It was great to get that kind of support. We walked the attendees through the "Can We Talk?" execution we've put together for Cadillac, after talking about some of the basic strategic thrusts and ground rules for Conversational Marketing in general.

I wish we could have spent more time in Q&A, because there were people with their hands raised who didn't get to ask their questions, since we ran out of time. Other than running out of Q&A time, I think the panel went really well. I excused myself to the hallway outside after it was over to answer questions from folks lingering after the panel. There were plenty.

I think Jason Calacanis did a pretty admirable job of outlining what NOT to do in his morning keynote. It was the perfect setup for what Tom, Liz, Todd and I talked about. So we didn't have to spend a lot of time going over the McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Sony flogs and why they're wrong. We didn't have to talk about PayPerPost or any of the other companies with approaches antithetical to the principles that gave rise to the blogging explosion. We didn't have to go over any of the negatives, since Jason covered a bunch of them. Couldn't have been a more perfect setup.

I'm tired, and I've got a lot of work to slog through, so I'm going to sign off for a bit. Blogging light for the next couple days.

Before I Leave

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I'm hoping that in the next 1.5 hours or so I can set up a NAS server. Before my Dad moved down to Florida, he gave me his reasonably-new Compaq, which I wiped and turned into a Linux box.  After I moved to Holbrook, the machine sat in my garage in Wading River, since I didn't have room for it.  Now that we're in Holtsville, I can throw it under my desk.  Since we're in need of some network storage, I decided to look into FreeNAS, an open-source project.

I created a boot CD from the ISO image I just downloaded, and the Compaq is chugging on it.  I'm hoping that I can get this thing running before my cab shows up at 11:45.  It would be nice to back up a lot of the music that I have on my various computers.  I'd also like to set up an FTP server so I can access my home files from the office.