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.

Resistance is Futile

I was trying to write my Spin column after a long week of moving the office and an abbreviated weekend. Sometimes, something will just stick in your mind when you're trying to think about column topics. And it won't get unstuck until you write about it. This week, my brain got stuck on this meeting I had before starting Underscore. It was with a marketing person from a company that will remain nameless. She told me that she wanted to actively avoid ongoing retention-based online programs. And it was because she would rather have customers forget about them once they signed up for a program that involved a recurring fee. Those customers who actually made use of the services offered - who actually remembered they were signed up for this thing - ended up costing the company money. Thus, they would prefer to attract the kind of customer who would rather fork over the monthly fee without uttering a sound or trying to interact with the company.

Yeah, they're out of business today. But that thinking still persists in our industry today. And that sucks.

I mean, how fucked up do you have to be to view engaged customers as something other than A Good Thing? How twisted does your thinking have to be to view conversation as a thing to be stifled instead of encouraged?

THIS Is How You Run For Local Office

On Sunday, I helped Dan with some maintenance of his election signs. We drove all over the district, putting up some new signs along highways and in some cases, re-digging post holes for old signs that were starting to lean over in the inclement weather. The fact that Dan puts up his own signs is reason enough to vote for him. ;-)

Light Blogging Today

Moving the office from 27th to 20th Street.