Whooshed

Far be it for me to tell someone what their takeaway from my columns should be, but the folks at 180 Solutions seem to have - shall we say - a unique perspective on the Long Tail piece from Tuesday. On their blog, they make a point about partnering with "the right team" for optimization and campaign maintenance, and write commentary that serves as a sales piece for MetricsDirect.

Really, I meant the overview of the workload involved in online advertising to serve as an exclamation point with respect to the work involved in monitoring and participating in conversations across a number of online communities. I wasn't looking to make a point about campaign optimization at all, which is a broadcast-model concept. Think about it - we already have people mired in online campaign data, trying to squeeze every bit of response out of a broadcast campaign. How many folks do we need to dedicate to simply following the conversation? How many more will it require in order to meaningfully participate once those conversations are identified (in a timely manner)? These are the types of questions we should be asking ourselves.

I did get a load of private e-mail on this one, with many folks inquiring about the tools we're building and asking what we envisioned those tools looking like in the near future. But no one was talking broadcast. Except 180 Solutions.

Something Wickedly Cool This Way Comes

Quite a few of our clients have been looking to us for consultative help with what I'll call "conversational marketing." And I'm not talking about riding blogging's coattails in the hopes of having some of the cool factor rubbing off on client brands. I've had a few client calls in the past week that were centered around what needs to happen in order to effect real change - investments in conversation departments, dedicated conversational assets, willingness to listen, tools and more. What I'm pleasantly surprised by is the willingness to adapt on the part of clients. On a couple occasions, I made some recommendations to clients that required a lot of adjustment and adaptation on the client side. In one of those cases, I laid down an ultimatum where I thought the client was about to go against the grain of the fundamental principles of the blogging movement. I basically told them I was uninterested in moving forward if they weren't completely dedicated to doing things the right way. I thought I would be overruled. I wasn't, thankfully.

Simultaneously, interest in conversational marketing is coming from partner agencies as well. At least two agencies that we provide services to have made significant queries concerning conversational marketing and one new agency has approached us about our capabilities in that arena.

We have a basic capabilities presentation for Conversational Marketing, which includes a few small case studies. We've been working with clients, both formally and informally on conversational initiatives, but it's far from a fully blown out practice area.

I won't say much more now, other than this is an area we're very interested in, we have some great relevant expertise and success stories, and we're completely passionate about it. So let's just say something's on it's way.

Monitoring Tools

I think it's actually not that tough to monitor relevant conversations in the blogosphere using a combination of search feeds, relevant keyword searches and RSS feed subscriptions to relevant blogs. I find that I can easily identify significant conversations about my agency, my column or my person within minutes of their posting. But there's a big chunk that we're missing. There's a lot more conversation going on, and a good bit of it is happening on bulletin boards and online community sites (particularly the ones with Open Source content management systems). Many of these sites are not indexed by major search engines, and many of them fly under the radar.

I don't mean to imply that every marketer needs to know about every online conversation involving their product or their product category. But I'm convinced that in missing out on many of the underground bulletin boards, we're missing a sizeable chunk of the market conversations. And I'm not sure how to measure how large that piece is, or what remains to be indexed.

There are other components to this, too. Some pieces are more significant than others. Chat room conversations are valuable, but probably less valuable than their BBS counterparts since they have extremely limited shelf life. No chat room conversations are hanging out long enough to influence folks other than the original participants.

What we really need here is community search, an index of sites and communities with conversational capabilities, with the one-way stuff filtered out.

Getting OSX on an Old Mac

Apparently, the G3 PowerMac I bought for $75 from the moving sale downstairs is one of the only machines still in existence that won't boot from a Firewire device AND doesn't offer Target Disk mode. This is exceptionally lame, as now I have to send my OSX DVD to Apple for a set of CDs (please allow approximately six years for shipping and handling). Yes, I tried booting from a Firewire DVD drive. Yes, I tried booting into Target Disk mode anyway. Won't do it.

Either I have to send away for the CDs or I have to somehow find an OEM internal DVD drive that will work with that machine. I think I'd rather send away for the CDs. It's not like I need the machine right away. I was just hoping to wipe it clean, get it set up for e-mail and web browsing and send it over to my grandfather by the time he comes back up from Florida.