Fair Weather Politicians?

/

My buddy and client Rob Burke points out on his blog that Wayne Township Mayor Scott Rumana has told him that his plans for placing a wind turbine at the site of his car wash, Wayne Auto Spa, are a "no go" as far as the town planner is concerned. He also notes that the reason the town planner doesn't want to allow this is that granting a variance would set a bad precedent vis-a-vis cell phone towers, yet local governments can't block cell towers in instances where coverage is needed. What tweaks me about this is that Mayor Rumana seems to have been eager to align himself with Wayne Auto Spa's clean energy initiatives when the News 12 cameras were rolling and the newspapers were writing articles about how the car wash and quick lube invested in solar panels, furnaces to burn waste oil and equipment to treat waste water.

On his blog, Rob provided a link to a page where interested folks can e-mail the mayor, if they feel so inclined. I'm going to do so. If you support clean, renewable energy, I recommend you e-mail the mayor as well.

Wading River House For Sale

/
wading_river.jpg
As if we didn't have enough real estate-related commotion in our lives...

This is the house I grew up in. Now totally renovated, we're putting it up for a while on ForSaleByOwner.com to see if we can get a deal done without having to pay commissions. Here's the listing.

This place has a lot of history with our family, but it's really time to let it go. It's really important that we sell within a reasonable length of time, so any little bit of promotion or publicity can help. I know other bloggers and media professionals sometimes stop by here. I'd appreciate your inbound links or, if you're a media seller and you have some remnant inventory you're not doing anything with... (I know, it's a stretch.)

The thing I will miss most about this place, other than the family memories, is how it served as the center of our social hub for so long. People love to come here, especially in the summer. And it's fun to entertain, whether it's family coming for Christmas dinner or just a random summer pool party. (Some of you out there may have been among the 500 or so of my closest friends invited to SposBash and you've experienced this first hand.)

I'll be sad to see it go, but it's really time to move on.

Conversational Marketing Tide Turning

/

Brad Berens interviews Northwestern Professor Emeritus Don Schultz about a few topics of interest. On his blog, Brad points out that Schultz understands how far ahead of mainstream marketers the social media players are. True dat. One of my favorite parts of the interview:

Well, the real issue that marketing, all marketing, struggles with today is that by and large all marketing organizations were designed to push things out. We made things; we pushed them out into the marketplace. We wanted to communicate with people; we pushed out advertising. We wanted to incent them in some way; we pushed out sales promotion. So, marketing essentially, has been a linear process, starting with the marketer pushing it out into the marketplace.

So Schultz obviously "gets it" in the sense that he realizes pushing out more "buy my crap" isn't the solution.

Here's the payoff, IMHO:

Now, you have to understand that marketing organizations are designed to talk. They have never been designed to listen. So, when you start talking about dialogue, and interactivity, and you start talking about things like social networks, and that sort of thing, the marketing organizations have no way to deal with that, because they have always been outbound, and linear, and all designed to push communication out, and never really ever looked at, or listened to, customers historically. So, that creates a big problem.

This is the biggest problem we run into when we pitch Conversational Marketing to clients. They're not sure whether they can commit because they can't fathom the depth of the commitment to dialogue. "How many people am I going to have to hire?" is a common question. So is "How can I be reassured that this scales?"

Often, it's a tough question for us to answer, which is why we have one of the steps in our process. We'll do an audit of potential resources for an organization, so that a company can turn to people in the organization who already blog, or who already are familiar with the ground rules for online communities and online conversation. From there, a clearer picture emerges as to what it will take to make sure people are listening and responding appropriately.