Jack Myers Covers Conversational Marketing

Here's the link. I'm flattered Jack covered this, and even more flattered that he chose to come to Hespos.com and quote some of the stuff I posted here about the Ford Bold Moves campaign.

I wanted to expand on something Jack raised in his first paragraph:

A number of companies are suddenly discovering and laying claim to a form of online marketing called "Conversational Marketing," not to be confused with Word-of-Mouth Marketing. Conversational Marketing is an advance on WOM, say industry veterans Tom Troja and Tom Hespos, who have teamed to bring structure and standards to the still wild, wild West business of generating market connections.

One of the ways we're "laying claim" to this new marketing strategy is in preparing our clients appropriately. There is nothing that could damage Conversational Marketing more than having a bunch of major marketers signing on to try it out, and then falling flat because they didn't dedicate the appropriate resources to following up comments and participating meaningfully in the conversation. You'll notice from some of the stuff I linked to yesterday on AccuQuote's blog that they follow up each and every one of their blog comments. They're also going to be posting about how, specifically, customer feedback on their blog led AccuQuote to refine some of its business practices and methods. And that's the difference. We work together with our clients to make sure they're prepared to participate meaningfully.

Another thing raised in the first paragraph - "Conversational Marketing" sounds an awful lot like "Word Of Mouth Marketing," but we ought not to confuse the two. I've railed against the false authenticity of a lot of the campaigns that go on in the WOM universe. I won't belabor it, but I will say that the foundations of Conversational Marketing are transparency, honesty, human communication, and the Golden Rule. I doubt many WOM campaigns can make that same claim.

We're continuing to talk to clients and prospects about how to do this correctly, so that the dialogue is real. It won't be long before we have more campaigns to talk about, and more success to report with AccuQuote and others.