Archive for Conversation Marketing
by Hylton Jolliffe
October 19, 2007 at 3:30 am · Filed under Conversation Marketing, Humdingers
Jeff Jarvis looks back at his saga with Dell and reports on a recent visit to its headquarters.
A quote from Michael Dell that echoes advice what we’ve given clients about engaging via blogs: “These conversations are going to occur whether you like it or not, O.K.? Well, do you want to be part of that or not? My argument is you absolutely do. You can learn from that. You can improve your reaction time. And you can be a better company by listening and being involved in that conversation.”
More goodness from later in the article: “Michael Dell predicts that customer relationships will ‘continue to be more intimate.’ He even speaks of ‘co-creation of products and services,’ a radical notion from a giant manufacturer. ‘I’m sure there’s a lot of things that I can’t even imagine, but our customers can imagine,’ Dell says, still sounding very bloggish. ‘A company this size is not going to be about a couple of people coming up with ideas. It’s going to be about millions of people and harnessing the power of those ideas.’”
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
October 2, 2007 at 7:09 pm · Filed under Online PR, User-Driven Strategies, Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice
Another Tom Asacker quote from our call:
“Customers don’t trust businesses or the people running them, and I think that any kind of business that somehow has fooled themselves into believing that they have earned customers’ trust — they’re deluded. And that will affect how they approach their customer base. They need to understand that people are skeptical of everything that they say and they do. Because we’ve been conditioned that way over the past ten years, with everything from Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Adelphia, Arthur Andersen, Xerox, to Catholic priests, Major League Baseball steroids, Martha Stewart – everywhere we look we see this kind of thing. We’re conditioned to distrust. So that’s what’s gone on. We have been conditioned by the activities in the marketplace over the past 50 or 60 years, which makes today’s mindset of the customer much much different than the mindset of 1940’s and 50’s people.”
What this means to me is that the marketer must relearn how to have a real conversation. By this I mean that they must allow for different opinions, instead of acting like a dictatorship where dissenting voices are hidden or silenced. This, along with listening, is the only way they can earn trust back. Companies no longer enjoy implicit authority. Those days are over, thanks to endless product choices (crumbling monopolies), the burnt bridges Tom mentions, and the amplifying power the Internet gives to word of mouth.
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
October 2, 2007 at 5:46 pm · Filed under Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice
Here’s another quote from the interview with Tom Asacker.
“That’s what marketing was all about. It was ‘how do I send a message to an audience and create this fantasy and this image and this promise?’ … And now it’s ‘how do I get a community involved, and how do I deal with real people and real expectations?’ And it’s a lot harder to do that because you have to get close to people and understand what’s on their minds and what they’re feeling.”
It’s just like you read in those books about dating. The first step in reaching people and getting their attention isn’t talking… it’s listening.
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
October 2, 2007 at 1:25 pm · Filed under Podcasts, Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice
Our second in a series of interviews and debates on our Facebook Marketing 2.0 group: An interview with Tom Asacker, renowned speaker, provocateur, and author of “A Clear Eye for Branding”.
On to the interview…
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
September 15, 2007 at 1:29 am · Filed under Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice
To inaugurate our new Facebook Group, Marketing 2.0, we did our first of what will hopefully be a regular series of interviews and debates. David Weinberger was our guest. The recording is here:
http://www.markethum.com/humdingers/marketing2.0interview.weinberger.mp3
by Isabel Walcott Hilborn
September 14, 2007 at 3:57 pm · Filed under Conversation Marketing, Marketing Advice, Print vs. Web
I was struggling today to try to explain politely to a potential client why a traditional PR agency might not be the best source of advice on how to understand the conversational power of the Internet. This is always a touchy subject because of course there are plenty of people working in jobs at very established firms, who totally “get” online PR.
At least, I hope there are! But there are many more traditional PR people who know the right buzzwords but don’t really understand what it means to foster market conversation as opposed to controlling the message. And there are still more traditional PR people who don’t even know the right buzzwords.
The Internet is really quite different from print media (this is a newsflash for some folks). For the PR professional, it’s a bit like the difference between moderating a panel and giving a lecture. If the moderator talked the whole time, and the panelists said nothing, well they would probably be pretty pissed and so would everyone in attendance (”lurkers” are today’s audience).
In today’s conversation-enabled world, some end-users are starting to think of themselves more as panelists than as a polite audience. They can be reached, they listen carefully, and they are amazing at getting the word out - but “the word” is going to be their word, not your word.
Anyway, as it turns out this client already knew what she was talking about so I needn’t have struggled. She came up with what I thought was a very clever analogy in speaking to an old-school ad man the other day, and shared it with me. “Do you remember,” she said to him, “how outraged you were when little Mom and Pop shops started coming out of the woodwork saying they could do ad campaigns, and you knew you could do it better because you’d been doing it for 15 years already?” Of course, the guy had to admit that experience counts for alot, when he was reminded of his own experience and what it counted for. He could hardly discount that!
I thought this tack was brilliant, and I never would have thought of it because I don’t have a built-in prejudice against Mom and Pops. But it’s true - we’ve been building communities for so long that we can now take people’s “establishment” prejudice and turn it inside out to work for us instead of against us.
I’m not saying that people who have trained and learned one skill for many years can’t change or learn. But I am saying it’s a good idea to ask your PR company things like “who do you have on the team who has built online communities and how long have they been doing it?”, “How long have you been working with user-created content?”, “How long have you been blogging and participating in social networks?” and “What lessons have you learned about online collaboration?”.
Contrast that with questions like “How long have you been in the PR business?”, “How many magazine editors do you know?” and “How many press releases have you written?”. By pointing to their existing areas of expertise, it should be easy to remind them that experience counts for a lot and that they should bring some conversation experts in-house, if they haven’t already.
