This is a podcast interview I did with Andrew Noyes, the Associate Managing Editor for Washington Internet Daily and Associate Editor for Communications Daily. Andrew wrote a nice bit of coverage on some of the important highlights from the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last Friday. We wanted to go ‘beyond’ the reporting he did and get some more of his perspective on the subject. He is obviously another one of the bright people from DC who ‘gets it’.

We talked about several of the big pitcure topics discussed at the event as well as the personal/professional Blog debate and how Blogging and Journalism can co-exist. Unlike several of the mainstream media people I have met over the last year, he sees the advent of Blogging as a positive occurence, as it is a great source for story leads. This is definitely a podcast you want to hear…

Notes: The show was recorded using Gizmo Project from my iMac in San Francisco to the conference room telephone at Warren Communications News in DC. It is 17:59 in length and has pretty decent sound quality given the VOIP to POTS connectivity and the use of iSight as my microphone. If you don’t get Washington Internet Daily yet, you should take advantage of this free trial offer they have to see why it is a must read for yourself.

Download as MP3 File (2.2MB)

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Categories: Conversation, Authenticity, Podcasts, Word of Mouth
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Funny that Steve Rubel’s post “I Like Companies that say ‘We Suck’” came out when it did - guess the universal consciousness is bubbling up a big world-shifting idea once again. I have been working on a post all week about a similar topic, but I think Steve’s focus on companies admitting their faults does not go far enough. Yes, the tech companies have had a bit of experience with Mea Culpa’s over the years, and this is a requirement for the establishment of trust for an organization’s voice, but the real change that is needed is for companies to embrace all of the truth and their intentions in order to develop real trust within the Commons and amongst its customers. The sort of FUD that Microsoft used to masterfully deploy (and is now being put forth by Google) has no place in the world any longer.

While owning up to corporate short comings is a necessary component of trust, I see it more as philosophical shift towards more openess and being ‘real’ than simply admitting that a company sucks at something. No, I am not talking about giving away your client’s upcoming product plans three months before launch so a competitor can do it instead - that would be harmful rather than helpful. I am talking about letting employees and representatives behave like the real humans they are, rather than simply delivering the corporate spin and enforcing the seemingly hard and fast rules that ‘the system’ dictates.

Part of the problem is much bigger than any one company, it is an undercurrent that is sweeping away the industry. I spoke with Ed Keller about this briefly via email before the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last week. In his press release announcing TalkTrack, he referred to “Marketers”. Summarizing my conversation with him, I inquired whether he meant just marketing people or marketing and communications people. From his perspective the use of the term “marketer” was all inclusive of PR, Advertising, Research, Marketing, etc… Merriam Webster agrees with his definition, calling it “an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer” but I see a need to redefine this understanding - to rebrand the marketing profession with not a makeover, but a “MakeReal”.

From my experience, and from the nature of a conversation I joined on Burning Bird with Shelley Powers in April, I have come to see that many people believe that marketing is evil and as such “Marketers” have a bad reputation. I won’t get into all the why’s here, but the main point was that the non-marketer general public sees the smarmy SALES tactics of some companies as marketing and this rubs off on all other aspects of the discipline. In certain parts of Silicon Valley, particularly the Open Source world and among many engineers, this is one of the leading causes of anti-consumerism. But like most anti-establishment rebellion, it is often more about an assertion of personal power and freedom in a world that seeks to impose power hierarchies and use fear of scarcity to control people who are left feeling helpless within a system that favors the rich corporations over the rights of the individual.

Tara Hunt picked up on this conversation with her post entitled “Marketing = Eeeeeeevil!” which contains some other great insights on this subject. While I agree with much of what she says in this regards, I disagree with her push for what she calls “Pinko Marketing“. To me, what she calls Pinko is really just a retelling of the original Cluetrain Manifesto - which she duly credits for much of the inspiration for her idea. The Cluetrain heavily influenced me and was a huge part of my original inspiration for pursuing the development of conversational intelligence software back in 1999 (before everyone but perhaps Intelliseek). While the principles are strong, the use of the term Pinko feels wrong, as does its association with communism.

I believe what we need to be talking about here is “Real Marketing“. As in keeping it real, being real and telling people what is really going on.

It may seem like merely a semantic difference, but there is a more fundamental shift of intention and focus at play here. Real Marketing is about matching products and services with the people who can truly benefit from those products and services. It is not about getting more people to buy something and maximizing market share. It is about getting the right people to purchase a product and helping them to get the most use out of it. It’s not about increasing sales for the purpose of making the numbers, it’s about getting more loyal customers who are obtaining real value from the product. It is about creating maximum efficiency in operations across the board - and that is only achieved by open and honest conversations.

As almost every panelist said at the event last week, we as “Marketers” can’t control the conversation any more - we can, however, participate in the conversation and facilitate certain portions of it. This reminds me of numerous meetings with almost every big client I have had around the issue of enabling open conversations through message boards or open comment systems. They were all ‘afraid’ of what people might say. Afraid that some truth might be exposed in regards to a product short coming, or a design defect, or a bad customer service experience. As I pleaded then, and still plead today - “THEY ARE ALREADY HAVING THESE CONVERSATIONS, AND YOUR VOICE IS NOT BEING HEARD BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T INVITE YOU TO JOIN THEM - THEY DON’T TRUST YOU!”

I have been working on a model of the stages of engagement in a customer relationship since my days of being Chief, eBusiness for the US Mint. While there are many deep things at play here in this model, the most fundamental premise here is that communicating the knowledge a customer needs to move through each stage of the relationship is the key - not advertising and not sales in the traditional sense. In this regards, I do agree with Edelman’s assertions on the potential for Communications Professionals to lead the way in the Social Media future we are just beginning to live today. Communications is conversation, so that is simple enough. I differ with them in that I see important roles for all practicioneers within the “Marketing and Communications Industry”. Advertising still has its place, as does research and an understanding of market segmentation.  What is needed is a more holistic approach that is centered on people.
Real Marketing means the end of empty hyperbole and hype. It is beyond the sales of Word of Mouth Units, the practical equivalent of increasing the volume of the sizzle - it is about increasing the nutritional value of the steak - about getting to the heart of what really matters. It still calls for the proper seasoning to make it tasty to the person consuming it, and we need to listen to whether the person wants that steak pink in the center or well done, but it is not so much about how many people hear that sizzling plate of Fajitas as it travels from the kitchen to the table. It has everything to do with people being able to get near real time information on what is in that dish, how it was prepared and what the people who have tasted it have to say about it. It is about the reputation of the restaurant, the description on the menu, the conversation with the server and the conversation over the shoulder with the person sitting next to you. It is about informed choices - it is about the market of conversation - it is about the market as conversation.

So what to do with this understanding? Blogging is a good place to start because it enables the sort of two-way dialogue that is essential for making Real Marketing work, but we definitely need to go ‘Beyond Blogging’ to make it Real. To really get the most from this however requires a fundamental shift in perspective - perhaps Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements might be a good place to start. Or better still, let’s start a conversation right here and try to get to the bottom of this together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, Authenticity, Word of Mouth, PR Community, Real Marketing
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For at least 7 years I have been railing against CRM’s claims to provide a 360 degree view of each customer. When I initially started working with conversational intelligence back in 1999, I was talking to a few key people about the fact that CRM systems did not accurately account for any given customer’s online behaviour and their offline conversations - but we could fix that with some software I was striving to create. Even after it was built though, we would still be missing a good chunk of understanding concerning the potential impact of any given customer for good or bad. This was because we had no way of knowing what exactly people were talking about with their family, friends and co-workers… until now at least.

Our keynote speaker for the event on Friday, Ed Keller of the KellerFay Group, has just released some of his firm’s TalkTrack research findings regarding consumer’s real world conversations about brands. According to the company’s press release, TalkTrack is “the first continuous monitoring system of all marketing relevant conversations in America, in whatever form they occur, including face-to-face, telephone and internet.”

Ed will be talking about the results and some of the surprising insights they found in their research on Friday morning at Beyond Blogging 2006. We have included the official press release here for you to download as part of this blog post, so I won’t get into too much detail here - however, I do want to speak to a couple of particularly poignant aspects of their findings.

• The survey included conversations from 1,507 Americans ages 13-69 relating to 11,000 conversations and over 6,000 mentions of specific brands
• 92% of marketing-relevant word of mouth takes place “offline” (71% in person and 21% via telephone)
• 62% of marketing-relevant discussion is described as “mostly positive,” while only 9% is described as “mostly negative”
• The average American discusses specific brands in ordinary discussion 56 times per week
• Email, instant message and online chat rooms/blogs comprise 6% of word of mouth

While this seems to finally provide the statistical proof that Word of Mouth Marketers have long sought, the relatively low impact of the Internet is a surprise, especially given the fact that The Internet was the most frequently cited media channel referenced in brand-related buzz. I for one am interested in getting more of the details of the report and asking Ed some more questions about the findings. On both a personal and professional level this is very exciting for me. It is something I have always had to make assumptions about in my discussions with others - now I can cite real research that is ongoing and will improve greatly over time, providing even greater insights along the way.

For some reason, reading the press release made me think about a very small nuance of Word of Mouth that has a huge potential impact to the nature of the industry. For some reason Word of Mouth is seemingly more associated with Marketing than communications. In asking Ed about this, he felt strongly that the reference to marketing in this context includes communications professionals as well as advertisers and other folks in the different arenas of the marketing tent.

When I read that MediaVest EVP Jim Kite had said “that word of mouth represents a very big opportunity for marketers, with significant implications for both media buying and creative strategies” it made me look at the WOM industry in a different light. It became clear for me that the big problem with WOM was one of perspective. Most notably from those who hold the still eroneous belief that conversations can be controlled like a carefully crafted piece of marketing communications. In reality, we are able to inform, influence and persuade people, but ultimately the product/service is what really creates word of mouth.

No matter what many very bright people in the industry tell me, I just don’t see a media buyer purchasing 5,000 word of mouth units for a campaign as being a realistic practice (though I undersand that people are doing this today). While the results of WOM campaigns are clearly trackable, which is a key benefit, the consumer’s demand for authenticity within the broader conversation creates an environment that will reject any efforts to control a conversation and generate undeserved buzz. Many of the brightest minds I know have been thinking about what makes one brand take off as another comparable brand stagnates - no one has really come up with any insights of note as far as I know.

The TalkTrack findings point to the power of media and advertising to influence the nature of conversations, which is a key strength of communications firms and one of the main reasons my money is on the Communications agencies over advertising agencies as the industry matures. The core disciplines of traditional Public Relations (such as writing articles and talking to journalists) have more relevancy in my view than the ability to segment audiences and determine pricing strategies. Ultimately though, the real winners will be those professionals who have a cross-disciplinary understanding of all the relevant skill-sets with a solid foundation built on understanding and interacting with people.

Yes, marketing programs can incentivize and reward desired behaviour as IMG Direct does with its referral program paying bounties to the new customer and the customer who referred them, but it would seem to me that more people share their brand related stories in response to a positive and unexpected product or customer service experience. How many people really become ‘raving fans’ because of a bounty program or loyalty rewards? My guess is that more customers become raving fans because of the experience they have with the company (ie, its products, services and people) then those that are driven by the financial reward. This is ostensibly the biggest problem with hiring agents to artificially create buzz - if the product or service experience is not congruent with the buzz, you can’t get very far over the long term.

You may be able to make some short term impact with WOM programs, but unless you really understand your customers and have met one or more of their real needs, it will only be a flash in the pan. Most people today are seeking more reality and less Corporate speak. More high touch and less high tech. Organization’s clearly need to embrace communications strategies that account for word of mouth and try to influence the conversation in positive ways in regards to their organization. I am 100% in favor of continuing to experiment with different techniques and protocols with regards to finding WOM programs that work. Still, I am worried by what I perceive to be the potential for using WOM tools for inappropriate or unethical purposes.

I guess I am really advocating a very simple, but very important value based ideology when it comes to WOM - just keep it real. Don’t just monitor conversations and react, really listen and respond as you would to help a friend. Perhaps the one’s you listen to will become friends, or even ‘raving fans’. Don’t just try to get more ‘mentions’ to increase the quantity of buzz out there, cultivate quality contributions to the conversation from the real ‘Influentials’.

Perhaps it would be interesting to get a sense from future TalkTrack survey participants in regards to their perceptions of the trustworthiness of the organizations they talk about. How much they believe what the company has to say and also perhaps what they think of other consumers who relate to those brands. Regardless of my personal perspective on the nature of WOM, I know I am going to be paying closer attention to Ed Keller’s work in this arena. He clearly has developed something that provides immense value for modern communications and marketing professionals. To quote Ed,

“The fact that the average American talks about brands more than 50 times per week — which is a huge number — signals to marketers that it would be wise to seek ways to join in these conversations.”

While many of us have been encouraging just such an approach for many years - Ed has set out to prove the value and importance of getting involved - this could be the turning point for many executives in charge of big brands. For this and so many other reasons, I am happy to have this opportunity to meet Ed Keller and learn even more from him this Friday.