Integration

I remember that feeling in my teenager stomach when my father came to me and said: "Let's have a conversation." This 'conversation' was a long monologue, interrupted by a few rhetoric or unanswerable questions: 'Why did you do it?' 'Don't you think I have to work for my money?'
And then there were these innocent talks that traansported me to a different place. They opened up feelings, allowed to form a closer bond with my father: When he talked about his upbringing in the 30's, being a refugee in his own country, having to work 6 days a week for 12 hours in a job none of us would survive for 2 hours.

Conversational Marketing is about opening up. It's not about formulating a response to what a person is saying while that person is speaking to us. Brands are still to attached to their thinking, their positioning and their organizational thinking to really listen to people.

Organizations have to change fundamentally to succeed. Demolish the old separation of church (emotion) and state (thinking): The company produces the product and surrounds it with content and experiences. The thinking is done by the brand and the emotion is attached by an agency.

Instead, we need to integrate emotion during the product development process. This will allow to communicate authentic feelings during the marketing process. It becomes a more organic development and conversational. Conversational Marketing is not a tactic or another channel. It's a mindset.

Voyeurism 2.0

Ask your partner or best friend to empty out their pockets and your friendship might cool off very quickly. Or just end.
Ask a stranger to empty their pockets and you just created a Flickr Group: 1,540 members so far. How about getting more personal: 'What's in your wallet' might help you. 162 members as of now.

I haven't joined. Yet. But I joined other networks that support the overall trend of voyeurism 2.0:

1. Find out about my professional experience.
2. Find out more about myself on Facebook
3. Read my daily thoughts and observations on Twitter
4. Look at my real estate on Zillow (Well, maybe not)

What drives Voyeurism 2.0? Is it our way of understanding and advancing the massive community that is the Internet and all the information that is accessible. Do we need to be feel grounded more connected because we sometimes feel like the online relationships are not real enough. Not deep enough for our brain that was wired millions of years ago?
The dream of a global village was never real. We're advancing to a global metropolis. And we want to be important, feel part of that metropolis. 'Here's my life.' 'Here's my house, my friends, my connections, my taste in music, movies and books.'

It might be our way to connect to a largely uncaring world and say: 'Here I am. Notice me. Connect with me. Become part of my world.' Isn't that what voyeurism is about?

Broken promises?

Quoting Anthony Parker, CMO at Kimberly-Clark, in the WSJ:

"You have to go back to the simple point that a brand is a promise and the product is a delivery of that promise. If you make that promise and deliver it better than the competition, you'll build brand equity. I believe brands are more salient today to consumers than they ever have been -- they are a simplifying mechanism in a world where there are many more options. Private label is declining in some categories. My belief is where brands are weak, the people who are stewarding those brands aren't spending as much on communication. Therefore they're not telling consumers about the promise of the brand."

How do we define brand as a promise? A brand promising something on product or service? Sure, that's a good start. It implies some form of honesty. But is it a good conversation starter?

Not really. Unless you're interested in conversations focusing on broken promises. If you promise a good running shoe for a decent price, people might buy it but they won't talk about it unless you exceeded the basic brand promise.

In a perfect world, brands would only be about promises. We wouldn't need brands to express ourselves, our self-realization wouldn't be achieved through work and we wouldn't need to spice up our existence with Britney news and reality shows. In a perfect world, a water brand would tell me their product benefits and that's about it.



Since we don't live in a perfect world, brands are more than just plain promises.

Brands are meaning machines.
Every part of our life has been commoditized: Dating, Sex, Conceiving, Parenting, Gardening, Spirituality, Life. We tend to complain about outsourcing but we tend to outsource on a daily basis: Scrapbooks, Diaries, Music Collections. Everything is stored on outsourced networks. Nothing is in-house. In addition, our entertainment and information resources have been commoditized as well.

This commodization of life has elevated brands to personal expressions and symbols of meaning. (Let's not forget: Greenpeace is a brand as well.) Those symbols are typically logos or product images, or better: shared cultural associations. In the old days, those cultural associations ended in your personal Cul-de-sac. Social Media allows us to change, re-engineer, reconfigure these associations.

Brands today have to have meaning to stand out the from tangibles jungle. If a brand stands for something we believe in, it becomes part of our niche culture, part of us and our memories. Good brands add this value to your life.

Great brands take this a step further: They let people in and create a collaborative brand. Brands and people as partners in the brand development and advancement process. Now, that sounds like a perfect world to me.

What will I say to her when she grows up?

We're not engineers. We won't be able to solve our reliance on fossil fuels.
We're not scientists. We won't solve the global cancer problem.
We're just marketers. But we still have a huge responsibility:

When my girl grows up, will she look me in the eye and ask "What did you do to make this world a better place?" I hope I was able to provide her a good childhood, education and wrap her with love. But, will I be able to say more:

Did I help move marketing away from advertising to conversations?
Did I help change brands perception of advertising away from getting attention to paying attention?
Did I add value and experiences to people's life?

Marketers face a huge challenge. Are you ready for it? Are you ready to answer her question?

The future of marketing

When I was a kid, marketing meant the farmers market: Stalls, vendors, smells, discussions, conversations. Nobody tried to convince you of anything, you browsed, you tasted and when you liked something you started a conversation.

Have you ever been to a Middle East Bazaar? You can offer the best price and profit but if you don't engage in a conversation, the merchant will refuse to sell since you didn't regard him as an equal. Sure, the merchant wants to make a sale. But he gets out of bed in the morning because of the interaction between him and the customer.

The gist of Conversational Marketing is to re-discover this old idea of marketing. In order to do that, we need to value the conversation as high as the customer does. The conversation has to be the center piece of our marketing. And, we need to be equals. What does that mean?

We need to be able to say no. Just like the customer says no to us all the time. The consumer might be in control. But we need to find a way to say no to customers. If we say no to certain customers, we will elevate our brand. Because we don't try to just get the sale. We want to be part of the conversation. And some customers shouldn't be part of it. Just like some people shouldn't participate in certain conversations. Keeping these people out might be the hardest part of your conversational marketing plan. But it also might be the one with the highest ROI. And the toughest pushback from the brand organization.

Henry Jenkins and Reefer Madness

Went to Barnes & Noble this morning to purchase Convergence Culture from Henry Jenkins. (See this post to understand why I dragged my family to a bookstore on Sunday morning.)

I looked everywhere for the book: Business, Management, Advertising, Culture. Until I finally had to ask the cashier and she pointed me to the Cultural Studies bookshelf. What I saw was 'Reefer Madness', 'The best shrooms experiences' and other books about hallucinatory drugs and out of body experiences. Apparently, Barnes & Noble had problems categorizing 'Convergence Culture' and placed it under 'Cultural Studies'.

It shows how important categories are for human behavior. Categories help you digest information better and easier. And they have a lot of disadvantages: They put you in boxed you don't belong in and when you're on the fringe of a category you might consider not even existing.

On another note, Joseph Jaffe bumrushed the Amazon charts today with his newest book 'Join the Conversation'. Very cool insider event and I was impressed by ooVoo, the video conferencing and messaging platform.
Now, that's conversational marketing.

Information R/evolution

This brilliant video by Kansas State University Anthopology Professor Michael Wesch, titled "Information R/evolution" explores the dramatic changes the Internet had on our ability to find, create and share information. It reminded me of my college time when I had to spend hours in the library trying to locate information. I got used to the lightning fast changes in information technology that I completely pushed these memories aside.

This video shows me again why I'm so excited to live in these times of community building, connection development and reorganization of information.

Michael Wesch also created "The Machine is Us/ing Is" which I posted earlier and below again. No other video you'll see this weekend will be as impactful as these two masterpieces.

Thanks to Ed Lee.

Here come the big guns

WSJ reports about Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay Inc., and his interest in participatory media:

"People who grew rich in the Internet age believe that the best media opportunities involve new ways to attract millions of users at low cost, with only light guidance from a small team at headquarters. Their reasoning deserves a close look.

The obvious champions of this approach are upstarts like Google Inc. founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Google's $192 billion market capitalization is public. Facebook's negotiations to sell a stake at what might be a $15 billion valuation are being chattered about constantly. In those cases, the sheer size of those new-media fortunes comes across as a triumphant roar.

Mr. Omidyar is no shouter. At age 40, he has been retired from day-to-day duties at eBay for years, though he remains chairman of the online auction company. He lives in Henderson, Nev., where taxes are lower. We've chatted intermittently since 1998, and it's always mind-stretching. Mr. Omidyar may be a low-key engineer, but he likes to defy tradition if he sees a compelling opportunity.

In recent interviews, Mr. Omidyar and his new investment chief, Matt Bannick, explained why they want to build "participatory media" companies, in which vast numbers of ordinary citizens call the shots. To them, that's the future of media, even if it won't always be profitable."

Who and what Omidyar is targeting remains unclear. But it's very clear that the big investors are waking up to the opportunities in participatory media. We've not seen many innovative ventures or niche agencies that focus on conversational marketing alone. I'm sure plans are in the making and there will be major shift in focus from Web 2.0 to Participatory Marketing. It's about time.

It's not the technology, stupid

Great presentation by Henry Jenkins. Especially fascinating since he's the only self-described egghead at the forum.

His main proposition: This is not a technology revolution, it's a cultural revolution.

The majority haven't understood this. They are still hoping for another dot-com bust and that everything will be back to normal again at one point. They understand that it's going to be harder and harder to break through the clutter but they still don't believe that the participatory culture is here to stay.

Web 2.0 might be a real misnomer since we put the focus on digital marketing. This lets 'traditional marketing' off the hook and let them continue what doesn't work anymore and push the new cultural movement to the fringes.

I had to leave early to catch my plane and ordered his book 'Convergence Culture' in the cab. Can't wait for more insights from Henry Jenkins.

My favorite line: “Any network that can be used to share cat pictures can be used to bring down a government.”

More quotes below:

- Web 2.0 is fandom without the stigma.
- What is 2.0? You make all the content, they keep all the revenue
- Cellphone is the new Swiss Army Knife
- Convergence is not about technology, it's about culture.
- The culture is shaped top-down by brands and bottom up by teenagers in their bedroom. And that's what he calls convergence culture.
- And the sweet spot where both cultures meet is participatory culture:

1. Low barriers for engagement
2. Strong support for sharing creations with others
3. Informal membership
4. Members believe their contributions matter
5. Care about others' opinions of self and work

- New consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media.
- Social Media is appreciative: People appreciate brands/products and spread the word. In addition, and maybe more important, the additional media you earn with social media appreciates the value of your product/brand.

- It's no longer about impressions, it's about expressions.
- If the work of old consumers was once silent and invisible, the New Consumers are now noisy and public.
- If old consumers were seen as compliant, the new Consumers are resistant , taking media in their own hands.

Off to LA.