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Getting personal It was great to meet and spend some time with Nick Usborne at the Personalization Summit. We're both old copywriters, and we're both fans of great copywriting. At its best, copywriting gives companies the honest and trustworthy human voice they otherwise don't have. Steve Hayden did it for Apple and IBM. Ed McCabe did it for Volvo, Barneys, Hebrew National and Perdue Chicken. Among many others, in both cases. Nick gave an excellent talk at the Summit on the need for a similar respect for copywriting on Web sites, and is working on a book along the same lines. Now here is what I heard from him yesterday, referring to what I wrote about the summit on Tuesday: So here's a funny thing... Hmm. Did I cross the line between respect and condescension when I said David's speech may have been "lost on an audience with the weary look of a dot-com hospice"? Maybe. The last time I heard David speak was at the PopTech conference last October. At the close of the conference, one of its creators, Bob Metcalfe, does a kind of stand-up routine in which he gently praises or roasts all the preceding speakers. After speaking appreciatively about David's speech and calling him "a fellow martyr in the fight against tenure," Bob added this "other hand" comment: The seven worst words in cyberspace are "You just don't get it, do you?" Ouch. Well, let's talk about context here. In Cluetrain we were speaking for markets, against marketing. As Jakob Nielsen once put it, we were "defectors" from marketing's war on markets. That war began seventy years ago, when Procter & Gamble borrowed "branding" from the cattle industry and almost single-handedly taught Production how to manufacture Consumption. In "mass" markets (the biggest and best kind) customers were reduced to "consumers" that filled a vital new role in the industrial org chart, as sources of money and demand. Consumers were reduced to nothing more than batteries for the Matrix of industry. Within the Industrial system, marketing's main purpose has always been to "create" (i.e. manufacture) and organize demand. That may not have been marketing's stated ideal, but that's what it was mostly paid to do. The result was countless "campaigns" waged to "penetrate," "impact" and "control" markets. Nothing personal about it. Then, thanks to the Net, markets got real personal, real fast. So, among other things, marketing responded with personalization . This wasn't a bad thing. Mostly it was a good thing. But it was also an adaptive thing. By oxymoronically "personalizing" the machinery of marketing, personalization moved in the right direction: out of Fort Business and into the real world where there's nothing more personal than another human being — and nothing more powerful than a bunch of human beings organized by shared passions. If you want to really personalize, David said in his speech, you want to set loose the passions of the people working for your company. If personalization can help, fine. But if personalization is just another way for companies to treat customers like batteries with credit card numbers, it'll fail. And marketing will fail along with it. At the Personalization Summit I was on a Future of Personalization panel. At one point the moderator, Eric Norlin, asked if personalization was already dead. Panelist Bruce Kasonoff answered in part by asking if marketing itself was dead. His point, roughly, was that companies have to get personal, and that's never been marketing's job. It still isn't when you label the work "1-to-1." As David Weinberger said, automating — "personalizing" — marketing makes it a 0-to-1 activity. You get software following a customer around like a bad salesman, guessing at what he or she wants. The main problem is that we are still very much in the Industrial Age, and we're still real short on clues about how to deal with conversational markets where Supply is no longer in control of Demand. That's no less true for Cluetrain authors than it is for professional personalizers. Compared to all the clues we'll need, none of us "get it." And none of us deserve to catch shit for trying. So rather than insult the perosnalization profession any more than I already have, I'll leave the last words to Eric Norlin. Here's what he said in an editorial on Personalization.com (at the top of whose masthead Cluetrainer Chris Locke still sits): Personalization's true promise is not to save some dying relic of marketing born from the outdated methods of the industrial age. Rather, it reshapes the very marketing ground upon which we stand. It opens the door to a marketplace of conversations. It emphatically seeks to actualize the inherent enthusiasm of the individual. It personalizes a world long turned cold by the restrictions of mass. I hope, for the sake of the good folks who make their living at it, that he's right.
The blue sky of death
Says here those Osprey aircraft crashes were caused by bad software. Guess "uncontrollable events" wasn't a feature.
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