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| Wednesday, February 7, 2007 |
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All the news that's fit to post 
Proof in the Evangelical pudding
| | Back when I was in the marketing game, I filtered out potentially boring clients by giving them my marketing philosophy, expressed in this not quite syllogistic logic: |
| | - Markets are conversations; and
- Conversation is fire. Therefore,
- Marketing is arson
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| | In a way, The Cluetrain Manifesto was one test of this theory. |
| | Today Chris Locke directed my attention to pyromarketing, its perhaps most vivid example, Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life and the alleged supression of a book about pryomarketing because it credites the success of Warren and his work with (gack) marketing. At least as I understand it. I've read the account a couple times now and I'm not sure I get everything that's going on here. |
| | In any case, my idea behind the fire metaphor wasn't much different than my later idea behind the snowball metaphor. |
| | Appealing ideas catch fire. Or gather snow. Icky ones don't. It ain't a whole lot more complicated than that. |
| | "Markets are conversations" has done more to erase the boundary between the social and the commercial than any other act of contemporary marketing. To the extent that the social and the commercial compete for our attention, and they emphatically do, it gives the advantage to the commercial at the expense of the social. It lowered a competitive barrier, and has made all of our lives more commercial, our interactions more of a commodity to be traded. |
| | Euan says Dave is a cantankerous curmudgeon. Hell, so am I, at least sometimes. But I like Dave, I enjoy reading his blog and I think he often makes some good points, including a few I don't agree with. |
| | His penultimate line is one I do agree with: |
| | Eventually, unless we learn how to preserve some social space, unless we develop a practice of social or commercial hygiene, I can see no reason why all of our lives won't become some part of various competing commercial interests. |
| | In fact, the non-commons we call the Net is for most of us a grace of carriage by a telephone or cable monopoly. One area of competition between those two monopolies right now is over how far they can push the "line of demarcation" between our home networks and theirs. |
| | ...extending a demarc beyond the front door or window sill and into the customer's living room and among & between the customer's appliances effectively places the customer's home network under the surveillance and, potentially, the control, of the telco. |
| | Has it occurred to you that this might be tantamount to the most blatant form of electronic home invasion? |
| | I have a feeling Dave and I would defend common ground there. In fact, I think Dave's demarc between the social and the commercial is helpful here. Especially if our friendly local carriers try talking their way into taking over our homes. |
Confrontation about conversation
| | Now it¹s all about "Conversational Marketing" (CM). Not to be confused with conversational French which of course is to know just enough to order coffee and find the rest rooms CM has become the slutty WOMM (word-of-mouth marketing) with a new doo and fresh douche. |
| | CM entered the geeky lexicon seven years ago with "The Cluetrain Manifesto." In the hypothetical, CM is the bottom-up approach to communication where ³broadcast² is replaced by connecting directly with customers. The book proposed that "markets are conversations," and because of technology, i.e. the Web and the ability to scale, ³In just a few more years, the current homogenized 'voice' of business will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court." |
| | Hmmmm... Yeah if you lived in a pod commune on the planet Zork and bought food telepathically with radiant mednars maybe. Nice theory but almost totally devoid of the earthly realities of human nature, transactional dynamics and the legal traditions of property. But it sounds good and is a perfect constitution around which to rally the legions of Open Source have nots sitting in their underwear in their parent¹s basement. Hell, this could very well be the rallying cry for disintermediated disintermediaries everywhere. |
| | For what it's worth, I've always found "conversational marketing" oxymoronic. Because, once markets get conversational, there's less need for marketing, which for too long has been fulla shit. |
| | That is, if there really is an inverse relationship between conversation and bullshit. Of course, there isn't. But bullshit stands a better chance of getting corrected in conversation than in many alternatives, I would think. |
| | Anyway, there are old arguments here. If you want to keep having them, go for it. |
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