Moving through Joseph Jaffe's book, Join the Conversation (buy it here).
Chapter 1; Talking "At" Versus Talking "With"
A good chapter that describes some of the differences among communications vs. conversation vs. viral vs. word of mouth. There are either vast differences among these terms or minor distinctions without real differences, depending on who you are talking to. For instance, the guys at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association will tell you there is a BIG difference between regular old communications and "WOM," but use your judgment. As I've written before, all good marketing is driven by word of mouth or "viral" mechanisms.
We're at a very high level in this chapter, so far, but I'm looking forward to...
Chapter 2; The Many-to-Many Model
Another "brief history" chapter, taking us through the phenomena of one-to-many marketing, one-to-one, one-FROM-one, and to many-to-many. The concept of "one from one" is a re-framing of "pull" or "permission-based" marketing but I think it's a more descriptive metaphor to describe how each of us chooses to get information from INDIVIDUAL people or entities.
The many-to-many model is an anti-model, truth be told. It's not a model at all in that it describes how one action taken by one person somewhere--say a relatively unknown blogger--can start a series of events well beyond the original action. The original post gets linked to by others and passed around, improving organic search results for that particular post, until it become the most relevant result delivered on a Google search, say for "AOL" and "customer service." (Lots of good examples in this chapter).
Chapter 3; Can Marketing Be A Conversation?
Jaffe picks up on his early conceit in Chapter 1 that ALL markets are conversations (thus, I think I know the answer to the question in the chapter title). He gives lots of good examples of how BRANDS, more than markets, can BE conversations, such as Dove, HSBC, and Delta in it's post chapter 11 days.
He also posits an interesting metric that I'm going to delve into more in my marketing practice: Voluntary Time Spent (VTS).
Chapter 4; The Birth of Generation i
OK, so now Joseph is cooking with gas: He debunks the marketing buzz phrase that the "consumer is in control." I never quite bought that line of crap either. About a year or so ago, I worked on a presentation with Tim Stock, one of the founders of the Gen Y think tank, Scenario DNA. Tim is an absolute genius, one of those guys whose bullshit detector is so finely tuned and whose intuition is so fucking wired into his material that he sizes up massive amounts of information in seconds. If you have not yet seen Tim's work, please go NOW to his site.
Anyway, we were working on this deck that addressed new marketing frontiers and we said (paraphrasing here), "I don't understand the phrase 'the consumer is in control.' In control of WHAT exactly," we asked. After much deliberation and hard work, we concluded that the essential controlling factor behind the new marketing frontier wasn't that the consumer was in control, but that the consumer has expectations about marketing and experiences that are beyond anything we have ever seen. We called it "The Era of Astronomical Expectations." Here's a portion of the presentation.
In the rest of this short chapter, Jaffe also brings up the notion of the "prosumer," which we will focus on moving forward in the next chapter.
The thing is...I don't buy Joseph's conclusion that "no one is in control," either. People, brands, agencies, marketers are absolutely in control, at least of their own actions and investments. Someone is writing the checks, typing the blogs, posting the videos (or ignoring the blog posts and videos). So there is some amount of control (sort of a "no-one-is-the-boss-of-me" kind of control).
But what we have now is in addition to the "The Era of Astronomical Expectations," we have what we might call "The Era of Unintended Consequences." We light the spark, hoping, HOPING that certain things happen, but what seems to happen more and more are things that we didn't WANT to have happen, HAPPEN, or could never have imagined happening start to happen (can I write "happen" more please?). Dell ignores a blog post and a few months later its stock takes a hit. Wal Mart makes a ham-handed attempt to be more youthful and it blows up in its face. A consultant posts a chapter of his book on a blog and it winds up getting downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. An investment banker creates a narcissistic video that's meant to be a video CV and you become fodder for the New York Times.
Our policy makers have been dealing with unintended consequences forever. It doesn't mean a lack of control; it means a lack of planning, imagination and insight.
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