thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Back in the late ’90’s the ClueTrain Manifesto* was perhaps the first widely read document on the future of marketing as a (two way) conversation.

*The manifesto is still a good read today – look at the 95 theses first or over here for more background.

The discovery and invention of new ways to engage both suppliers and customers at the same time in conversations about what is relevant to the participants now,  can generate very powerful outcomes around what  is ultimately delivered to the market.

The “marketing as an ongoing conversation” idea seems incredibly obvious now but to place it in context for 1999 most media was all “push” and the closest similarity to conversation was “letters to the editor” or early forums  like “The Well” which weren’t that easily accessible at the time.

Of course, all  those letters were filtered and with tighter publishing logistics then it was less easy to facilitate ongoing market based conversations about anything other than extremely popular topics.

Over the past 10 years online media, blogging and web 2.0 styled tools for annotating, enriching , slicing and dicing content have extended both richness and reach

All good so far but we are now fast approaching another tipping point where the noise outweighs the signal.  Some would argue that social media has become part of the problem and that may be true; but it is really just another phase on the ongoing marketing journey.

Some marketing departments have mistaken  messaging for meaning and getting the balance between what the company thinks it provides and what the consumers want to pay for is an ongoing challenge.

4 Questions  For Marketers

How do we tune in past the noise and the cyber loitering that passes for conversation on some sites?

Do social media tools like Digg, Delicious and even regional and local ones like Scoopit help us to cut through to the core ideas ?

Is there a way to mine conversations and test social media idea distributions that gives us a greater depth of analysis and measurement?

How do we translate these ideas to the into guidelines for the marketing team on Monday morning?

All markets go through different stages of adoption up to the point at which they mainstream. In the early phases the leverage of new tools received disproportionate results.

For example I remember sending direct emails to various authors in the late 90’s and most of the time making useful and very clear connections.  Of course that couldn’t last and the sheer velocity of changes and technology induced spin has made it harder to make those connections on a meaningful basis.

Many of our work projects are based around the idea that we can use online iterations and feedback to regenerate a more highly tuned marketing campaign in real time as the markets respond to ongoing change.

Ironically in some cases as big businesses have added systems to cope with all of these ongoing conversations they have not kept pace with the editorial and analytical side effects.

In another  example  using an FAQ (frequently asked questions) based system to log faults,  issues and hopefully provide quick answers for  user based searching is a key way that companies can help themselves.

Unfortunately many of those systems have been set -up in such a way that there is no active and ongoing review process so that staff and customers just work out new ways to sidestep the existing process so they can talk to a human.

And the issue with many of the social media bookmarking tools is that they have been gamed right from the start by those who understand page rankings and also those with more spurious objectives.

The big promise of Cluetrain and conversational marketing was to get to a level of  “human to human”  connection so that we all get smarter, better and more relevant products and services.

The challenge for most business managers is quite simply they need to have definitive measurements on what works and what doesn’t so that they can persuade the finance department to make sense of themes and memes and and mine significant meaning.

Finance departments can’t deal with ambiguity at any level for the most part. Many of us have worked for companies whose philosophy is ‘if we can measure it we won’t do it.”

The Best Buy story linked to in the Hirshberg link (below) noted one key metric that finance would definitely understand. Before Best Buy started using social media tools the employee turnover in the company ran at 130% ! each year and it has now dropped back to 50%. That is a mind blowing result to say the least.

My personal view is that blogs and wikis can still add incredible value to customers and suppliers on a regional basis if we add them to our websites and a conscious and  useful way.

Even without specialist medial tools we should always be able to see the impact of better engagement between customers, suppliers, managers and staff and that should flow through to improved profits and even market share.

Here is another example of what we can easily do.  Back in November I linked to a great essay from Paul Graham on Why to Start a Start-Up in a Bad Economy where you really need to check the comments to get a better read on that piece.

Ideally the comments should be more closely connected but the point is while the essay can be read in isolation it is so much better if we look more closely at the context and that means comments.

Here are some other  answers and some more clues – please feel free to add your own ideas as well.

• Conversational Media watch this space (Conversation Measurement Toolbox from Federated media.)
• A code of Conduct for conversational marketers
• What this all means on Monday Morning (4mb PDF)
• Try something new capture your passion and communicate that.

Last but not least,  a few weeks ago I wrote about Peter Hirshberg. He has another video interview on his blog at where Best Buy CEO – Brad Anderson notes that as we move from

“simply distributing product to insuring customer delight under countless usage scenarios, only a method that tapped the wisdom of everybody made sense. “

And this is the point at which all of your group wisdom and comments become more pertinent.

A true self learning organisation won’t wait for the accountants to catch up and this is where we can all help out by decoding the market signals we know are out there.

Best wishes for the Christmas Season. Thanks again for stopping by.

Be present, be engaged and be renewed – see you again in the New Year.

P.S. While at Zeitgeist Google I also found this clip which features Lee Clow of TBWA and Alex Bogusky talking about the transition from narrative to interactive and implications for brands. It is definitely a related topic as are many of the other 117 other videos on that Zeitgeist 08 channel.

Looks like you have visited before, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks again

This past weekend I was very pleased to be at the first second* Wordcamp in Australia. There were about 60 people present over a 2 day period to share WordPress related ideas and project experiences in the local area.

Among other delights, I was very pleased to hear that WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg was an arts major in college and could even remember a bit of TS Eliot.

There is a line (bottom right footer) on the WordPress.org site which says “code is poetry” .  Now I understand where some of that influence comes from and why the photo essays work so well.

For the Wordcamp Australia photo essay from Matt check out this collection loaded up a few hours ago.

As some of you know – I’m very enthusiastic about using WordPress as a web framework and platform which includes blogging but goes further as well.

For me – intentions are very important and it was great to feel part of a group who have generally managed to combine altruistic intentions with some very practical and savvy online skills.

New Zealander Dan Milward of Instinct was a keynote presenter and sponsor for the event. Pics of Dan Wp-Ecommerce is huge ( 60,000+ sites) and is a product extension that I am actively working with on a number of sites. It was also real privilege for me to share a few ideas from the NZ side of the Tasman.

There is even a bit of a plan to organise a WordPress NZ event so please use the contact form to let me know if you are in/near NZ and would be interested in that idea.

Matt has managed to combine a huge amount of experience and street smarts in his 24 years on this planet.

He is a genuinely nice guy and  deserves all the kudos he gets. Matt also mentioned that the wordcamp idea of having small grassroots style meet-ups to help link local WordPress users and practitioners was a deliberate intention. This is another reason why I Iove WordPress. Think global – act local.

Alignment or needs, directions and intentions are all much more sustainable and better for us. I have tried to articulate some of these ideas in an Ethos page.

I was particularly interested in presentations by Karel Segers and David Wolf on film & video related projects. At times the conference veered between technical topics and back towards the blogging side including journalism considerations.

The sessions took place in a performance venue called The Red Box and co-organiser Sam Bauers managed to arrange a acrobatic performance from some of the regular Red Box users just after lunch.

Anthony Cole and Sam Bauers did an excellent job in organising the conference and on also making it all very accessible as well.

I have already been using WordPress version 2.7 for some weeks (along with 30,000 other beta testers.) We found out a bit more about the 2.7 version which looks like it may come out before Christmas. It is a major user interface upgrade and presenter Jane Wells gave us some insights in to the development process.

Jane also mentioned her involvement at the WordPress in Education camps which is a special interest of mine. I’m especially interested in the best ways to enable ‘Private’ blogging so students and teachers, get to practice and experiment online in a safe space (such as a group blog password protected with access to the class.)

Earlier this year we used WordPress as the core system to promote the LittledayOut which was a community fund-raising for a local school. Since then we have been working on a  number of back room projects to find the best ways to enable schools and other education facilities using some of those ideas and the WordPress MU framework. See also the full MU site.

I was particularly interested in the BuddyPress project which is something like what you might imagine facebook or myspace would look like if those systems had some taste*. It makes huge sense to leverage social networking on a more “clean look” basic for the more than 12m or so websites based on WordPress.

(* Sidenote – Myspace and Facebook work well enough its just that they look very messy as the temptation to overload the pages with widgets and moving objects is too great for many of the site-owners.  So love that anyone can have a go – I just prefer the less is more approach.)

I remember using gravatars (portable icons) in the early days when they crashed all the time due to huge growth. Now as part of the Automattic / WordPress family add personality to millions of sites. BuddyPress will add an extra dimension like a super gravatar.

There are still many ideas to keep processing. Thanks again to the wordcamp team.

Other Wordcamp Info / Its early days but expect there will be a fair number of posts from other attendees. here is a selection of the first few I found.

(*Update: Looks like there was an earlier Wordcamp in Melbourne in 2007.)

Dan Milward from Instinct was a key presenter and wrote many notes as well.

• Jason from Finding Simple was there
• Alan Harris was also at Wordcamp
• Neerav Bhatt was at Wordcamp Australia
• Kristarella at wordcamp
• Run a wordcamp?

Related

• Automattic people
• Matt Mullenweg on Wikipedia
• 25 Most Influential on the web list – Matt is listed next to Rupert Murdoch!
• 50 most Important people online also features Matt.