From micro-loans to micro-vacations, micro-celebrities to micro-trends, speed dating to speed cooking: the "long tail" world of consumers is becoming smaller and shorter. Products, services, and experiences are being deconstructed in easier-to-digest, easier-to-afford bits, allowing consumers to collect even more experiences, as often as possible, in an even shorter time frame. Shrinking attention spans have prompted the rise of what Wired Magazine calls "snack-size media," and the hyper-personalization of online communication has led to new formats (micro-blogs, widgets, feeds, texting, etc.) that challenge long-held marketing conventions.
The emerging "economy of micro-scale" renders the traditional consumer segmentation obsolete and has major implications for brands that distribute content. The smaller the format, the bigger the chances, it seems, to become the next big (small!) thing. If "selling less of more" is the future of business, communicating more to fewer is the future of marketing.
In a nutshell, you could also put it this way: The world is small. Life is short. But brands still want to be big and have a long life. That's no longer viable. Given the atomization of audience size and behavior, brands will need to "shrink," too, if they want to remain able to connect with consumers. Small brands don't need to be small companies. And it doesn't mean they need to be humble. It just means they understand and embrace the small containers, the micro-media, in which they take place and come to life (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Twittergrams, Kyte.tv, widgets, etc.). With everyone else vying for the premium attention space above-the-line, maybe brands are better off relying on the small worlds of micro-formats and snack-size media below -- if they manage to be really eye-to-eye with consumers, there will be enough room to make a lasting impression.
Ps. I'm working on a book proposal about this (my new year's resolution!) and will post bits and pieces of my early drafts on this blog in the coming weeks and months. More soon...
Over on Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel is making a bold prediction: The portals will be big winners in the social networking wars. "Social networking is certainly rising and there seems to be no end in sight to the phenomenon. However, what I do know is that people will jump around from one Myfaceborkutspace to another and not all of them will win." Rubel refers to Long Tail author Chris Anderson who points out that all good web sites should have elements of social networking and therefore suggests that social networking is "a feature, not a destination." Rubel believes that the portals' key advantage is that they "own the glue that keeps many of us connected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones -- e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net."
That's true. You could also say that our buddy list is our social network, and we appreciate just plugging it into the most convenient and trusted network of our choice. Call it the floating network. I therefore also agree with Rubel when he says that "No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central."
There are good reasons why there is a lot at stake for the traditional portals, and there are good reasons (Rubel names them) to predict they will not just sit back and watch the young social networking sites own the game, especially now that business has begun facing up to social networks. And yet, I am hesitant to follow Rubel's prediction that the portals will have the upper hand in this conflict. In fact, I think he gets the conflict wrong. I don't think this is as strict an antagonism as Rubel describes it, and I would even question the "war parties" as he identifies them: On the one side, the emerging social networks that are relentlessly trying to enhance the one main feature they're built upon ("making connections") into a platform. On the other side, the big portals, the AOLs, MSNs, Yahoo!s, that are seeking to operate more like social networks. This is an over-simplified showdown, for Rubel stages a competition where, in fact, we witness a co-evolution. The portals will adapt the best social networking features, for example by activating the "dormant social networks" they own (see Yahoo! Mash), and the social networks will adapt some of the portals' features; just yesterday AllFacebook and Paid Content speculated that Facebook is preparing to launch a music platform, either as a potential iTunes killer (according to AllFacebook) or a MySpace competitor (according to Paid Content).
However -- and herein lies the major difference to Rubel's assumption -- both social networks and portals strive to eventually become something entirely different: the new operating system. Facebook is not shy about its intentions, and you could argue that they've already transformed the site into something much bigger than a social network.
It is a not a social networking war; it is a race to become the de facto operating system for the social networker. And that is of course why Google, which is neither a social network nor a portal, is in the game, too. The company is said to be feverishly working on "out-facebooking" Facebook by introducing a meta-platform that integrates not only a suite of Google services (like iGoogle, Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut, etc.) but is also 100% open to third-party developers -- and other social networks. Google's recent acquisition of mobile social network Zingku indicates that this uber-platform may have a strong mobile component and the long-rumored free, ad-based phone service. In other words, while social networks and portals are fighting the "social networking wars," Google may be winning the actual competition at hand: to become the dominant operating system for all of our communications. You can also call it the World Wide Web.
Yes, we live in the "age of conversations." Even though "Marketers and consumers have always had conversations -- they’ve just been slow," as Casey Jones, VP of Marketing at Dell, observed, the velocity of both market conversations and marketers trying to join them, has significantly picked up. Companies such as John Battelle's Federated Media (FM) are smart enough to validate this trend by enriching the grand meta-conversation called "conversational marketing" with thought leadership and platforms such as a namesake conference. The Conversational Marketing Summit, hosted by FM last week in San Francisco, gathered 300 top marketers who are either leading the conversation or are eager to become a part of it. If you suspect this to be a solipsistic dialogue of the in-crowd, you may have a point, but it was actually a fantastic forum for meeting interesting people, hearing inspirational ideas, and having a lot of -- well, conversations.
The blogosphere is wild, violent, and nasty, and it can kill you.
I missed the opening sessions on the first day but the second day started off strongly with Steve Hayden, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Mather Worldwide, who provided a solid framework of conversational media by elegantly weaving together old and new school marketing, from the origins of TV advertising to the 1984 Apple "Big Brother" commercial to today's social media. His reflections on "marketing in a post-apocalyptic, fragmented, converged, and blogorific world" were spot on and came from someone who had obviously seen all parts of the long tail. Hayden began with examining the long tail of the blogosphere and provided some interesting base data: An estimated 2,600 blogs have 1,000 or more inbound links, 400,000 have 20 or more, and 100,000,000 have fewer than 20 incoming links. So, the big question for marketers is "How do you organize the long tail?" "The blogosphere is a new form of behavior," Hayden reminded us, "and not just a new media format. The blogosphere is wild, violent, and nasty, and it can kill you." Therefore you don't have a choice, you just have two options as a marketer: "Amplify or attenuate your message."
Hayden provided a convincing raison d’être for conversational marketing: As the "marketing confidence gap" -- that is, the gap between advertising dollars spent online and consumer time spent online -- is widening, "conversational marketing is the primary way to close that gap." Money follows eyeballs, and eyeballs follow conversations. It's as simple as that. However, in order to have true conversations, marketers have to give up their fixation on message consistency and repeatability, in one word: they have to learn to let go. Hayden: "In the age of conversational marketing, you have to move the message forward because that's the nature of conversations. If you don't move the message, you don't have a conversation." Hayden suggested replacing the "big idea" (the Holy Grail of marketers) with the "big ideal:" "A big ideal keeps your long tail from falling off." While the big idea meant "share of my mind," the big ideal was about "share of culture," and Hayden illustrated this juxtaposition with a nifty chart:
For Hayden, the big ideal can be defined by asking a simple question:
[Insert brand] believes that the world would be a better place if [insert assumption]
Examples:
- Dove believes that the world would be a better place if women felt better about themselves.
- Coke believes that the world would be a better place if we saw the glass as half-full and not half-empty,
- Virgin America believes that the world would be a better place if flying was fun again.
- Fanta believes that the world would be a better place if we didn’t grow up and had more time to play.
- Lynx believes that the world would be a better place if it was easier for men to have sex whenever they wanted.
…and so forth.
Hayden emphasized that it didn’t matter if the ideal was good or bad or a noble cause, as long as it was authentic and connected a cultural truth with the brand's authentic "self." To prove his point, he showed this over-the-top ad, courtesy of Lynx:
So what if a conversation such as the Lynxjet stirs controversy (remember the Chevy Tahoe campaign)? "Stay the course," Hayden recommended. It is paramount to deal with critical or nasty comments and accept them as an integral part of the conversation. At the end of the day, capturing hundreds of thousands of eyeballs outweighs any naysayers. And yet: "The best way to make money is not to focus on making money but on making a difference."
The Old Guard: Yes and No
It was good that the "old guard," earnestly and openly focusing on money, was represented at the summit as well, but as executives from Dell, Symantec, and HP proudly presented their recent forays into conversational marketing, the gulf between old and new school became evident. Casey Jones, VP of Marketing at Dell, was determined to get everyone excited about "the new Dell." I didn’t count but I bet he used the word "astonishing" a dozen times in describing Dell's "astonishing" culture. Even more astonishing was his answer when John Battelle asked him if he would move marketing dollars from traditional advertising to conversational marketing in the digital space: "Yes and no" (he actually got away with that).
James Rose, Vice President of Brand and Global Marketing Communications at Symantec, had brought his agency lead and had him run through a number of PowerPoint slides that were over-populated with data trying to prove the effectiveness of their blog campaign. Still, to really gauge the marketing revolution that is taking place, it was enlightening to see that Symantec, which had not allowed its employees to read blogs two years ago, was now launching a blog with user-generated content around security issues. The times they are a-changing.
HP is poised to move the needle, too. However, in referring to internal barriers in her organization, Daina Middleton, Director of Global Interactive Marketing in HP's Imaging and Printing Group, admitted that 66 people had been part of the decision-making process at one point or another. This was inadvertently proven by her presentation, which was the exact opposite of having a conversation with your audience. No one asked questions, and one of the FM hosts had to politely volunteer to save face. Bottom line: All these brands are on the right track, and their efforts to embrace new formats may be laudable, but, boy, do they have to work on how they talk about them!
Much more entertaining was Johnny Vulkan, a partner with Anomaly, the cutting-edge agency darling of the moment. He was in character as agent provocateur (the Brits just get advertising, for some reason). Johnny presented some case studies to illustrate what he propagated as the "three principles of conversational marketing:"
1. Leaning into the frame (in other words, hijack someone else’s conversation, for example by way of being the first in line for the iPhone release to promote a charity…). Best suited are market conversations with a built-in emotional response (sports, high-involvement consumer products, weddings, baby products, etc.). One could also call this the "wedding crasher" effect.
2. Branded utility (i.e. ShopText, an instant commerce service that lets you purchase online items via text messaging)
3. Fundamental goodness (i.e. Virgin America’s “Name a plane” campaign)
Vulkan argued that effective conversational marketing should always look for win-win-win situations between brand, consumer, and a third party, and that good advertising, in particular, should add value for the consumer if it really wanted to cut through the clutter ("value-added advertising") and, yes, "stick" (we all want to stick, somehow). He is right and his quick session demonstrated that conversational marketing is fun. As the socialization of the web progresses, marketing can in fact become the social glue when it no longer feels like marketing. And increasingly it doesn't. To quote Owen Van Natta, Facebook's Chief Revenue Officer and VP of Operations: "We know that many Facebook users click on ads and don't know even know they do. They don't perceive the ads as ads because they are so organically embedded in the content experience."
Destination Internet is dead – here comes the Distributed Internet
Speaking of Facebook, of course it was all the talk and became the main proof point for the summit's main theme: The days of "destination thinking" -- the idea of driving as many eyeballs as possible to a certain site ("one audience, one time, one venue") -- are numbered. Instead, "It's a distribution game now," as Jon Miller, former chairman and CEO of AOL. remarked. We are witnessing the rise of the "distributed Internet:" pushing the brand via branded content out to where the audiences already are, through "branded micro-networks" (Johnny Vulkan) such as Facebook, which essentially is a micro-Internet. John Battelle was one of the first to theorize on the emergence of "conversational media" over "packaged goods media." Not sure what's chicken and what's egg here but conversational media propel the verticalization of the web into specialist-driven content offerings with distinct micro-foci and micro-formats (case in point: "Seven Minute Sopranos" = seven episodes of the Sopranos in a seven-minute YouTube clip). In a nutshell, the history of online marketing goes like this: First came email, then web portals, then search (aggregation), and now there is the distributed Internet with its myriad atomized blogs, widgets, voice posts, Twitter grams, RSS feeds, and social networking hubs. This poses new challenges, for example the question of how to scale a micro-campaign and ensure its repeatability. Aren't conversations by their very nature designed to be unique and can hardly be repeated? The trick, I guess, is to design them such that they can feed themselves and stay. Of course this is easier said than done.
Alright, let's talk about metrics…
Ok, but how to measure if conversations actually have an impact on brand recognition and, excuse my old school lingo, "revenue"? In other words, what are the metrics of conversational marketing? Many speakers at the summit asked for new "engagement metrics" (i.e. time spent online + interaction with content) and "return on objectives" rather than "return on investment" for conversational marketing campaigns. There was also a strong need for some kind of consistent dashboard that consolidates different metrics into one easy-to-use solution for marketers, kind of like CRM software for conversational marketers. ComScore's "Conversational Media Report," announced during the conference, is a first and promising attempt in this space (are you listening, Technorati?).
Certainly, the 80/20 rule (20% of the visitors create 80% of the page views) no longer applies, nor is it all about reach. Many panelists agreed that the effects of the "distributed Internet" will likely cause a gradual decline in the number of web site visitors and page views on traditional brand and news portals. "Context of the conversation" is becoming more important than unique visitors, page views, click through rates, and CPMs. Frequency is another new factor that marketers ought to take into account when committing to a long-term social media engagement: Facebook has 40 million active users and half of them return every other hour. Moreover, the Pulse feature lets marketers survey thousands of Facebook users (or even just hundreds in highly targeted groups or networks) in instant polls. That's pretty powerful.
At the end of a day rich with conversations, I got the message: It's time to walk the walk. "It's a different organizing principle that is going to dramatically change the playing field," said Ross Levinsohn, who famously acquired MySpace for Murdoch and then got ousted: "Some marketers will lean forward, some will lean back. But if you lean back, other marketers may effectively outmarket you." In this new Cluetrain world of marketing, brands can either be the subject of conversations or they can host conversations, moderated by either brand advocates or brand atttractors, and facilitated by marketers whose titles should consequently change to "chief facilitation officers" or "chief listening officers." "Spend your money listening," was one of the watchwords of the summit, and in a variation of David Ogilvy’s famous "the consumer is your wife" quote, one could perhaps contend that in the amateur-driven, democratized conversational marketing world of today your spouse may in fact be your best marketer.
According to a McKinsey & Company study of US economic activity, "Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can’t be automated is the next big performance challenge." The study argues that "as more companies come to specialize in core activities and outsource the rest, they have greater need for workers who can interact with co-workers, partners, and vendors," supported by highly personalized organizing and communication tools. 40 percent of labor activity, says McKinsey, comes not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what the consultancy calls the "Interaction Economy," which it defines as the "searching, coordinating, and monitoring required to exchange good or services."
This interaction economy emphasizes collaboration, social intelligence, tacit knowledge, and ambiguity, as much as it values workers' ability to make individual decisions quickly and organize tasks and time efficiently – in a nutshell: it puts a much stronger focus on the non-formalized, individual productivity or "micro-productivity" of employees. McKinsey says that this area of productivity involves the highest-priced labor of the most valued knowledge workers and yet remains the hardest to measure and manage.
It is also the least commoditized part of the economy, for a good reason: it would be counter-productive to decrease the level of entrepreneurial freedom at the micro-level by trying to implement streamlined de rigueur organizing tools. More companies are starting to realize that it might be a better alternative to provide a vast array of tools and leave it up to the workers to tailor them creatively to their specific needs - the human being and not the application as the meta-organizer. "You’re not trying to automate the task a human does; you’re trying to complement what the human is doing,” says James M. Manyika, a senior partner at McKinsey, who co-authored the study, in a recent New York Times article about personal organizing tools and company mash-ups. Micro-productivity applications such as Scrybe or 37 Signals may indeed lead to more productivity gains than big companywide applications such as enterprise resource planning or arcane knowledge management portals, which because of their rigidity too often limit innovation and creativity. And BusinessWeek reports that E*Trade, Siemens, JDS Uniphase, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Coldwell Banker Commercial are all using enterprise mashups in some capacity. Just as personal computers released the gridlock of corporate information to employees, personal organizers and mash-ups are empowering the individual worker to effectively engage in the “soft” yet critical tasks of collaboration, organizing, communications, and interaction – and let them choose themselves how to best accomplish that.
This is an interesting premise as this new "tacit technology" combines seemingly antagonistic convergent and divergent elements (as so many innovations do these days). The demand for a meta-organizer which combines myriad schedules and calendar applications is contrasted by the demand for personalized and individualistic organizing options that are divergent because they consider the differences in the user's preferences.” David Weinberger, author of the book "Everything is Miscellaneous," argues: "What we need is the ability to associate the people and the times and the places of our lives with the broad messy context of our lives." He adds that these new productivity tools are "an early but important step toward giving individuals at companies a better way to manage their increasingly complicated existence."
The recognition of micro-productivity is part of a broader trend – the renaissance of a human-centered economy that introduces new organizational and business models to re-cast the old Man vs. Machine story. Consumers want it real and human - post-industrial, excellent, unique, provocative, sentimental, opinionated, boutique, artisan, (eco-) epicurean, handcrafted, hand-wrought, warm, attentive, devoted. And companies are getting it. From user-centered design (Apple, Cisco, HP, etc.), user-generated content (Blogs, Wikis, Slideshare, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) to human-powered search (ChaCha, Mahalo), crowdsourcing, GeekSquad (call 1-800-GEEK-SQUAD - of all places, a technology company - and hear how the use of a real human voice and humorous options helps render the company real), to the new social and green responsibilities of the "high-purpose company," the rise of a more powerful human resources function, and a new quest for "authenticity" – the human is, once again, back at the center of attention and the economic value chain.
I visited the HQ of the “Best Company to Work For” (Fortune), aka Googleplex, last week for a Silicon Valley WebGuild event about “the future of online platforms.” It proved to be a timely topic given the Facebook cover story in Newsweek that came out on the same day. Expertly moderated by Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio, the panelists Mark Trang, Director of ISV Marketing at Salesforce.com, Chris Schalk from Google Developer Programs (codename: Google Code), and the witty Chuck Mortimore, Director of Platform Services at Rearden Commerce discussed how and when the next evolution of the web would take place – and who will be in the driver’s seat.
From the beginning of the evening, the most daunting challenge for the panelists appeared to be the definition of what an online platform actually is, and not surprisingly they fell back on sales pitches rather than providing some general attributes to nail the category. At least one gained some valuable insights into the business models represented on the panel. Rearden, probably the least known of the three, is an aggregated services procurement solution, a “mash-up platform,” as Mortimore put it, which connects supply and demand for consumer services. Salesforce.com – oh, boy, do they wish they hadn’t locked themselves in by choosing that name – is striving to become the go-to-platform for all business applications, far beyond just CRM. Trang said that in five years he’d expect his mom to do all of her event planning on Salesforce.com. Schalk, who evangelized Google’s efforts to collaborate with the developer community, could afford to lean back and play the humble card: “The web is the platform.” That, of course, is easy to say if, as many suspect, Google and the Web are essentially the same.
In any event, the panelists agreed that the “network effect is critical” for any platform, and that “putting the long-tail business models into demand” (Mortimer) was the number one challenge. For Mortimer, the platform value applies particularly to fixed-cost services as it enables businesses to achieve economies of scale much faster than they would on more traditional marketplaces. Trang emphasized that Salesforce.com did not consider itself to be a data warehouse: “We have no interest in storing all data in the world.” Rather, similar to Rearden, they would facilitate transactions and provide the tools and the infrastructure to run data operations. Well, there is your definition of a platform.
Of course, the question remains (and Ghalimi posed it to the panelists): With all these platforms in place and all the applications that are being built on top of them, how will users remain able to manage them effectively, that is, without having to administer multiple log-ins? Ghalimi proposed the “one single sign-on” solution. His rallying cry for a meta-platform, however, was essentially an “identity problem,” argued Mortimer, and one that was extremely complex and, because of its political undercurrents, almost impossible to solve by just one player alone. “It can’t be done on the browser level,” so Mortimer, “as that would create a control monopoly.” Instead, models such as OpenID, which proposes a decentralized identity framework that streamlines access to multiple platforms through one major hub, would be the best bet.
Overall, no surprise, all three panelists said in unison that the future of online platforms was golden. The “entry barriers for software entrepreneurs are as low as never before” (Trang), and according to him and Google’s Schalk, the micro-businesses that develop and distribute targeted niche services based on the SFDC and Google applications, make serious money.
So what are the next big milestones to look out for?
- Better data portability: Automated data-sharing across applications and platforms
- Offline functionality (still under-developed)
- Opening-up more applications for third party developers (Schalk hinted at the possibility of Google opening up Gmail or Google Analytics)
- Solving the “identity problem” by finding a “politically correct” way to consolidate multiple identities into one
I learned it the hard way in Hollywood – you will not get anywhere near your five minutes of fame if you don’t have an interesting story to tell – in less than 30 seconds. Nowadays, in the age of Twitter, instant messaging is the new storytelling. And provocative little statements such as this may just suffice to get a reporter interested in your story. Who has time anyway to read a lengthy pitch? Top-tier reporters from the Wall Street Journal and other publications receive up to 200 pitches per day via email, some of them (will they ever learn?) still with attachments. Engage PR lays out the new rules:
“In the PR business the ability to pitch a story depends on several factors:
1) Relevancy to the journalist;
2) Relevancy to the reader;
3) Timeliness;
4) Brevity”
Yes, brevity!
This means: “A few weeks ago a Forbes editor was talking about his “Five Line Pitch Rule”…basically any pitch should be no longer than five lines of text, and hopefully shorter. Based on this, we started to develop pitches that were not only five lines total, but each line was no longer than 140 characters. Using this model we can develop a pitch for a journalist that is approximately 700 characters or on average 200 words.”
Ok, but that’s still old school pitching, after all. Has anyone tried to pitch reporters via Twitter?
There’s no better place to study social conditioning and then come up with some quick generalizations about human nature than New York. I just came back from a business trip, and one night after work I hung out at the Ava Lounge in midtown, with a group of friends one could consider the quintessential “always-on” Manhattan demographic: a lawyer, a banker, a reporter, a marketer.
Not surprisingly, several times during an animated evening someone in the group pulled out their Blackberry (the iPhone hasn’t made it to NY yet, I did not spot a single one), which gave all others, in a Pavlovian reflex, the OK to check emails as well. The ritual, accompanied by a not even awkward sudden silence, lasted for about three minutes, before everyone focused again on the group and continued the conversation. A secret Blackberry-quette consensus seemed to exist, approving of the appropriateness of this interruption and also strangely sensing its right timing, both in terms of the intervals and the duration of the break. The ritual was repeated again and again over the course of the night.
I’ve heard a theory that in-person conversations, either one-on-one or within groups, naturally die off after approximately seven minutes. Why? Because TV commercial breaks happen at roughly that interval; and researchers assume a causal relationship between their duration and the impact they have on what people in the US consider the natural length of a conversation. That was yesterday. “The vernacular has changed!” writes the Thingelstad blog, ”Even the couple of people with non-Blackberry Blackberry’s like Treos and Windows Mobile devices are enjoying their Blackberry Break. I wonder if we’ll be taking iPhone Breaks, or just an iBreak.”
“Intermittent email access” this is, indeed, leading to “intermittent conversations” or, to be more precise, multiple simultaneous conversations with different parties in different communication realities. Yet this is not meant to be a fatalist’s take on our culture’s decline. To misquote Steven Johnson: “Not everything bad is bad for you.” In our case, the Blackberry breaks marked a welcome break in the conversation, a pause and an opportunity to meditate, recharge, and come up with new topics for the next stage until the next Blackberry break. The breaks allowed for a better flow of the conversation, and they made us, in fact, more social.
Blackberries enable us to expand the social space of a conversation in almost real-time. We know that, enabled by technologies such as email, IM, SMS, or video-stream, others can virtually join a conversation, but it is riveting to see that this place-shifting effect also has an effect on our design and perception of time as well as the way we conduct our in-world, in-person meetings. The “conversation on the side” has become a virtual reality extension that is far more subtle than Second Life avatars.
On our night out, a friend of a friend, who had just emailed, was introduced via Blackberry and became part of our conversation. In the end, one of my friends got a date with him – in the real world, next Thursday. Thanks to BlackBerry, the matchmaker. What you get is not necessarily what you see but there has never been a better time to meet (with) people.
Jott (still in beta) is a new "IP over voice" service that weaves together user-generated content, lifecaching, and attention economics. Here's how it works: If you have an idea, a thought, or simply want to remind yourself to do something while you are on the road (or anywhere for that matter), you simply dial the Jott number on your cell phone and "tell" Jott that you want to "Jott" a message to yourself. You then have up to 30 seconds to record your thought or message to yourself. After you hang up, Jott transcribes your message into text, and emails it to you (or anyone else you want to send it to).
I wonder how Jott protects the intellectual property stored on its servers....
When words speak louder than actions, the human voice becomes a business requirement
"Just got done biking 2 miles, first time EVER!" - "Feeling ADHD, dont want to be here, and none of my friends are online. Bastards. ;)" - "Uncontrollably thinking to myself: Where the players play..."
Welcome to the conversation age! It's not the first one ever (remember the "age of conversation" a few centuries ago?), but it is the first one in the history of economy, enabled and propelled by web 2.0 technologies. Gavin Heaton, who is currently working on an open-source e-book about the "conversation age," writes: "Technology in the guise of social media is giving rise to not virtual connections, but real conversation." Granted, this conversation started a while ago: the Cluetrain Manifesto pioneered the notion of brands as conversations - long before the triumphant rise of the blogosphere. The idea of the "Architecture of Participation" has been known for a while, too. But now, the "conversation economy" seems to have reached enough critical mass to become a new business paradigm. In the conversation economy "talking the talk" trumps "walking the walk." Words speak louder than actions. In fact, there is a "full-blown conversation going on about conversation," as Bruce Nussbaum points out, and one can even speak of a "long tail" of conversations - everyone, really everyone, has the chance these days to get the attention s/he deserves.
Conversation Architects = Evangelists?
The "conversation economy" is a sibling of the "influence economy" -- and they both have the "attention economy" as parent. In a poignant article for BusinessWeek, David Armano makes the case for grasping conversations as the currency of attention. In his eyes, Twitter has evolved from a simple service (that allowed users to express mundane thoughts) into a robust "conversation ecosystem" - based on widgets and mash-ups such as Twitteroo, Twitter Earth, Twittervision, and Twitterific that support dialogues based on feeds and feedback. But why is all this conversation rage such a rage for marketers? "Conversations lead to relationships and relationships lead to affinity," writes Armano. And personal affinity to brands is what marketers long for.
Hence John Battelle, former Wired editor, author of the standard book on "Search," and founder of Federated Media, explores economic models for "conversational marketing," whose raison d'etre he derives from the following insight: "... to have a conversation, you need to have something to say. And on conversational media sites, where the grammar and voices are so strong, you can't open a dialog with a deafening pitch, a crass come on. You have to understand the values of the site, and you have to have something that offers value, in context, to the audience." This requires a whole new breed of marketers, so-called "conversation architects;" professionals who possess the talent to understand conversations in their various contexts and modes as well have the ability to facilitate them across different social media platforms.
The main task for these conversation architects is to embrace inconsistency and divergence while maintaining personality, character, and integrity of a brand. At this point, though, you may ask yourself a blasphemous question: Aren't conversation architects essentially what companies used to call "evangelists"? And, are they, by joining and driving online and offline conversations within their community, not just simply engaging the already engaged, evangelizing the evangelizers? The answer is no. I think what's new and so remarkable about the phenomenon of today's "conversation economy" is that conversations have begun to reach beyond the boundaries of closed communities; they expand now to customers, media (and competitors!). They no longer occur only on the periphery of a brand; they become the main message and the heart and mind of the brand identity.
Empathy and Style
With this shift in focus, "conversational marketing" brings branding back to the fundamental parameters of dialogic human communication. Given influencer-driven word-of-mouth buzz and facing micro-audiences on blogs, video-sites, forums, and in chat rooms, the human voice, as the elemental medium of communication, is enjoying a renaissance. Washio Kazuhiko, a photographer and media researcher at the Institute of Media Environment in Tokyo, highlights this aspect in his book "Branding for Empathy:" There's something unique about the human voice that sets conversations apart from all other forms of communications: the ability to create empathy by tonality. We can feel and we can express empathy because of the way a voice sounds, both in verbal and written acts of communications. That's why video content will play an ever more important role in marketing. And that's why an authentic style will be substantial in engaging people in conversations.
With marketing becoming increasingly conversational, empathy becomes increasingly important. Empathy must not be confused with sympathy: Sympathy is literally 'feeling with' - compassion for or commiseration with another person. Empathy, by contrast, is literally 'feeling into' - the ability to project one's personality into another person and more fully understand that person. Sympathy is Steven Spielberg; empathy is Lars von Trier. You feel sympathy when you haven't been there; empathy is when you have. In this mediated world of omni- and ever-(tele)presence, empathy is key to effective communications. And in the world of atomized micro-audiences, empathy is key to effective marketing. Sympathy means you "liken" a brand to your own traits and virtues; empathy means you really care for it.
The ROI of a Conversation
There are some great examples of conversational marketing that is aware of its context and empathetic to its audiences. Batelle, for instance, examines the conversational nature of contextual advertising (Google Ads), elaborates on BoingBoing, and recalls the distinct editorial tone of Wired magazine (that led advertisers to gradually adopt it in their own language). He furthermore refers to the IT job board Dice. The site introduced a so-called "rant banner" and, instead of simply inviting readers to another site, invited its readers to add their conversational tidbits directly into the banner (the opening question was "Does your tech job suck?"). Other examples of smart conversational marketing are Symantec and Cisco (with its "Human Network"). All of them are "taking the conversation to another level - the conversation becomes the marketing, the medium is the message," writes Batelle.
For conversations in ad format, it is easy to evaluate their performance: You just look at the click-through or sell-through rates. For all other conversations, it is much more difficult to develop metrics. You may weigh the fact that an initially commercial conversation finds its way into a wider cultural canon (i.e. Cisco's Human network made it from Wikia, Wikipedia's commercial sibling, to Wikipedia). Or, in the case of Cisco, you may consider that a Google search returns the "human network" landing page in the #2 position - ahead of Cisco's own site - a success. For more informal, less action-oriented conversations, however, the challenge becomes to not only track conversations but also precisely measure their impact. Ideally, you want to be able to strategize and orchestrate future conversations based on the findings of today. Firms such as BuzzMetrics, recently acquired by Nielsen, have developed tools to track blog conversations, but the verdict is still out on how accurate these metrics really are. While they can provide absolute data and identify the quantity and even the quality of conversations about a brand, there is still no mechanism that - quantifiably - ties these conversations back to the business goals.
Promise-Based Management
Yet the power of conversations does not only apply to communications with external audiences; it also unfolds in a company's internal interactions. Companies may remain wary of the new radical transparency propagated by web 2.0 social media, as a recent McKinsey survey posits. Notwithstanding this hesitancy though, internal conversations are shaped by what philosopher John Austin conceived of as "speech-act theory" - the concept that written or verbal statements are not only descriptive but in fact serve as active statements that intend to "get things done" -- "in saying something, we do something." On these grounds Donald Sull, in a recent Harvard Business Review article, constructs a framework for what he coins "promise-based management." This framework understands active statements as the "strands that weave together coordinated activity in organizations" and conversations as a give-and-take mechanism that builds the social fabric of organizational behavior and provides the "essence of execution."
Anyway, I'm digressing, but I guess that's the nature of conversations. (John Batelle, to go back to the beginning, even uses a conversational format for his post and serializes it over the course of the day he's writing it.) Yes, indeed, conversing means "Thinking Out Loud." I have tried to aggregate and make sense of some of the existing perspectives on the conversation economy and condense all their complexity into blogspeak. It's a mission impossible. I don't really have a point of view. I don't have an argument to win. This is an ongoing conversation. I'm listening.
