5 good reasons why PR is incompatible
"Conversational Marketing"... now does that sound cool or what? It's certainly all the buzz around the water cooler here lately. Just last week Jeff Jarvis touched on it in a great interview of David Weinberger from the Always On Conference. And surely we've all seen Joe Jaffe's Social Media Survey making the rounds. Good? Maybe not. Looks like we are about to replay the Wikipedia debacle actually, i.e. a HUGE opportunity where the PR industry is prematurely locked out. That has a few industry experts scratching their heads and asking why. Here we try to answer that. Among other things, we might just be too stupid for Conversational Marketing.
Okay, let's back up a minute. Where's this coming from? Well, unless you're a sheltered luddite or have been marooned on a deserted island in the South Pacific for the last five years... generally speaking, blogging is now the recognized cure for cancer and Jarvis is up for a Nobel Peace Prize. In PR, there's been a huge rush to fain invention and experimentation: Rubel's slinging all things widgets; Phil Gomes has perfected the groundbreakingly mindless StoryMaker Upper 1.0 "; and Rick Murray, the president of a division of the largest independent form in the world mind you, is touting the value of "fake people doing fake things spending real money" in Second Life. It's a mad, mad world. Today what you've got is a plethora of half-baked cockamamie ideas held out as salvation by people who, by and large, are vying for position to cash in financially and/or politically. Fact is, it's a smarmy, mad, mad world.
Now it's 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 "broadcast" 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, "In 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 parent's basement. Hell, this could very well be the rallying cry for disintermediated disintermediaries everywhere.
...And that's where the swarm of marketing opportunists (redundant) swooped in. WOMM has kidnapped the pristine virginal CM. According to Tom Hespos, President of Underscore Marketing: "WOMM tries to make the idea of connecting directly with the marketplace compatible with the broadcast thinking typical of large corporations, mainly by taking the conversation away from the people working at the corporation and giving it to a group of paid agents. Really, the two concepts are polar opposites."
Poor CM. She's held captive now doing $400/hr. tricks in a seedy PR office near Times Square.