PAN Blog

I would have liked to have live-blogged this "radio talk show-style" interview with David Weinberger our good friend Francois Gossieaux, president of Corante and founder of new marketing agency MarketHum held for a bunch of Facebook Marketing 2.0 groupies yesterday at 1:00, but I dialed into the call with just time enough to open Word for note-taking.

Those who attended got a treat--David Weinberger, of the Cluetrain crowd, and Berkman Center and Everything Is Miscellaneous fame, fielded questions about marketing, new and social media, pr and even politics (with his "typical, New England Jewish" slant--Democrat) He likes Obama and Edwards but thinks Hillary will take the nomination. More on that below.

I'm not the best transcriber, meaning I'm sure I didn't catch all the questions and answers word for word. I was also interrupted during the Q&A by some work stuff (imagine!) So if you notice anything wildly out of place please note it in the comments section and I'll do what I can to correct.

Francois: What about blogging in heavily-regulated industries (i.e., Pharma)?

David W: Customers are smart about metadata—we can tell the difference between marketing fluff on a site and real data; we’re pretty good at figuring out what to trust absolutely and what’s marketing.

It’s important for companies to be explicit about the info they’re giving out; for instance, "this stuff 'here' you can count on, its facts, ingredients, etc.—sue us if we get it wrong." Compared against that the marketing content is apparent. Now go back and look at marketing in general and ask yourself if customers trust the word of other customers rather than what you say about your own business.

Customers have learned not to trust companies the way they trust other customers. Marketing needs to adjust to this reality by taking on an authentic tone (the marketing stuff is starting to really sound phony because people are increasingly listening to other—authentic—people. So, the marketing stuff is now starting to sound PHONY because it’s not authentic, even if it happens to be right.

Francois: Are there other lessons Everything is Miscelaneous can teach us?

David W: two things change for marketers: 1) the customer is in control. The control goes beyond exchange of ideas and reviews; customers are starting to take control of organizational issues. Customers can now “organize their own stores with metadata”

2) Finding the complexity in what looks simple. Marketing has always been about simplifying the message. You’re engaged in a process of simplification. BUT, blogging and being transparent is about tackling the complex. Marketers have to get more "stomach" for being complex, meaning interesting. Simple is becoming the new ‘insulting' to customers.

Francois, taking questions from audience: – How do we make things more simple with so many angles attached to each subject, especially in B-2-B environments? AND, marketers have always been on the side of being in control of the message; how do we as marketers give up control?

David W: Simplicity vs. Complexity – there’s always a dialectic. If you teach, you know sometimes you want to make things simple because people get confused. Other times you have to show the complexity. At certain times in business you want to be very simple—find the statement that sums up what is your product (especially in tech). It has to be simple. Once you do that you can organize the complexity to some degree. There’s hypnotizing simplicity—which is bad because that’s saying the same thing over and over again. And then there's clarifying simplicity—which makes understanding easier so you can then layer levels of complexity on top of that simplicity.

David W: On control: marketing takes as a measure of success the level to which it controls the message, which is the wrong way to go about it.

Francois G: On Simplicty: Simple messages - “what’s it going to do for me?” is where we need to focus.

Francois G: What would happen if marketing did not exist? Should marketing go away, or become a part of every company function to some degree or another?

David W: it’s healthy and worth enabling the exchange of ideas an information. Marketers cannot control the message…there are still elements of communications that marketers can control and need to run with, but messaging and product messaging isn’t going to be it anymore.

Audience Question: (GalxoSmithKline) – Converting people who don’t know they want something is called "the intent economy," which consists of people who want something but have to find you first. What does tagging have to do with the intent economy? – we haven’t figured out how to use tagging yet; should crossing the intention economy include tagging? How does tagging tie into this economy?

David W: The intention economy, and why tags matter, is marketing. The conversations that are happening with or without you and the reasons why people find you are because of these conversations. More often than not people don’t know you exist, so they can’t find you. So, if I want to find you, I need to stumble across you. The framework that enables you to find me is not on your site. Tagging certainly helps by finding people’s recommendations and what they think of your products and that makes it easier for others to find you.

For example: if you're a car company and you changed your messaging to “we’re the safe car.” But a lot of people might not care about that so much—they’re looking for other attributes. You need to make your site accessible to people with multiple interests. You can’t anticipate what the people want, so you architect your site to help the intention economy along.

This is something that's happening to brands – branders used to try and control the brand; now its all about reputation—your users bestow this 'reputation' upon you and it’s become more important to protect reputation, vs. your brand.

Audience Question: What advice do you have for those of us “stuck in the middle,” where the company says it wants to get involved in conversations, but still can’t let go of control. So they get into these conversations while trying to retain control and really make a mess. How do you convince the company to stop this?

DW: A company would be foolish not to listen and take advantage of the information the web FIRST—in many respects the customers are the market research. But be careful, as soon as you convince a company to listen, they will want to jump in because they’ll want to respond to stupid posts and message boards. It’s the marketers JOB to HOLD THEM BACK at first. knee jerk responses will be bad.

Francois: "The Shut Up Revolution."

Audience Question: Can you give us your view on the Democratic primary. Who is going to win and why is their message working?

David W: From my point of view, the three majors: I like Obama and Edwards..and I'm doing volunteer work for Edwards. But I think that Hillary is going to win, but I don't like her communication style; it’s old-world, alienating, foreign and annoying. It’s a space alien from the planet broadcast – her communications style is a serious negative for her, although she’s probably going to win.

Francois G: A lot of companies are looking for help, and there are a lot of pr agencies that don’t get it. For people who are looking for help, where do they turn?

David W: I wish there was a list to point to. You want to find people who have something good to say. I don’t have a magic way of predicting this; if they don’t know how to use email, there’s a problem.

For those of you who want a more complete account, Francois will have (I believe) a recording of the event up soon!