Conversations are not markets, people!

I agree that it is dangerous for businesses to look at social media (or ‘gatherings of people’) as nothing more than sales opportunities. That would be akin to a TV channel deciding that the adverts were more important than the programs and sacrificing shows in favour of wall to wall commercials. It is the other aspects of these gatherings that make them gatherings in the first place.

Marketers should know (I say ‘should’ because — well, you know — idiots abound) that the audience isn’t there for them but for these other alternative reasons.

Now, I want to take your park and picnic analogy and stretch it. Certainly, if someone came up to a picnicking group of people and tried to leaflet them, they would get a terrible and negative response. But, remember, the central tenet of conversation marketing as put forward by Cluetrain and others, is that you need to get invited to the picnic.

If I invite friends to a picnic, they all have jobs and work for various companies etc. If, during the course of our sandwiches and lemonade I should mention I’m having trouble with my bank and my friend who I have invited to the picnic works at a competing bank, it would only be natural for him to offer a solution (transfer to me and I’ll sort out your account) and for me to expect that kind of support. That doesn’t feel like a marketing push but a friendly offer of help.

We’ve all done it — talked shop at a social gathering. To me, this is the least offensive and most influential form of conversation marketing. Someone who is on Twitter says they’re having a problem or asks for advice and I offer a solution.

As ever, cogent and to the heart of the issue. So much better argued than the lightweight effort I made. Indeed, the comments on my post to which you link above strongly suggest that even the non-evil marketing folk tend to believe the “all” rather than “some” view of the inverse of Manifesto #1 — that all conversations are also markets.

It was this belief and the accompanying practices that prompted me, and I think, Kate, to our original posts. It’s also the reason I am making a deliberate point in my work to focus on long term strategic value of conversation if I’m talking to someone about social networks and their business.

I may even move to simply being a user and educated commentator on social networks rather than offering my advice as a part of my business. I am over the unpleasant intrusion of marketing by some into the communities I am a part of and I want not to be identified with it.

Having commented now at length, I will away. I’ll return later to pinch this and make it into my own blog post.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m *on* it. Seriously. You’ll start seeing meaningful output in the next 14 days. Or thereabouts. Roughly. Probably. Mostly. This offer void in TAS and ACT. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Parts may digest before opening. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Thanks for another thought provoking essay. Of course, some will just find it provoking. Marketing intrudes wherever it can — the branding of the picnic coffee mugs, the Tee-shirts participants wear. But it doesn’t stop some of our social interactions being just about connecting with people. Perhaps we could turn this into a measure of people that ‘get it’. Horrifying thought. A bridge too far. However, good socmed environments give us the power to block, follow or unfollow.

We connect simultaneously to several different subcommunities and part of that includes a seriously Darwinian view on who can join. Intrusive marketers leave the tribe pretty quickly. I worked with one OSS company I liked to try and explain that Socmed marketing was different because of the need to build rapport. Press releases are blatted out without rapport — you are interested or not. Rapport was not in their lexicon, and sadly, eventually, even I unfollowed them. We have the power to ignore those that ignore social rules.

My concern is that many people are joining these networks without understanding how abrupt we sound in emails and 140 characters. I have email traffic from 20 years ago and it’s just plain embarrassing how aggressive and unsympathetic I sounded. I’ve looked at the responses to Minister Tanner’s first blog and I see behaviour that would never occur (I hope) in a face-to-face meeting. How much time in our early communities did we spend trying to prevent ‘flame wars’. Now we have individuals and hungry marketers unleashed into social communities without the tempering of experience. Can it be true that Twitter usage grew 800% in Australia from Jan to Feb 2009? If so, what does that mean for new arrivals eager for the bounty that they have been promised, and older users like myself, entrenched in my little network?

The same conflicts arise in the physical world, but one of your points is that we have ways of understanding these. Even so, marketing appears everywhere. One hypermarketer earnestly believes that one should never eat alone — meals are another opportunity to network (business network) that should never, ever be wasted. I accept that person has earned their success. I also choose not to live like that.

I understand Cluetrain is being updated — but without the marketing hype and focus, could Twitter have ever taken off? The Oprah phenomenon alone created a measurable leap in membership. But what then? How do we manage our conversations? Your answer sums it up — our many simultaneous roles and conversations are now revealed to a wider audience. I talk XR6 (Motor vehicle), photography and EVE Online with one person, Religion with another, and support a gay couple setting up a video broadcasting operation out of NYC. Each conversation is different — each group is independent. All are welcome to participate. The disrespectful or intrusive leave the Tribe with one click.

I can recommend this year’s Reith lectures — Michael Sandel makes a similar point. There is more to life than markets — moral, spiritual and political values have all been monetized in the last 20 years, and now the market society has had it’s comeuppance.

I have written more on this at http://globalvillagegovernance.blogspot.com/2009/07/society-maybe-there-is-such-thing-after.html

What surprised me was the degree of hostility to the comments expressed — demonstrates how deeply economic values are embedded and held as the new religion. Check out the depth of feeling in some of the comments on http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/28/society-values-morality-political-vision

While this essay was not just about the commerical implications, its discussion of them was not dissimilar to the traditional challenge of reaching an audience with a relevant message at a relevant time.

Reader’s Digest, for example, was doing that through the letterbox very successfully in the second half of the 20th century because the letterbox was the place consumers were ready to engage. Telstra recontracted a lot of customers through telemarketing in the 1990s/early 2000s because its customers were engaging with them through that channel.

But things change and while channels like the letterbox and telemarketing are still very effective for some messages, there now have other channels to work with. And when we’re talking about online channels, we are dealing with conduits for a message that are very fast and relatively inexpensive. Both these features don’t exactly encourage investment in the quality of those messages.

Discussions like this one are happening because the novelty of putting words out to lots of people (whether in Twitter, Facebook (where did MySpace go?), blogs etc) is passing. We now look for quality in these words and expressions. And that is leading to questions like those above around how we can most easily assess that quality and relevance.

We know not to call after 9pm. We know not to leave 5 message in a day. We know not to doorknock before breakfast. Without normed protocols marketing messages in “social media” are like those fundraisers who operate in shopping centres and street corners – ie throw enough lines out and something will bite. (And if you need to, grab the fish and corner it until it jumps on the damn thing.)

But unless society values this outcome, it will not become the norm. Whether your social media is a face-to-face conversation, phone call, letter or Facebook posting, if you’re not adding something of value to the dialogue the conversation will not last.

re “The problem is that the entire focus of The Cluetrain Manifesto is “business” and “markets” — all that buying and selling stuff,” I think if you had read beyond the theses, like my first chapter, for instance, you would not have made such a statement. And it’s so easy to do!

http://www.cluetrain.com/apocalypso.html

I basically agree with you. Conversations are not markets, and such reversals of Doc’s great one-liner are extremely unfortunate, to say the least. While Cluetrain was marketed as a “Business book,” I think it became a bestseller precisely because it lobbed such a big FUCK YOU at business. That was certainly my position ten years ago, and it remains so today. I once thought the net might encourage business to become more humane, but that clearly has not happened in most cases. I am sickened by much of the use Cluetrain has been put to by rapacious idiots in search of ever-increasing profits. My “other blog” – Mystic Bourgeoisie – has sought to uncover much deeper causes of this cultural psychosis. Do have a look.