Stuck at LAX Again, Thinking About Conversational Marketing
I spent last Friday evening at LAX and the Burbank airport (and trafficky freeways between the two) on a 9 hour quest to get back to San Francisco. Lucky for me, I found myself distracted by an engaging and spirited discussion of advertising models, journalistic ethics and best practices for conversational marketing! A week later I find myself, again, stuck in Los Angeles waiting out flight delays — and collecting my thoughts on last week’s hoopla around conversational marketing.
Earlier this week I had a frank conversation with the folks at Microsoft to get their take. After revisiting the elements of the ad campaign, we agreed that this sort of “conversational marketing” doesn’t violate ethics (marketer or journalistic) or intentionally mislead readers. Still, they are taking seriously the perception among some commentators that we all could have done more to disclose the details on the campaign. More transparency can’t be a bad thing. Most importantly, Microsoft is listening and trying to learn from the feedback. I was thrilled to hear all of that.
That’s what makes conversational marketing so compelling to me (and my colleagues at FM) — it allows our customers to give us feedback. Honest feedback isn’t always nice to hear, but it’s important that we hear it, that we listen and that we grow from it. We’ll keep at it because we’re committed to finding more relevant, natural ways to communicate to our customers, and (let’s hope) we get better each time.
At this point I’m not so concerned by ethics or transparency cause there seems to be a lot of that floating around. I’m more concerned with bloggers who believe their name and text can appear in an ad without perceiving it as an endorsement.
Clyde–Professional journalists and critics who review movies, cars and technology products at the most credible and respected publications have always allowed their names and words to be re-used in advertising copy. The part that seems to be upsetting some folks about the People Ready Business campaign was that the words were written as part of the sponsorship program, not written previously and re-purposed for an ad campaign only later. I appreciate the feedback, sir! But I remain on the side of those who feel that full transparency is the issue, not participation by authors.