There were a lot of developments over the past week in the emerging field of conversational marketing, something we first wrote about last January and have been working on with bloggers, brands and agencies ever since.
Here's a quick summary of what we've been up to, with details below:
-Auto manufacturer Scion launched a new conversational marketing campaign with Technorati aggregating conversation about independent film festivals and films, and creating awareness for indie film bloggers.
-At the Conversational Marketing Summit, Technorati and Ogilvy released a white paper, The Manifesto on Monday Morning summarizing our thinking and approaches to conversational marketing. The paper includes several case studies, a proposed conversational marketing code of conduct, and Technorati's technical and product approach to building conversational campaigns. The paper opens with a section by Doc Searls with rules for the road for marketers to consider.
-Together with The Conversation Group, we launched a conversational media microsite at www.conversationalmedia.org that constantly aggregates posts about conversational media and marketing.
And here are the details:
Scion
The most recent example of a conversational marketing project is a new section of Technorati we developed with auto manufacturer Scion, which highlights blogosphere conversations about independent films and film festivals. If you've ever been in the indie film community, you know how much work it is to get people to pay attention, get word of mouth out and generally be heard against the background noise of Big Entertainment. The Scion brand has built a reputation in supporting alternative and "off the beaten path culture." (Their words. From their site. Which puts culture on the same level as cars and their owners.)
As their first foray into conversational marketing, Scion is concentrating in one place the voices of indie film culture as heard in the blogopshere. There is a lot of conversation out there about indie film, but its tough to find. You can search film and festival titles, or click through a blogroll of film blogs, but the Indie Film Festival Guide, at cafe.technorati.com/film shows links and excepts of these posts in one place, sending new traffic off these bloggers. And to really celebrate this community and its passions, Scion is placing conversational ads at Technorati and elsewhere. These ads feature constantly updating syndicated headlines from the indie film site and further create awareness for film festivals and film bloggers.
We believe that conversational marketing starts with conversation and not marketing--- and properly executed this medium allows for a relationship to emerge between brands and communities they are passionate about. Scion's commitment to alternative culture is a great long term example of such a relationship, and the new film project we're working on with them is something that can benefit the indie film community and its many followers.
White Paper and Code of Conduct
A year ago when we did our very first conversational syndication project (with Paramount, on Al Gore's film an Inconvenient Truth) Dave Sifry and I realized that there were a set of ethical issues we needed to think through in conversational marketing and advertising. How transparent should a brand's editorial selection process be? How do we avoid polluting this form of commercial culture with astroturfing, corporate sponsored fake blogs, or undisclosed pay-per-post. This week we are publishing a proposed conversational marketing code of ethics--- for which we invite comment and debate. We're using these guidelines with brands and agencies as way to explain that when you engage in conversation you need to do so in an open, transparent manner. These guidelines are included on our whitepaper, and here:
A proposed Conversational Advertising Code of Conduct
• Transparency in the use of a publisher’s content
Fair use rules offer the legal and ethical underpinnings for including excerpts of a blog post or article in another site. By pointing to a post, an advertiser ultimately increases exposure and awareness of the original content. Nevertheless, we believe any blogger has the right to refuse permission for an excerpt or link to his post to appear in a conversational advertising site. A blogger’s content should never be syndicated in its entirety: headlines, snippets and/or truncated posts are acceptable, but the actual full-length post should only be available on the blogger’s blog or at the blogger’s discretion. The link back to the bloggers site must be maintained in the conversational ad so as to drive traffic to the blogger. There should be a means by which that blogger can opt out if his/her content has been referenced by an advertiser sponsored site.
• Transparency in the editorial process
Advertisers should disclose the filter and editorial mechanisms they use to find and/or display content.
If inclined, the audience should be able to understand the degree to which the content they see has been editorially selected: heavily (sponsored and/or handpicked posts), moderately (preset filters and restrictions) or not-at-all (unfiltered streams of content). Furthermore, as a gesture of transparency, advertisers may want to offer a means to view completely unfiltered content (e.g., links to live search results).
• Transparency in attributing ads
If a brand sponsors a conversational ad, the ad should say so. If a brand syndicates conversation onto a site they maintain or pay for, this sponsorship should be disclosed. Syndicating content on topics relevant to a brand and its customers can be an excellent way to facilitate conversation and help foster a community, but a brand’s presence in that conversation must be accurately represented.
• Transparency in influencing content creators
Conversational advertising will fail if it is exploited as a means to cover-up sponsored blogging, pay-per-posting, or any other publishing that is supported and influenced by a brand without being represented as such. Previous instances of undisclosed brand-blog collusion have led to online backlashes for the brands and hurt the reputation of the blogosphere. If an advertiser enlists the assistance of bloggers, compensates them, or starts blogs itself, that advertiser should make its influence over the content apparent, and neither hide that relationship nor advertise those content creators as impartial parties. As long as transparency is maintained, the content created when advertisers work with publishers is perfectly legitimate social media.
Of course guidelines like these ultimately are sourced in the brilliant principals of books like the Cluetrain Manifesto, which as its first thesis declared eight years ago, "Markets are Conversations." What was theory back then is now something talked about daily by brands, pr people and ad agencies. This week Technorati and Ogilvy are sharing our thinking the best practices and approaches to conversational marketing in a white paper entitled, The Manifesto on Monday Morning How to put the theories of Cluetrain to work for you. In writing this, we back to the source and asked Cluetrain coauthor Doc Searls to weigh in with his thoughts on what's changed in eight years and how marketers should approach conversation today. Here's some of Doc's thinking excerpted from the white paper:
• The framing for conversational marketing should be conversation, not marketing. Think about what you want in a conversation, and let that lead your marketing.
• The purpose of conversation is to create and improve understanding, not for one party to "deliver messages" to the other. That would be rude.
• There is no "audience" in a conversation. If we must label others in conversation, let's call them partners.
• People in productive conversation don't repeat what they're saying over and over. They learn from each other and move topics forward.
• Conversations are about talking, not announcing. They're about listening, not surveying. They're about paying attention, not getting attention. They're about talking, not announcing. "Driving" is for cars and cattle, not conversation.
• Conversation is live. It’s constantly moving and changing, flowing where the interests and ideas of the participants take it. Even when conversations take the form of email, what makes them live is current interest on both sides.
What this means for conversational marketing is that brands must be living things too. Not just emblems. Those that succeed will be as live—as open to the flow and diversion of ideas—as the market conversations they participate in.
( I should point out that Cluetrain had four co-authors and these thought's are Doc's and not those of the entire team.)
Dan Farber at ZDNet wrote a great summary our thinkng here.
Marketingshift also covered us, picking up here a major theme from the white paper: that the conversational center of the blogosphere is what we call "the magic middle" ; blogs with 20-1000 inbound links.
The Conversation Group launches to facilitate market conversations.
As Technorati has been working with brands and agencies over the past few months, we've had a lot of requests to help companies think through the best way to engage with bloggers, provide advice on what their conversational strategy should be, and how best to design a campaign. As a technology company we kept having to say, "No, we're not a creative agency, so we can't do this work for you." Which was frustrating because most of brands we talked to genuinely want to know how to get conversation right and engage in an authentic manner. The result of all this thinking was the creation of a new company last week by a former member of the Technorati family, Ted Shelton. The Conversation Group has launched as a professional services firm to help brands build conversational strategies and marketing initiatives. . They are a Technorati partner and have been working with Scion, Microsoft and several other brands on developing client campaigns using Technorati's conversational marketing system as well as technologies from other vendors. In the midst of a very busy launch, The Conversation Group built a terrific microsite using Technorati's conversational marketing system to aggregate conversation from across the blogosphere about conversational marketing. Its a great way to keep track of what everyone is saying about this emerging field.