Marketing Tool or Conversation

Gretchen on Jerry O on Blogs

In a very well-written posting, the Dog Lady agrees with Jeremiah Owyang that blogs are conversations not marketing tools.

To me, a conversation on a business blog is a marketing tool. But a free-wheeling one. As opposed to some obviously biased material composed by PR hacks.

Canadian Headhunter

Comments

[gretchen]

Well, I believe they become marketing tools. In fact, I think blogs are the most effective marketing tools for many companies. But what I don't think is that blogs should be approached and managed as marketing tools. Creating a blog just for marketing purposes sets up a disingenious conversation that readers can see through immediately.

So I think we're in agreement on this one. :)

[laurence haughton]

Could that be because business gurus have blessed the idea that marketers can be liars (or at least deceivers)?

Marketing was not invented to be the refuge of the disingenious. But over time marketing practicioners have been seduced by the dark side. Now their disingeniousness is an accepted fact of business life like "lazy" workers or "greedy" bosses.

[laurence haughton]

BTW I think the phrase "marketing tools" is very descriptive.

[Colin Kingsbury]

Right now we're OD-ing a little on the "blog exceptionalism" talk. It is simply a new medium of communications with its own quirks and benefits and weaknesses. Business blogs are powerful right now because they are relatively scarce. But if you look at political blogs, which got started in earnest in 2000, they are largely settling into the established pattern of being hot-air machines. But they are also becoming a must-have for any political figure. So the price of ubiquity is authenticity.

[Canadian Headhunter]

As usual, I love your lines but in this case I'm not exactly sure what they mean.

> hot-air machines
> The price of ubiquity is authenticity

It sounds like you're saying the key factor is the audience of busy, no time for depth readers.

The blogs which were once the domain of the political junkie who wants additional depth, now cater to the mass woman.

Am I right?

(Hi Larry!)

[Colin Kingsbury]

CH, I think I was trying to be too clever by half. My point was that as blogs become more common, they become less like what made them interesting in the first place. Political blogs are now mostly places where everyone posts finely-crafted talking points or howls at the moon with their pack.

Likewise, while I'm sure Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit.com) is quite an interesting fellow, I'm pretty sure there are hundreds if not thousands of other interesting fellows out there whose opinions and tastes we will never know about because Instapundit has sucked up 98% of the oxygen in the room. He will likely not be replaced until he quits blogging. Like every other medium, blogging gives more power to incumbents than challengers, though the balance is far better than TV or newspapers, where challenging the established voices is nearly impossible.

There are still interesting political blogs where good conversations happen with a minimum of acrimony. They are vastly in the minority and are of miniscule impact compared to sites like Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs. Blogs have not improved the qualiy of the political discussion, they have simply given more people megaphones to shout at each other with, which is what people want (as measured by what they do, rather than what they say) these days.

Similarly, I see no reason to believe that companies as a whole want to build and sell their products any differently than they did ten or fifty years ago. Everyone still wants to buy raw inputs for a nickel, put a dollar of labor into it, and sell the finished product for fifty dollars, until somebody comes along and offers it for a buck ten. Companies will use blogs to manipulate consumers just as they used every other medium. They just haven't all figured out how to do it yet. When they do, they will all blog, and almost none of them will be worth reading.

[laurence haughton]

(Hi CH - I've met more than my share of "marketing tools" and a fair number of "management tools.")

Authenticity is no more a required part of blogs than it is required in talk radio or pro wrestling.

[Curious George]

Wake up and smell the rose’s people. Blogs serve the author first and foremost and the audience second. Take that into consideration when looking at the real reason on why people blog about what they do. Not because it is 100% buddest monk pure pleasing the masses, but because content = readership = notoriety = ego = happy!