Joseph Jaffe’s Join the Conversation

If you’re a brand marketer
or have a brand, or a market to reach,
read this book.

A Marketing Dialog

The foundation of Join the Conversation, How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership is author Joseph Jaffe’s distinction between communication and conversation. He describes communication as one-way and carefully controlled in its implementation, while conversation is organic, non-linear, unpredictable, and not initiated by any one person or organization.

Key Moments

As collective online conversations begin to spill into conversations offline, the book addresses the opportunities presented to brand marketers engaged in conversation with groups Jaffe identifies as producers, prosumers and consumers.

He presents many examples of what we here at Brainstorm refer to as key social media moments—moments when companies have either seized an opportunity or been seized by it.

If you’re not present at a key moment,
you can’t exploit that moment,
but it may exploit you.

Helpful Advice

The book provides a number of guidelines to consider when adopting conversational engagement over mere communication: The need to embrace consumer-generated content, the importance of honesty, an emphasis on product quality and service excellence—coupled with a balanced sense of transparency, as well as the benefits of partnering with today’s consumer, paired with cautionary advice.

About the Author

Joseph Jaffe, author of Join the Conversation and Life After the 30-Second Spot, is president and chief interrupter at new marketing company, Crayon. He’s a noted consultant and blogger and hosts Coffee with Crayon Thursdays at 9am EST on Crayonville Island in Second Life. This review is part of his UNM2PNM project.

Join In

Although it may take purists a while to get used to the conversational writing style, regardless of whether or not you’re already engaged in conversation, Join the Conversation is a read worth talking about.

Think of it as a TinyUrl with residuals.

Short, but Sweet

LinkBlip is a new URL-shortening service perfectly suited for micro-blogging sites like 140-character max per message Twitter. As an added plus, when someone clicks on a LinkBlip-shortened URL, the link creator is automatically notified via email with the user’s general location (city and state).

Future Growth Opportunities

Matthew Inman, the developer of LinkBlip, is looking to add functionality, saying, “I want to add multiple URL tracking and the ability to be notified every time someone clicks a URL, not just once.”

Pros and Cons

Unlike TinyUrl where a click creates a shortened URL in your clipboard, LinkBlip does not, yet. And use of a third-party geoIP database sometimes serves up the user’s ISP location instead of the user’s.

LinkBlip does provide a browser button, and the minor inconvenience of adding your email and copying the new URL is offset by the potential benefits LinkBlip’s feedback provides.

Think of it as a TinyUrl with residuals—worth the paste. We think they’re on to something.

Click on http://lburl.com/f3bhf, Brainstormbrand.com’s small URL and let us know you stopped by.

$1000. Write away.

Need some cash—right away? In celebration of The Marketing Technology Blog hitting the triple quadruple (1,000 posts, over 1,000 unique visitors daily, and over 1,000 feed subscribers) Doug Karr, FormSpring, and eight other sponsors are ponying up a cool $1,000 to the best blog post featuring a sentence or two about each of the contest sponsors.

Check out the rules for yourself and write on.

Be Heard Among the Herd

Digitally propagated word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing initiatives can reach your target audience in ways traditional means can’t. WOM can also be a far more trusted means of amplifying your messages and driving results in vertical lifestyle markets and niche communities.

Viral seeds, chat room seeding, key blog commentary, message boards, forum contributions, and even SMS (Short Message Service) are just a few of the ways products and services are promoted or demoted on an ongoing basis.

Be Results Oriented

Enter online social spaces liberally and vocally but with a plan of action and an eye to nascent communication protocols—think long-term behavioral loyalty over short-term sale.

WOM works best with easily explained products and value propositions founded upon messaging that establishes future loyalty with new customers and encourages natural WOM among current customers.

A WOM campaign can:

1. Generate Buzz: Advance your brand and accelerate distribution of your message via properly tagged media assets forwarded virally.
2. Enable Proaction: Promote, mitigate, or preempt the effect of breaking news, and/or seed news of your own by engaging in online social dialogs.
3. Enhance Augmentation: Support your existing promotions, draw web traffic and gather consumer input.

Not for Everyone

Interactive engagements with your online target audience within their social networks is smart business. But WOM marketing strategies can negate value if improperly deployed. Push an agenda and social networks tend to roar right back (or bite) if they sense they’re being sold.

Finally, it’s always important to consider the current quality of your brand’s deliverable when developing a WOM strategy. Ultimately, as a marketer, you can’t control what customers say about you online.

Image: bullish1974

A Protest

Tom Wayne, owner of Prospero’s Books in Kansas City, Missouri, loves books. Recently looking to reduce his used book inventory, he found he couldn’t even give them away. So he got a permit and burned them in protest (see the Yahoo article).

Read a Book? LOL!!!

Apparently the 18-34, web 2.0, GenMe, millennials just don’t read books much anymore.

According to a recently released study on The Arts and Civic Engagement by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 18-34-year-olds have the lowest literary reading rate among all adults at 45.2%. In 1982, the rate for the same age group was 61.1%, the highest among all adults at the time.

Burning Issues

The Internet is one likely cause in this behavioral swing. With the web’s seemingly infinite supply of information and the finite number of hours in a day, books are becoming arcane, expensive, and volumetric. Committing to more than a 2-minute video, a podcast sound bite, or a short blog entry is increasingly impractical if GenMe individuals hope to keep up.

Relevancy, Transparency and Brevity

Trying to reach GenMe and other market segments flooding into online social environments is a long-term, long tail play. Consider words like transparency and participation over terms like selling—and above all, keep it brief.

In fact, if you’re still reading this, you may be over 35.

*Download the complete NEA report here:
Civic Engagement pdf | 136 kb

Image source: n8ive