The word “conversation” is used a lot to reflect the fact that, yes, it’s required of a brand or company to enter into the conversation its customers are having – otherwise the conversation goes on without you, which is a bad bad thing.
Now I see plenty of companies chattering away on Twitter, posting cool content on Ustream or Facebook, creating compelling blogs around their customers’ general area of interest- all in the name of engaging the customer and proving via a sort of “soft sell” that, really, we’re in it for the sheer love of what we do and not merely to sell you stuff.

This is all great, and necessary. But are you merely conversing? Or are you listening to your consumers – taking their input and responding, reacting to immediate customer complaints and the like- but not hearing them?

By hearing I mean…Are you practicing transparency, but not actually creating change? Are you ready and willing to make long-term, major changes in your company or product based on real and substantive interaction with your customer?

The spirit and essence of social media are completely separate from the tools we use to deploy them.

The New York Times yesterday announced its paid online model. The model’s very much like that used by The Financial Times: a visitor may read a certain number of articles for free, and after that is asked to subscribe for a flat fee.
The Times has been racking its collective brain for a couple years on which model to use and how to implement it. The thing is: the online newspaper is far more valuable than the print version. The core audience should be willing to pay, if they can also be made to recognize that fact.

What makes the online paper so much more compelling? It’s alive and evolving. In a time of instantaneous news, what will make an institution like the NYT relevant and valuable is layers of content and perspective.

No paper can compete on news, but today, the initial coverage of, say, the crisis in Haiti (it’s hard to think of much else right now) can be overlaid with new information (as facts come in), new perspectives (from different reporters and civilians on and off the scene, photos and video from those who are on the ground, and human stories from those affected. The story never ends; it is constantly augmented and remains relevant.

News is a universal commodity and it can’t be sold as-is. But if the New York Times can find a way to be the best at creating this kind of deep, evolving, honest, relevant story, then readers will pay.

(I wrote a post on this last April and have reposted it below. It’s about NYT entertainment content being made more valuable by the participatory nature of the Web. Also, Fred Wilson just wrote a great piece about the NYT and the “Freemium” model.)

From Paul Carr’s TechCrunch piece on integrated advertising, especially on Twitter (the piece is wonderfully entitled NSFW: Give Me Ad-Free Conversation or Give Me Death (Please RT):

A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.

Couldn’t define the current and/or idealized nature of Twitter any better. As marketers (Carr: “What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.” So true) we are faced with a world where any traditional notion of advertising is easily avoided by all smart people and most not-so-smart. So we leverage ourselves into content and “conversations” because people like those. At which point, like an airborne contaminant, we risk ruining that content/conversation experience by rendering it no longer genuine (the word “authentic” is currently in my “social media cuss jar” via which folks in our meetings are fined for egregious buzzword use*).

One answer to this is to leave the conversations alone in order to maintain their authentic real and genuine nature, thus retaining what is currently a quite effective marketing tool.

Over/under on that happening? Thought so.

* Social media cuss jar is combined with Internet jargon cuss jar and includes such words and phrases as “100,000 foot level”, “drill down”, and the execrable “best practices”. You get the picture.

Just finished lunch with Marc Gobé, friend, mentor, and the man behind Emotional Branding (where I’m an advisor):
emotionalbranding.com
The topic of conversation was largely…conversations. The conversations brands have with their customers, the conversations customers have with and around brands, and how to aggregate the conversation in a way that makes sense. For instance, I’m working my way through and testing the available Twitter tools so that I can ask a question both here and on Twitter, and bring the various comments and discussions back here in one place, making the discussion more immediate and vibrant.

The conversation idea is of course not new. It’s the tools we have to engage it which are multiplying. But does every brand need a conversation? If I’m P&G and a majority of my brands improve various areas of the home experience, I’m going to build something successful like homemadesimple.com . This is an ongoing engagement with my customer and although my brands are present throughout, it’s not blatantly brandcentric nor intrusive, and in fact it’s possible to completely miss the branding (this is a good thing). So, P&G and Tide, Cascade, Dawn, Swiffer, Mr. Clean, Febreze, etcetera, definitely benefit from having this conversation and so do their consumers.

Marc and I wondered, though: does a company which makes, say, galvanized pipe for irrigation need a brand conversation? What attributes does pipe need to have besides being strong, not leaking,  and being well-priced in its market? It would seem ridiculous to have social actions for a pipe manufacturer, right? Well, yes, and no.
For the sake of galvanized pipe discussion, I looked at Morrill Industries . Turns out there are an awful lot of attributes to galvanized irrigation pipe, none of which are probably fascinating to brand people- but they definitely justify a conversation about “Couplers, Tees, Crosses, 90° Ells, 45° Ells, Hex Bushings, Bell Reducers, Reducing Tees, Street Ells……..” – in the right venue.
Facebook’s the wrong place for this, as is any broad-based social application which is difficult to shrink to a specialization- but an aggregated Twitter discussion group could definitely work. Morrill could have the only hex bushing for particular situations, and its audience would never know that if it were not engaged in the conversation. (I have absolutely no idea what a hex bushing is, btw.)

Moral of the story: yes, Dorothy, you can engage social media, but not in a paint-by-numbers way. Find the right destination; don’t just toss darts at Twitter and Flickr; and if what you do/sell is specialized, corral that community even if you do so within a larger social context .