Events

Triangle bloggers get together.

Malcolm Gladwell in Durham on Feb. 24.

Pete Lerma highlights the “horizontal” rather than top down potential of blog advertising: “It seems there’s an incredible synergy that could be realized between viral marketing and online media. Given the right campaign and the right audience, media can be a tremendous tool to help get the viral ball rolling, and viral marketing techniques can be used to extend the life of online media campaigns.”

To the degree that most advertising is still, like the publishing model it evolved with, top down, marketers who look for opportunities to converse with humans rather than “message to audiences” will have a big advantage. As Cluetrain put it:

“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.”