Who is TDavid and why do we care what he thinks?

The American Marketing Association has now offered a complimentary pass for its upcoming blogs-and-marketing day to TDavid, the blogger who ruthlessly critiqued next week’s event.

But a friend of mine thinks this is overkill. He writes: “Who is [TDavid], anyway? Anyone know him?… Is he really anyone who’s opinion we even need to worry about?”

Here’s my answer.

TDavid is a blogger. He’s an opinionated, obsessive, savvy geek with a megaphone who can, with a few perceptive comments and just one or two readers who also blog, ruin your reputation in 15 minutes.

While TDavid may not know anyone in New York or Chicago marketing circles, he’s woven into the fabric of the locale, Seattle, the AMA is trying to sell to. He’s got local readers and friends. And TDavid goes to blogger Meetups in Seattle. Let’s assume he said something about the AMA event if he chatted with the Seattle Times journalist or any of the 30-40 bloggers who attended last night’s Seattle blog Meetup.

There’s risk but also reward in doing business in a blogged economy. Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post yesterday about how a Microsoft team is using blogger feedback to shape product development: “How did they decide what to fix? They did a scan of all the blog comments and picked the most important things that the bloggers asked for (that could be done quickly).” Product development has never been so easy.

Back to TDavid, who has also reviewed Tablet PCs, AskJeeves, MSNToolbar, Onstar, Saturn Relay in the last week. He’s gone out of his way to provide feedback on the AMA’s offer. Until the AMA is swamped with other feedback on the upcoming event, TDavid is worth his weight in gold.

The future of marketing is engaging rather than ignoring bloggers like TDavid. For the AMA’s Seattle blog-day, TDavid would be a perfect guest star.

For some background, here’s my post yesterday. (I’ve got a personal interest because I’m participating in the Chicago day.) BTW, I’m loving this chance to re-grok Cluetrain.