11 September 2008 - 9:44Managing The Conversation — Start Here

The annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit has established a blog carnival, and one of the subjects they are asking people to react to is “Where Does Content Start Or Marketing Begin…And Vice Versa?”

At CreativeFeed we believe that successful digital marketing — like all marketing — must focus on connecting with consumers. It’s easy to create a buzz by just making a lot of noise with some oddball content, but buzz always dies down fast. Creating an ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between consumers and a brand is more of a challenge but infinitely more valuable.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and listening to this conversation is where marketing efforts/content creation should start. Companies should obviously pay attention to the blogs belonging to well-known influencers and the consumer review forums that pertain to the particular brand’s industry,plus check the chatter on Twitter and Technorati and subscribe to feeds from the meme aggregators like Reddit and Mixx as well as blog aggregator feeds focused on the brand’s target consumer groups. Listening to this conversation results in the kind of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain — a constantly evolving and highly accurate insight into why and how people are responding to the brand and its services.

You then join this conversation by creating content and marketing initiatives that acknowledge the existing conversation, share authentic points of view in a human voice, and ask people to share what they know by telling them what you want to learn.

Paying close attention to the ongoing conversation is invaluable, but don’t lose sight of the fact that a good digital marketing strategy is centered on managing the entire conversation about a brand in the marketplace not just the conversation between a brand and its consumers. A solid digital marketing plan should incorporate efforts to influence consumer-to-consumer venues, creating and distributing innovative content in appealing ways, search optimization and metrics analysis, developing events, working with the press and other influencers … all of the activities that lead to favorable opinions about a brand and pave the way to the campaign’s desired outcome.

And remember that great conversations, like great blogs, have to be fed often with new ideas. Companies should give their customers something to talk about, use what they know about their customers to create online/offline events that are interesting, provocative, or amusing and act as a conversation starter.

As an example, Google’s recent introduction of Chrome was promoted primarily through a digital comic book, exactly the right vehicle for the audience they needed to reach. Our recent campaign for Sonim Technologies rugged XP1 phone encouraged people to come up with odd ways to break the XP1 phone, a challenge that journalists, bloggers, and many other people happily accepted. It worked because it was big fun — who doesn’t want to beat up on a piece of technology every so often? — and because it reinforced the authentic value of the product, a phone that was carefully engineered to stand up to very hard use/severe environmental conditions.

The end results? Dozens of “torture test” videos and reviews, great word of mouth, Sonim has become the standard to beat in the ruggedized mobile phone world, and sales went from zero to $14 million in one year, the company s on track to triple their sales in 2008. That’s the power of listening and authentically responding to the conversation.