I took the train for a trip to Paris just a couple of days ago. A few tie-wearing business persons were traveling to the same destination. Three of them spoke loud enough for me to hear their conversation, which was about the great opportunity blogs represent for business... That's when I thought about my early days of blogging; back then few of my contacts knew what a blog was and those who did thought it was an online personal diary for teenagers. And then I thought about top radio channels making their content available as podcasts. And about recent business contacts I got through this blog... How things are changing!
Blogs are great tools, not only for sharing thoughts as I do, but also for business communications. In fact one of my latest customers is in the field of buzz marketing and they do use blogs heavily. I will tell you more about it in the coming weeks.
A few weeks ago, I attended the very interesting presentation Culture Buzz gave to the Commerce Chamber of Luxembourg (see. http://www.cc.lu/index.php?type=art&id=596).
ReplyDeleteTheir presentation, which is available online, is pretty interesting (and joyfully colorful, you will like it ;-).
To my sense, viral/buzz marketing is a much welcome marketing strategy, as the gap between consumers and standard advertising campaigns was getting too blatently wide.
Nowadays, you feel ill at ease by commercials that blankly talk about "the product": they simply do not sound right anymore, as this little voice inside your head says "do they think I am a moron?".
Buzz marketing talks to everyone of us in a personalized manner but leaves a lot of margin of action and does not try to disable our decision power by training our brain in a Pavlovian way.
At the end of the day, one might argue that whatever the strategy is, it is all about selling and making money on the customers. But this would be a ridiculous simplification.
And we do not like simplification, do we?
David,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this great comment.
I certainly feel that practices like one-to-one marketing, word-of-mouth, viral communications and buzz marketing are great ways of empowering consumers. Some people call that guerilla marketing. I simply think it gives the power back to people, individuals who have a choice about the message they want to deliver. People with an opinion, not brainless cash cows as top media executives like TF1's CEO would like us to be (he said that his network's business was to sell brain-time to Coca-Cola... no comment).
So, you are right, no we don't like simplification. As Einstein said "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler". Traditional advertising and traditional marketing communications seek to make things much simpler than they ought to be. That is particularly true in politics and international relations, where the end result looks like Vietnam or Iraq-class disasters.
Have you read "La révolte du pronétariat"? Great book (post follows about it later today). I was lucky to meet the author and I think he has a point about the net empowering people.
And by the way, Culture Buzz is truly great. Expect a few posts about them in the coming days... I have come to meet them too recently ;)