"Your Self-Centeredness is Showing"

I don't know about you, but I'm finding myself getting increasingly tired (sometimes, even irritated) when I encounter one of the many "new marketing" buzzwords out there.

"Conversation" is one of those words; it's just starting to really bug me, and I'm not entirely sure why. It could be a combination of the self-righteous/pious way in which it is tossed around and the mostly rhetorical way in which it's used. But it might also have to do with my belief that, taken as a tactic, it's shallow and utterly meaningless. There have to be deeper motivations for a brand to mean it, conversation has to be baked into the DNA as Umair Haque puts it.

[I want to pull an excerpt from Brian Oberkirch on this subject. He knows what he's talking about, and he has a good way of putting things:

firms underestimate the deep changes in marketing and go for surface improvements.  What Foucault would call a discontinuity in the very mode of knowledge — there is a gap between marketing as we knew it and what we will come to practice.

So, we get ‘conversational marketing’ and other examples of what I call Advertising By Other Means.  Or you add a ’social media strategy’, a ‘facebook strategy’ or an iPhone app to the mix.  You spam people via bookmarking services.  Add them as ‘friends’ on their social networks.  Invite users to co-create ads.  [Note:  the only people who want to make ads are would-be ad people.  Please to stop with the DIY ad campaigns.  Your self-centeredness is showing.]  Such tactics are stop gap, incremental, often disengenious, and they fundamentally misunderstand the radical nature of the shift.

Comments

[Charles]

I had a chat with a bright girl from Glue Digital the other week. She said that clients were asking for a bit of twitter, a bit of web 2.0 and a bit of social media in the marketing plans as if they are a check list.

People need to know it takes time and not money to build community.

I'm using the dialogue word instead of conversation but even that isn't always right and I will no doubt tire of that soon.

[Mikej]

unfortunately... its what our industry does. It also annoys me. But I break through the pain with a game of Buzzword bingo

pick five buzz words. Then when all have been said in a meeting... scream bingo

helps the pain