Conversation is the new Marketing
Conversation is the new marketing. This is gospel to us. But how did we get here? What eroded the might and credibility of conventional marketing?
It’s no secret that conventional marketing is in trouble. It deserves to be. After all, it’s about smoke; it was about the myth of the perfect product, the perfect experience–the apotheosis of duplicitous lifestyle marketing. Well into the second decade of the web era, it’s being called out for what it always was: a sham. 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all display ad clicks. The other 92% is bored and still waiting to be persuaded.
Old paradigms shattered. In the formative years of the web economy, marketers tried to impose the old order on us. They used their websites as display channels, whereby they could talk AT their consumers. But something else was percolating: the emergence of the trust economy. The idea that people could talk amongst themselves online, that they could share stories, reviews, advice, conversation threads. In the coming together of the people on the social web, corporate websites became secondary channels for brand chatter. Facebook absorbs 8 Billion minutes of total usage time per day. That’s just under 1% of total human attention. What chunk of total human attention do you think corporate websites have?
This is why a new mode of marketing has emerged, a participatory mode, where brands can talk WITH consumers instead of AT them. Conversational marketing deconstructs marketing and takes it back to its roots. It restores the sacred trust between buyer and seller–an unspoken compact that used to govern human relations before the industrial revolution. Connecting people is the most critical function of marketing, even more important than collecting data.
Great sites don’t pay for traffic, they earn it. They earn it by being real, vulnerable, authentic. They earn it by replacing broadcast with dialogue. The conversational marketer doesn’t spin, doesn’t reposition, doesn’t do damage control. She’s okay with tweeting at a disgruntled customer, publicly acknowledging a product defect, and vowing to make things better. In short, the conversational marketer has forsworn lying.
We see the new conversational brands; it’s easy to recognize them. They are the ones that are redefining what it means to market products and services in the age of digital conversation.
Jonathan Levitt
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