It’s not Cluetrain’s fault. Misbegotten & generally borked offspring of Cluetrain, I’m looking at you.

And it’s not merely semantics. Yes, I’d love to do word games with you all during a long summer’s sundown, but this actually plays out in what we spend time & money on what we call marketing, how we measure progress, what sorts of tools we should build, and so on. I’m arguing that it actually matters. That conversational marketing is a red herring. I say this fully realizing I’ve been guilty of talking such a game.

But as I think on it, sometimes not having to talk to a company is exactly what I want. I’ll call you when I need you, and I when I need you, you should be there. Ready to receive the signal. Mostly I want as little friction between me & my goals as possible. Increased dicking around with a company might not help that. Maybe I already find the relationships I have a challenge; maybe I just want coffee. Or a new vacuum. Or to see if the Cubs are on. Let’s take Get Satisfaction. To me, the goal is to get me out of there as soon as possible. Give me a satisfying answer to my query and let me mosey on down the road. Building a set of friend connections, assuming routine visits, building around page views: all of these seem problematic for the mental model I’m bringing to this. Maybe I don’t want to talk about it; maybe I just want it to work.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this. Without specific context, talking about the value of conversation is meaningless. Engage me? Are you out of your mind? I want to engage my three kids in some playtime. You sell me stuff. Sometimes. When I feel like it.

& it could just be, as is with all periods of creation, that this is a moment of decadence in online marketing and the next turn of the screw will root out this baroque, extraneous set of contortions around conversation. Marketing should be dialogic. True dat. But the goal isn’t conversation. That’s just a way station en route to customers doing they thing. Maybe Doc’s VRM project is already working around this. Or you could talk about the gesture stuff, blah, blah, blah. All I know is, if you keep talking about conversations like they are the Cy Young award, I can’t listen anymore. Maybe it’s just me.

Update: Or maybe it’s not just me. Jeremy Toeman writes on much the same topic today.

Update to the update:  Ok, the ‘anti-conversation’ memetrain is moving.  Get on now, pilgrims.  Alex Hillman foams at the mouth.  Jeremiah Owyang posts his thoughts this morning.

Very much a work in progress, but I’m glad to be able to show you some recent thinking and get some response. Oh yeah, and I’m still going to blog a bit. Prepare yourself for thoughts that have been marinating for a while.

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I moderated the final panel at Graphing Social Patterns, East today.  David Recordon, Allen Hurff, Dave Morin, John McCrea, Chris Saad and Dave McClure.  This video is the panel answering my first question:  who is thinking about users when it comes to these issues?  

[Viewzi founder Brandon Cotter tells us the big idea.]

I stopped by the Dallas (okay, Richardson) HQ of Viewzi yesterday to take a look at the visual search service they’ve been working on for a year or so.  It’s purdy.  There are a couple of reasons I’m interested in following the project:  search is so vital to our Web experience that it’s good to keep trying to add to it; how can you create valuable experience layers atop open pools of data; how do you create revenue for niche services; and what can Stephen Anderson do with hyper-niched search contexts?

The idea is that Viewzi offers you multiple views of search data.  They’ll launch with 21 views.  What will be really interesting is when anyone can plug in a data source and composite their own view.  Both options are coming, and view creators will be able to share revenue.

Therein lies the rub.  This is boutique search.  As such, it can’t put Wal-Mart type of distribution & revenue strategies to work.  Just how good must the experience be to displace our entrenched search behaviors?  Just as Squidoo generated negligible (nil?) views/revenues for main street lens authors, Viewzi has to think hard about high-value context experiences.  More likely, I see this as a unique tool for corporate & other off the grid search tableau.  Searchme & Powerset are working on similar problems.

You can check out the demo today, and you should be able to trial the service Monday via Techcrunch.

I love ambient service design that unobtrusively adds to whatever I’m already doing.  And the real challenge when it comes to aggregating social contacts (as Tim O’Reilly noted at Social Foo) is in gathering up the people who aren’t already in one of your myriad online services.  The people who are in your phone, or your address book, maybe your calendar, your photographs.    

Apple has my address book.  Maybe my calendar.  My IM contacts.  Maybe my phone.  My iTunes habits. Access to my newsreader, whatever I use.  They can see my bookmarks.  My email.  My photos.  Maybe my TV habits if I have an AppleTV or have rigged up a Mini for home theater use.   Could Apple use .mac to do for contact lists, preferences and taste data what they did for seamless digital music management?  

It would take them getting serious about the Web and playing with other services, but I’d love to see them dust off an underused asset like .mac and put forth some ideas for a simple, pleasurable service that makes better use of all the social data I throw off in a day.  

I’ve been a big fan of Flickr video so far.  Simple video options like that, combined with Flip recorders, built-in Photo Booth, probably more video cameras in phones:  we’ll have lots of options for simple self-publishing.  Kind of what we see happening with tumblelogs & quick posting services like twitter/jaiku.  More, in this case, is good.  Whatever works for people to share & collaborate will help the network.

I’ve turned on Seesmic comments for this blog, as well.  So you can leave a video comment if you think that’s easier.  We’ll see how it goes. 

Subject to Change, by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schaeur, Todd Wilkens & David Verba.  As an unabashed AP fanboi, I’m looking forward to this one.

Buying In, by Rob Walker.  Murketing writ large.  I have a galley copy of this & I’ll try to write a review as I can.

Designing the Moment, by Robert Hoekman, Jr.  A follow up to his excellent Designing the Obvious.

Mental Models, by Indi Young.  With whom I have a great podcast about this very book, which I’ll try to actually publish in the sweet by & by.

Here Comes Everyone, by Clay Shirky.  You should read this, like now.  You can get a taste of it with this recent talk.

Designing for the Social Web, by Josh Porter.  I’m sure this will be fantastic.  Josh is one of the best at thinking through the complex issues of designing social elements.

Groundswell, by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff.  I’m totally over breathless writing about companies joining the conversation, but I keep seeing good reviews so I think I’ll check this one out.

You may also be interested in the book list Scott Dierdorf put together while at An Event Apart, New Orleans.

They want the awesome without the investment.  They show up after the lemonade is made but want no part of the lemons.  Let’s look at Facebook Beacon.  The social model is something like:  your friend bought a watch; would you like to buy a watch?  Such nuance.

They go right for the transaction.  It’s like:  Hi, there, I’m…hey, is that your hand in my pocket?

I think I speak for a lot of us when I say “Please get your hands out of our pockets.  We’ll call you when we need you.”

Unless you’re in it for the long haul, unless you really want to learn and get better and help, unless you have something to bring to the party, until you can think of something beyond your own enrichment, please pack up your little kit of ROI and go back to advertising.

That is all.

[For those wishing to take the advanced course, see Geertz & the story of Agassiz & the fish.]

Everything looks like the open social Web, but it’s run by Pod People.

Really. I read this post, and it’s like everything we’ve all been talking & dreaming about, but only in the hands of the majors. Like I keep rounding the bend and there’s the Statue of Liberty in disrepair. zOMG, it’s Earth!

Do I think the ‘you’re soaking in it’ vision of the social Web is dead on? Oh yeah. I like Charlie’s term for it: social dialtone. Instead of ‘it just works’, we’ll see apps that ‘just know’ who the relevant people might be for some action you want to take. But, as for incumbents being the one to deliver this jetpack future to us, I’d say that’s a feature best directed by Ed Wood. How long has AOL sat on the biggest stack of presence accounts on the planet? How’s that working out? How’s that goldmine of emails helping Y! keep up with the GOOG? Surely, lashing a bunch of these firms together is going to produce some real innovation. Katie bar the door. They are going to drink our milkshake.

Call me crazy. I like our chances.

N.B. Anyone really, seriously, like not screwing around and calling something Web x.o, c’mon. You could have Jesus in a Can, and I wouldn’t be able to hear you. Also, special mention to Dave for dropping ‘nigga please’ into this wonkfest of a post. Among stuff white people like is looping in some kind of neckbone lingo into otherwise dry discourse. Kills em everytime.

In my first post there, I start to talk about what I think works, and why I think terms like ‘data portability’ don’t help us get there.

So huzzah for yesterday’s ray of light:  Muxtape.  Jason & Scott wrote about the power of its simplicity.  I’ll tell you this:  if you want to see how people are starved for joy, watch Muxtape spread on yesterday’s twitternets.  Matt talks about being user #1 for your idea:  that you should be giddy like a school girl over what you’re doing, else, how will anyone else be? A close second has to be watching the faces of those playing with what you make.

Muxtape is fun.  Don’t pester me with business model questions or remind me that they have some fine print issues to clarify.  If you can’t learn from Muxtape or Line Rider (start with a simple idea that appeals to *emotions*; make it easy to get to the fun; make it simple to share) you should go sell insurance.  In fact, if you feel yourself going wayward, ask What Would Amit Do?  Because if you stay firmly in the Amit Gupta School of Happiness Creation, you’ll be a-ok.

I made a wiki for everyone to list their muxtapes.  I already have several new bands to follow as a result.  Make your own joyful noise here.

New York

Director of Brand Management

Position Summary:

This position is responsible for managing the marketing and design teams. The Director of Brand Management will collaborate with leaders from the editorial, business development, and technology departments and oversee all extensions of The Onion brand as well as marketing partnerships for all Onion media—online, video and print. The DBM will report to the company President.

Responsibilities:

• Responsibility for web and print audience growth.

• Day-to-Day managing the marketing and design teams.

• Manage project managers, ensuring projects are brought in on deadline.

• Supporting national sales in developing programs, pricing, and custom advertising packages.

• Support product development, business development and partnership efforts.

• Educating and training sales force about the key features of new products.

• Oversee the coordination of local marketing and promotions within our network of locally distributed newspapers.

• Develop a communication strategy and managing all PR efforts.

• Work with team to develop all marketing collateral including media kits, powerpoints, brochures, sales materials, and promotional videos.

Attributes/Experience:

• Strong management skills, both project management and people management.

• Strong sense of urgency for reaching deadlines and goals and seeing complex projects through to completion.

• Ability to build and leverage relationships across organizational boundaries.

• Ability to turn strategic goals into detailed and actionable plans.

• Superior communication skills, including proven success delivering presentations to senior leaders, group sales presentations, and strong written communication.

• Strong understanding of The Onion and AV Club brands.

• Online marketing experience.

• Understanding of the design process.

Great fit for someone with ad agency experience on the account side. Reaching deadlines, managing design and editorial deliverables, goal-oriented.

Not too long after he wrote that post, Newsgator made all their consumer client apps free.   Hey, this merits a closer look:  the early mover in RSS, which had spent time & money acquiring the very best desktop clients (NNW forevah), decided to give them away.  Whaa?  You could say, sure, Google Reader is getting traction & they need to do something about that.  Or, more likely, they realized the tremendous opportunity cost of charging a minimal amount for software and dampening the total number of users and data flow that might run through their systems.  Absolute dollars aside, it also hampers listening to the edge and finding new opportunities for value.  The ‘pay me for this software license’ approach was deeply limiting for Newsgator’s creative potential.  I’m guessing.

Or, let’s look at Webkinz.  You buy a stuffed animal for anywhere from $8 to $14 or so, and you get a ‘free’ Web service with an avatar of that little critter.  You can add up to 10 Webkinz on this account.  So far, my family has spent about $80 on this free Web service.  And no one would think twice about doing something they do routinely:  buy stuffed animals for the kids.  Genius.  (Check out Mike Kuniavsky’s discussion of Webkinz as a form of information shadow.)

This is creative marketing that has nothing to do with messaging.  (Which, again, is why the ruse about marketing being only necessary for unremarkable companies is annoying to me.)  A lot of the creative firepower now trained on incremental feature tweaking needs to go into rethinking how you create & extract value in a world of interlinked services where better experiences win.  It’s coming.  Start thinking.

Take this excellent piece by Simon Phipps, on what he calls ‘the adoption-led market’.  (hat tip: Michael Sippey) Phipps:

In this approach, developers select from available Free software and try the software that fits best in their proposed application. They develop prototypes, switch packages as they find benefits and problems and finally create a deployable solution to their business problem. At that final point, assuming the application is sufficiently critical to the business to make it worthwhile to do so, they seek out vendors to provide support, services (like defect resolution) and more. Adoption-led users are not all customers; they only become so when they find a vendor with value to offer.

Even more interesting are the consequences of this model, which, as Simon notes, impact how you staff, set up your products, price, etc.

Though you can’t tell from the current discussion, the reason WordPress is eating Moveable Type’s lunch isn’t because of some geeky feature differences.  At a critical time in the category lifecycle, they chose a more efficient, more plastic mode of creating, extending and distributing blogging software.   Any momentary product parity from Six Apart is going to be rapidly undone.  I think you’ll see 6A churn off all the consumer-facing businesses, and some large enterprise software shop will absorb the platform.  That well-earned enterprise success may be more durable.  Probably still a great result for founders & investors, but the loss of MT market dominance is not merely because of product failures.

Let’s look at another service.  WordPress.com is creating value Google-style.  While there are millions of free blogs hosted there, tons of traffic making it one of the top sites on the Web, Automattic continues to leave money on the table while they think it through.  They charge a bit for a la carte things like domain mapping or custom CSS.  They are doing select experimentation with ads.  Meanwhile, the network keeps growing and accruing potential energy.  They are learning a ton about how people actually use the system.  And they are slowly adding to their team to deal with the growth.  At any point, they could turn on dumb revenue streams and start to gin real money, but I think they’ll hold off till they think they’ve got it right.  That’s why they got a big round of funding even though it feels like blogging tools are played out.   I should probably write a whole post about Akismet, a service which doesn’t get nearly enough attention.  Other firms, having developed the best spam blocking system out there, would be screaming from the roof tops and taking g-string tips from every user to pay for this remarkable service.  Instead, commercial licenses make a bit of money while ‘free’ use from rank & file bloggers makes the system exponentially more valuable.  Again, the technology is great, but the business model keeps it viable and creates potential value.  Sphere is doing the same thing.

You can look at the list of business models I made some time back.  Or, I encourage you to check out Chris Anderson’s post about creative media business models, as well as Fred Wilson’s follow up post.

I’ll continue to work on this as I give it a few more times, and when they are ready, I’ll post the slides.  For now, I’ll note that I talked a good deal about some of the brands I think exemplify successful unmarketing:  Firefox, Jones Soda, Skype, Threadless, Etsy, Method, Feedburner, Flickr, Twitter.

I also made a list, not of principles so much, but theses that I think pertain.  They included:

Serve communities, don’t build them.

Find existing groups and add value to what they are trying to do.  Participate.  Host, if you must, but I bet groups are already helping themselves.

Always be opening.

Instead of focusing on closing, marketing should be opening things up.  Dialogue, new angles for exploration, new potential meanings within a brand.  Keep an eye out for mods.

Organic, not viral.

Totally biting Kevin Marks’ style here.  It’s true, though. Stop emailing us asking for a viral video.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Instead of brand meaning one thing (whether you call it a promise, an essence, positioning, etc.), let the market define the brand with as many relevant facets as possible.

Close the gap.

Marketing will become the shared process of creating awesomeness.  Get the users and makers of the service or product together.  That’s your new gig.

Be quiet.  Listen.  Ask.

Likewise, shelve the impulse to be the one with the clever lines & arresting images.  You’re a brand ethnographer now.  Your field notes contain the seeds of strategies.

It’s in there.  (product as marketing)

As with closing the gap, bake your marketing into the experience of the product, not in discussions of it.

Who are you? What motivates you?  (vs. what are you saying?)

You can’t hide.  If, as Renny says, brands will continue to be a lighthouse, people will trust you by who they think you are.  What you stand for.  It will easier all the while to see if what you are saying stacks up or not.  DNA vs. creative.

Little things are huge.

What happens when we’re all connected?  Good service (and bad) goes round the world.  Leave instances of awesomeness in your wake.

Be like the network, with intelligence at the edge.

Ok, this is geeky, but still true.  & hard to pull off, I know.  But your brand mavens have to be at the edge, in contact and able to mod the brand moments on the fly.  It won’t look glamorous, but it will make all the difference.  What Mike Manuel calls being the community janitor is probably not too far off.  You know it’s all about homework and showing up, right?

The clear impression I had from Social Foo was: social interop is on the way & I hope we’re actually ready for what we said we wanted. It’s been clear to me that the obstacles were not technological, but involved questions of business value, user expectations, and organizational priorities. After listening to everyone, I think prioritization is maybe the main obstacle. They have so many issues to deal with, it’s harder to prioritize something as nebulous with as many open questions as social network interop. Let’s not assign motives or assume intransigence. Sometimes people just have trouble getting to these issues, however burning we find them.

But it’s happening, probably faster than we might have thought. The day the camp started, Google released the Social Graph API, which indexes explicit contacts (stated via XFN, FOAF and actually some other systemic cues) on the open Web and then makes those available for query. So a lot of the discussion was less ‘how do we pull this off’ and more ’so, when we do this, what are the implications?’

Quick hits:

• Almost every conversation, at some point, went to privacy issues and building systems in non-creepy ways
• User expectations are the blind spot & we have tons of work to do in this area
• Jabber, jabber, jabber
• Overnight, Ralph & Blaine built a Jabber bridge between Jaiku & Twitter, allowing tweets to show up instantly within in a Jaiku stream. No polling.
• Email addresses as IDs shouldn’t be assumed, or should at least offer an opt out. Linking you to your email allows us to thread a common portrait of you across services which you might not dig. (Think Rapleaf.) Indeed, as soon as Joseph Smarr started to play with the Social Graph API, he found a ’secret’ account Brad Fitzpatrick had on Twitter because of an email linkage. If the creator of the spec has to deal with unintended consquences, it would seem that non technical mortals will have issues.
• Niall demoing this browser history sniffing javascript voodoo.
• Face to face evangelism & discussion matters. More gets done, quicker, with less noise. I don’t know for sure, but perhaps Jeremy Keith’s session on Password Antipatterns helped speed up Dewitt’s team working on & releasing the Google Contacts API.
• Evangelizing this stuff is complex & is going to take time. More on this later.

Other notes from the camp I’d recommend:

Kellen Elliott-McCrea

FactoryJoe

Dare Obasanjo

Brad Fitzpatrick

Joseph Smarr talking about friends list portability

Citizen Garden podcast review with Larry Halff, Chris Messina & Matt Biddulph

Co-organizer Scott Kveton

Big ups to David Recordon, Scott Kveton & O’Reilly for getting all these social nerds together for a rainy weekend.