Journal: News & Comment

Live notes: Steve Rubel of MicroPersuasion at Gnomedex

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Steve asks the Gnomedex crowd, where should marketing be going?

• Works for one of the largest PR firms in the world.
• Marketing is moving into a conversation.
• How can marketers become more collaborative?
• Marketers and companies are nervous about giving up control.
• Becoming part of the conversation.
• The World is Flat: moving from command and control -> collaboration and connecting
• Darren Barefoot: if you're pitching to me, first demonstrate that you know who I am and what I'm interested in.
• If you're receiving pitches, call people out privately before you do it publicly on your own blog.
• Set up a survey that can go back to my blog, not a Word document I'm supposed to fill out.
• Boris Mann: product images, permalinks, and personality.
• Don't try to buzz market if you don't know what you're doing.
• Find passionate people.
• Everyone has built-in BS detectors, but many people working in marketing seem to suppress theirs. Get back in touch with your own.
• On the other hand, there are many, many, many people who don't want to participate and be part of the conversation.
• Don't just work on catalyzing participation: you want to find ways to communicate clearly.
• In this room people tend to think advertising is busted.
• So is PR, but what do we do?
• Advertising as a monolithic "department" *is* falling apart, but it is dispersing throughout organizations now too.
• Not everything that you're advertising is genuinely high interest for most people.
• Having the hosts do ads is great, but only a tiny proportion of brands are comfortable with that.
• Control is the universal language that marketers speak, and that's not changing very quickly.
• Improve the product, not the pitch.
• Darren: advertising your product is getting harder and harder—if your product sucks!
• Can we cross the us vs. them.
• Todd Cochrane works with a lot of marketers and sponsors. It's hard to get them to loosen up.
• The PR people want a canned message to come out. Let us talk about your products in a natural way.
• Werner: people are passionate about everything. And advertising is in my way.
• There are so many ways to be creative, don't get locked into AdSense and banner ads.
• Think about hacking marketing as a great way to get your message out. Make it exciting!
• Steve thinks character blogs suck. Scoble and most others (but not Tris) agree.
• In the end, you have to study and understand the community.

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