“Markets are Conversations”

Unny Radhakrishnan, Director, Maxus Interaction
Have you heard of Social Technographics? Social what? Or have you read the research paper ‘Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness of the Economic Performance of the Organizations: The Social Network effect’. Huh! I still haven’t understood the title itself. But then if you are in the online marketing profession, all these will catch up with you soon.

It was in 1999 or 2000 that the Cluetrain Manifesto was published. Initially, it was cluetrain.com, a collection of ideas put together on a website about the way internet is changing the markets. The book, ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ was later published as a sequel to the website and turned out to be an instant hit, topping the charts for a long time.

I came across the manifesto in 2003. Just before taking up my new job with an online media/marketing agency, I asked my then would-be boss on whether I should do some reading up, since I was getting into a new role. He gave me a copy of this book and said that would suffice. (I am itching to say ‘the rest is history’).

Written in a tongue-in-cheek, humorous and delightful style, it is hugely entertaining (the preface asks ‘when was the last time you laughed aloud reading a business book’), but at the same time make many marketing professionals squirm in their chairs.

Sample some here:
If language is a living organism, TechnoLatin words are like those pod people in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They look real, but they are not. And like the pod people, TechnoLatin has become the norm. Clarity is the exception when it should be the rule. Today we no longer make chips, circuit boards, computers, monitors, or printers. We don’t even make products. Instead we make solutions, a fatuous noun further bloated by empty modifiers such as total, full, seamless, industry standard, and state-of-the-art.

Equally vague and common are platform, open, environment, and support when used as a verb. A veterinarian using TechnoLatin might say that a dog serves as a platform for sniffing, is an open environment for fleas, and that it supports barking.

In short, this brilliant book tells the story of how markets changed from real human conversations to the ‘business-as-usual’ where everyone is demographics, eyeballs, abstractions or statistical aggregates. And now finally, with internet and new technologies, how everything is changing once again, and how the customer is having the last laugh. An eye opener for me was the phrase ‘Markets are conversations’.

Much bits and bytes have flown through the wires since then. (In the industrial era, this phrase read as “much water has flown under the bridge”). New fads and jargons came. Some remained, while some died.

The conversations have now been baptized and given a new name: Social Media. And the new battle is Social Media marketing. Predictably we have a new series of jargons, definitions, terms, and then of course, the consultants.

Just as we thought that we have learned something – that markets are not about xxxgraphics (demo-,psycho- etc.), here are some things you need to brace up with. ‘Social Technographics’ from Forrester research will tell you what kind of social animal are you (or your customer) online. In this new social ladder, one can be slotted anywhere between a ‘creator’ at the top (wow!) and an ‘inactive listener’ at the bottom, which your father certainly will not be very proud of. (especially in this ‘Chak De Bacche’ season). What will you do with this data? One more slide in our PPTs. Someone commented on a popular blog about this research report – “Gosh! You'd almost think they were selling dot-com-2.0 snake oil in an opaque bottle”

Then there is something called ‘Community Analytics*’. Earlier we have heard of Marketing Analytics, which typically tells a bank that there is 58.23% chance of a customer applying for a personal loan before his second wedding anniversary and that an offer like a free vacation to the moon has the highest propensity of generating response.

And yes, there is Web Analytics, “which gives a wealth of information like comprehensive cross channel view of your customers’ behaviour, preferences and motivation and evaluate your ability to build and maintain sustainable relationships while keeping an eye of powerful attributes like customer life-time value, channel loyalty and ROI”. Life was certainly a lot easier earlier.

And now Community Analytics will help you identify communities, influencers, laggards with the help of complex mathematical models. No sarcasm intended. All these are powered and driven by well-meant intellectuals. Wonder what is next!

Meanwhile, some of us are trying to ‘engineer’ some conversations. We air drop some characters or sometimes ourselves into these conversations and talk how great that product or this service. Maybe it is working now. Isn’t it only a matter of time before genuine people start recognizing these engineered conversations? Perhaps yes.

Getting into the honest conversations in the market and ‘marketing’ is a genuine challenge. The ‘why and how’ of social media marketing is still debatable. Till then we continue to believe that we are ‘innovating’, ‘disrupting’ and in the bargain, hopefully a little bit of learning as well.

If you have not read the book ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ the complete version is available at http://www.cluetrain.com. After a hard day at work, it is worth it.

*Community Analytics is a name of an organization.