Conversational Media Marketing

I had the best time presenting my talk, Top 10 Strategic Marketing Benefits to Using a Blog, to the AdFed group in Lake Charles, LA today. They were gracious hosts who fed me well, then proceeded to listen and subsequently express appreciation for my presentation. It can't get better than that!

I especially want to thank Oran Parker from the O'Carroll Group, a local advertising agency, who extended the invitation. I took some video of Oren and I, but for some reason, it didn't save...or something.

At the very least, I uploaded the PPT to Slideshare so that the participants could download it. (Of course, anyone is welcome to.)

Lastly, I did invite them to leave a comment regarding the presentation... good, bad or indifferent, I'll take all comers. So, if any of them take me up on my offer, you'll know when I know.

UPDATE: See part II of this series: Thoughts from LinkedIn respondents.

The other day I blogged about Spoke.com, a company that even they admit has received its share of negative attention on the web.

Which brings up the question... How does a company go about changing perceptions and protecting its brand?

Though companies like Dell and Facebook have done a reasonably good job of turning things around (and I think you'd agree they had quite a number of rotten eggs thrown at them by consumers), many companies have yet to find the secret sauce.

The entire blogosphere it seems has been standing at rapt attention waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to come down out of his lofty ivory tower (or Ivy League tower) and apologize for screwing things up.

Now, he has.

It seems everyone is taking "pokes" at Facebook nowadays, including me. Not that it's undeserved considering the panoply of missteps lately. In case you're interested in following the meme, here are some links to leading voices:

• More Facebook Advertisers Bail from Beacon... (TechCrunch)
• Where the hell is Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook? Robert Scoble)
• Facebook is a Beacon for Bad PR (PR 2.0)
• A Morning Lecture at Berkeley: Facebook, Time to Find the Value for the Individual (John Battelle's Searchblog)
• Do You Have a Facebook Account? (Conversation Agent)

It's hard for me to see how Facebook is going to recover from the maelstrom of criticism its receiving for unsavory privacy practices. And, yet, still the venture capital flows in.

I hate writing press releases. I'm terrible at putting words in someone else's mouth (my term for the task of creating quotes someone else supposedly said, usually the CEO) and equally as bad writing in classic press release style.

Frankly, in this age of conversational media, I don't see that they have much relevance. I mean, if I can reach consumers directly using, say, a blog, why should I have to write something expressly targeting the media? After all, journalists reference blogs as source material anyway.

Can you tell I'm not a PR guy? Tho't so.