Here I am, sitting in on the “Markets and Conversations” track at Supernova. I really enjoyed the first session, with David Weinberger and Doc Searls moderated by Jerry Michalski. I’ll toss in a few of my notes and comments. These aren’t direct quotes, and mistakes are mine - sorry!

Dw: it’s hard for marketers to join conversations. They’ve been trained to talk a certain way. We’ve seen lots of wonderful corporate blogging of course. Engineers who naturally are more free do a better job of it than many marketers.
Doc: Although they’ve at times been stomped down when they’re honest.
DW: Marketers everywhere now want to “bring the conversation in”. When Sun starts automatically aggregating the existing blog posts, it’s great, but it’s different from the marketers joining. Really, Jonathan Schwartz is a great blogger.
Tom Mandel: a CEO blog is classic marketing, it’s not “joining the conversation”. Not that they’re not interesting or sincere… but this is a side effect, the point is it’s a show put on by the CEO.
Doc: So are you saying it’s “just a show”?
Tom: I don’t mean to minimize it, I’m saying it’s inevitably a show.
DW: He’s accepting comments, he’s responding… this is different from the “news from the CEO” memo put out by the PR office.
Doc: It sounds like Jonathan and it’s real. So it’s different. You recognize his voice.

IWH: I’m going to take a moment here, and this is my prerogative as a blogger, to editorialize about what I’m hearing here. I’ll put my own thoughts in italics. This conversation, to me, is really about getting back to basics because marketers have gotten so off track. If we hadn’t gotten ourselves into a situation where hired guns were speaking on behalf of the CEO and all corporate communications had to be pre-approved message soundbytes, we wouldn’t need to be getting out of the situation so desperately. This conversation is about saving marketing.

Jerry: So how has “markets are conversations”, your Cluetrain motto been misapplied?

Doc: People can take it too literally, thinking that it’s just about marketing, or just about talking. This is bigger than that. Companies exist at the grace of their employees now, more than ever before. Access to capital, international reach, having a loud voice, controlling the media – used to be really closely held. Now we have markets being allowed to be markets. People talk with people, and companies are sometimes in the middle of it.

DW: There’s the silliness where companies say “we’re all about user generated content”, we’ll pick the best ad for the superbowl… or candidates that use Youtube to announce their candidacy… it just can get silly, that’s all.

Audience (OK, this was me): Isn’t that too cynical? Some of these things can be good – the Dove Cream Oil user-generated ads show real women, real bodies – this is different, it’s valuable.

DW: That’s an example of one that’s not silly. Some are good, some are bad. That’s all.

Doc: What makes us valuable is what we know and what we could learn. What I know is who I am. Suddenly I thought differently about something… I can’t get rid of that new knowledge. This makes us human, how we’re enlarged by what others bring to us. The way we teach each other, the way we learn and enlarge ourselves… if we reduce everything to fixed commodities- I don’t like the term user-generated content – it’s so fixed. Now I’m going to “generate” a piece of “content”?

DW: I’ve ingrained the wrong routes in my brain by getting lost – because I’ve traveled the path before it looks familiar, so I take it again the next time. People can learn wrong as well as right.

Doc: I used to hate crm for what it tried to guess about what I might want to buy or do. Then I – we – realized, at the Berman Center, that the problem is that they bear the entire burden of the relationship with the company. Aside from giving them cash, what are we doing on our end to maintain that relationship? All surveys are wrong, they’re wrong by nature. “Why are you asking these questions? Here’s what I want to tell you.” If I’m making a tech support call, don’t try to market to me, that’s not why I’m calling. They promote a pay-per-view while I’m waiting for tech support? OK, these are global preferences they should have that would help my relationship with the company. But there are a zillion of these things. Can we create VRM systems – vendor relationship management – that bring some of what we want to them, so they can use it? What we really need is inter-relationship management.

Jerry: So what’s the next logical step?

Doc: This is an idea, I’m just starting a conversation. And it’s not even remotely just my idea. I just think people have so much to bring to the table, learn from each other. There are thousands of add-ons to every platform. Once you create the feedback mechanism that links you to your provider, just think of all the new ideas that could be looped in and capitalized on. It’s endless.

Doc – the Identity Movement was a corporate thing – and the user-centric identity movement grew up around it as a result of it. I want to tell the rental car company – that without telling them who I am, I’ll tell them what I want to rent, which clubs I’m in, and other key details.

DW – “Keep this information to yourself or I will not deal with you again” puts too much power to the vendor. If the marketplace were fair that problem wouldn’t arise – but if not… what if we put forward this identity system and either Amazon doesn’t play, or they say we’ll give you a 1% discount if you let us do stuff with your ID, and people will say yes to that.

Audience – Is tomorrow’s marketing – each customer has so many to vendors to choose from , that intermediaries are recuired to help choose – and they will pay for it?

Doc – yes – there will be a business in helping customers find vendors. It’s around advertisers – we’re so busy thinking “we have to get the right messages to the right people” – we need to move to the intention economy – people with money in hand wanting to buy something right now, who need help finding it.

DW – Review sites do that, some are fantastic. Finding travel destinations. There may be business plans that are created based on this.

IWH: Isn’t this just what travel agents are? So the problem is you can’t get an unbiased, honest recommendation. Which is why we’ve turned to each other as being more trustworthy. Again, it’s another way of saying, if this marketing thing weren’t broken, we wouldn’t have had to find a new way to fix it. If you could trust your travel agent, or your real estate agent, to give you what you really wanted – the best deal, and not what compensated them the most, then you wouldn’t have to go out and do it, buy it yourself. Having removed the integrity from the vendor recommendation process, they’ve lost their status. They may never be able to get it back because the vendor has so much more budget decisionmaking power than the individual.

Doc : I talked with someone the other day who said he wanted to own his customers. And I said what’s another word for owning someone? And he said ‘Oh my god, slavery!” And I said, ‘who wants to be a slave?’ So we have to build markets better around what the customer wants, with the information they want to provide. My wife asks – why can’t my shopping cart move side to side? It’s 2007 and we haven’t figured this out?

IWH: I’m going to step in again here and editorialize. The problem with this, though, may be that we as end users don’t cooperate. Something gets a little cheaper, we’ll buy that instead of the better thing. We don’t like to pay as much as we might have to for this stuff. And most of us will gladly trade our home address for a free package of jellybeans. We still buy something even after we’ve heard the radio announcer recommend it, even if we know he’s been paid to make that recommendation. So how can this concept of “principled buyership” work in concert with these “real life users” who might just be actively undermining the dream by not giving a hoot who has their information and what kind of advertising is done with it?

Audience – I have a visceral reaction to the notion of “managing a community”. I think companies should serve the customer. Salespeople don’t like the CRM, they’re getting judged on it, but it doesn’t reflect their real relationship with the customer, visible to both sides.

IWH: Hmm… the idea of a both-sides-visible CRM solution is an interesting one… companies should think about it more. The user can make changes to his or her own record as desired – sure people might delete some info the company wanted, but they are probably just as likely to add information the company would find useful. I really like the idea of a visible-by-both-sides V-CRM system.

Audience – Companies don’t always trust what people say, what they say is not always what they actually do. They say they’re faithful husbands but they’re out fooling around, or they say they’ll pay more for Green but in real life they really don’t. Harrah’s tracked every single thing the user did for their loyalty card, and therefore the marketing was based on everything they liked, and they blew out the competition in this way.

Doc: It’s inadequate from the customer side right now, it’s too heavily weighted toward the vendor. What can we do from out side of things to make things better?

Jerry: You will read research that says people don’t know enough about themselves, and they won’t make the right predictions and so forth. But once you get a real community together, with trust, and relationships, this changes. Natural markets form, word of mouth does its thing, you end up with a different kind of relationship. You won’t betray your customers. They know you. We’re human beings with lives, and patterns in our lives that aren’t always pretty. Important apps will rise out of the crowd.

DW: Well I really like Amazon. What kind of relationship do they have with me?

Audience – my travel agent once told me that she wasn’t worried about the Internet because she had close personal relationships with all of her customers. That was the last conversation we had [presumably this person stopped using a human travel agent] – there are some things that are more important than relationships.