_This article is by Guest Contributor Kate Trgovac, reporting from the “BlogOn”:http://www.blogonevent.com/blogon2005 conference._
Heralding the call of the “Cluetrain Manifesto”:http://www.cluetrain.com/, this panel promised a discussion on becoming a smart voice in the market place and engaging your customers in a conversation. Moderated by Steve Rubel, VP at CooperKatz and author of the “Micropersuasion blog”:http://www.micropersuasion.com.
Steve started the conversation with the recent incident of “FedEx Furniture”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedex_Furniture — an individual who created furniture for his apartment from any used FedEx boxes he could find.
He then posted pictures of them on a site. Predictably, FedEx’s lawyers sent him a cease and desist letter. Which he posted on his site. He finally ended up being interviewed on NBC’s Today Show. And FedEx received more negative publicity than if they had just left it alone, or, gave him a few boxes.
Rubel asked the panel, “if markets are conversations (and really, as the example above shows, conversations are markets), what has substantially changed for marketers?”
One Degree Posts
Critical Mass was named by Forrester as the leading web development agency in North America for the second year in a row. I asked for comments on the win from SVP of Strategy, Neil Clemmons.
One Degree: Congratulations on the win! Marketing Magazine quoted Forrester’s Harley Manning, VP of customer experience research, describing Critical Mass as “a throwback to the early days of the Web. The agency exudes earnest excitement about crafting sites that maximize the potential of this still-young medium.” How do you keep up and grow that enthusiasm?
My ever-trustworthy Snake Oil Detector registered a big one last week after I was approached by an online retailer with questions about search engine optimization (SEO).
Turns out they’d recently launched their Website and were shopping around for some much needed SEO help. They had been speaking with another firm that purported to do SEO work, and they were a bit suspicious of what they heard. Turns out they had every right to be.
When I did a bit of digging, I uncovered one of the most egregious scams I’ve come across in a while.