Two-Way Marketing

"Blogging is the best connection tool ever invented," says Steve Rubel (as quoted in Naked Conversations, p. 107.

Who is Steve Rubel? He is a senior marketing strategist and one of the top 100 bloggers in the world, according to Technorati. He is considered an expert on something called conversational marketing, a concept in marketing circles that is part of a general sea change from command-and-control to listen-and-participate marketing. In turn, many of his ideas come from something called the Church of the Customer. Even though the name is clearly a metaphor, the idea of marrying business evangelism and computer technology is a major plank in their platform and message.

It's all about "word of mouth, customer evangelism and citizen marketers." To put it differently, in the words of Shel Israel and Robert Scoble, it's about "two-way marketing" as opposed to "interruption marketing." Traditional marketing approaches assume that customers need to get one-way messages, either from press releases, web sites, or advertising on various media. The new marketing approach assumes customers are smarter than that. They want and need a two-way relationship with their suppliers. And blogs are the best technology ever invented to promote conversations with customers.

As of this week, Pano Cap has two internal bloggers - me, the techie, the IT Manager, the geek of the week; and the Operating Systems Manager, Jim Sinclair, currently on training on Enterprise IQ's quality module in California. Read us, comment on our blogs, link to us - get the conversation going!