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Yes, the Hardball host started a fundraising phenomenon in the 6th congressional district in Minnesota with his Oct. 17 MSNBC interview with incumbent Michele Bachmann. She called for a media investigation into members of congress to see which of them might be anti-American.

But, Chris, come on. Be a little generous to the internet effect. You implied on Monday night's show that it was entirely the power of your show that drove outraged viewers to contribute hundreds of thousands to Bachmann's opponent.

You did good, but what you did was to start a viral effect. Check out the blogs that helped spread the influence of your interview in the first few days. Factor in the rabid use among politics junkies of microblogging tools like Twitter that have replaced our RSS readers to pass around these blog and video links, and there you go.

A single interview in isolation would not have caused the Democratic National Committee to take notice of Elwyn Tinklenberg's campaign. Thank you for getting the snowball rolling, but individual contributions flooded in from the combined influence of your interview and the net effect. The DNC recognized the resultant phenomenon. There was a team at work here, and as quarterback it would be gracious of you to acknowledge the whole squad.

Elinor Mills on Cnet last week asked the question "Want to 'converse' with advertisers?."

No, not really. Anyway not the way they seem to want to do it.

She covered the Conversational Marketing Summit, and came away feeling wary of the whole deal.

I can't help but view conversational marketing as a thinly veiled attempt by the ad industry to insinuate itself into the popular social media craze. Calling it a "conversation" makes it sound benign and implies that it is consensual.

Yep yep yep.

Still, I do think there's a place for talking to customers that PR people don't get because they are stuck thinking in terms of image. I don't think people want to talk about a marketing slogan like Microsoft's and Federated Media's dumb "People Ready" campaign where they asked for reactions to top bloggers' takes on the slogan. That's pretty much having a conversation about nothing.

Online types do like to get into the nitty-gritty of products, and that makes you think the conversation might better be taking place in the customer service arena. Let people talk to product managers and developers and designers. Leave the PR types -- with their exclamation points and "lively language" and their messages -- right out of it.

Update
Bonus links: Doc Searls, a Cluetrain brother, brings the
marketing conversation topic up to date. Also check out this other great post from Doc on NYTimes Select, the Times' paywalled service that came down this week. He quotes from one of David Weinberger's chapters in The Cluetrain Manifesto. So amazing how well the ideas in that book have held up, but then when it came out it just felt so true, I'm not surprised it's endured.

I'd be curious to know what Steve Gillmor thinks of the Users Bill of Rights championed by Marc Canter and others.

Couple days ago, Dave Winer made friends with a bunch of women by saying he was tired of people talking about how their mother wouldn't understand something.

In Philadelphia (the movie), the Denzel Washington character said "Explain it to me like I'm a 4-year-old." That might be a substitute for using "your mother" as the lowest common denominator user.

Anyway, sometimes I think too much is made of dumbing things down. It may not be just women of a certain age who are not respected by some confident young purveyors of technology tools. If they're thinking "we have to make this idiot-proof," aren't they thinking that their audience is the hoi polloi, the great unwashed?

I've been around that attitude in companies and organizations, and it makes me uncomfortable to hear employees disrespecting customers -- the source of their income, and their ultimate boss. I worry that the attitude may subsciously creep into dealings with customers or tend to dictate disrespectful strategies in approaches to them.

People will rise to the level of expectations of them. You shouldn't drag the majority down to the level of the least aware. It's insulting.

Here's a post from almost a year ago that tells about dumbing down instructions on the web.

I'm not saying you shouldn't write carefully, and you shouldn't make things as clear as they can be. But too often you get one or two complaints and you are tempted to change things to make sure everybody gets it.

Take the person in the linked post who was all up in arms on receiving a mailing list subscription confirmation. She thought I was trying to trick her into buying a magazine subscription. In the end there were more than 2,000 people on that list of community planners of local National Safety Month events. I should use this one paranoid, irritated user as the model for dealing with all the others? I don't think so!

Hello? PodOmatic?

I must have given you my e-mail address at some point. I don't remember why or when. But here's the thing: you've been sending me too many e-mails lately and I'm getting close to directing your stuff into my spam folder.

Love,
Amyloo

I listened to part of the latest Gillmor Gang tonight, Identity Gang II.

If you have been slacking off on your GG listening, here's a tip: listen to the last third because the interesting stuff tends to emerge near the end as the commentary synthesizes.

Plus, the 'round-the-horn wrap-up is usually pretty good. (Do you think the term "around the horn" started with ships going around Cape Horn? And was it applied to baseball infield warmup throwing before it was applied to conversation? The baseball and conversation uses seem to go together, but sea travel doesn't fit.)

Nice that Steve is paying more attention to identifying speakers. I really appreciate that. Not so much with this particular gang, but some of the regular people sound a lot alike to me. Doc Searls did a nice job of moderating; Steve's voice is sick.

I don't quite get identity yet. I don't know enough to have an informed opinion, but are some aspects of it being made more complicated than they have to be?

P.S. Mary Hodder didn't get to talk enough.

You have to think that AOL, Audible and Google either don't have heavy hitters in PR -- or their bosses don't listen or don't know how listen to counsel.

Anybody know where PR is plopped down on the organization charts at these places? Sometimes if the function doesn't report directly to the CEO you get companies taking blunt-hammer old-school disrespectful stands like we've seen from AOL and Audible very recently. And from Google not too long ago when CNET was blacklisted in a fit of pique.

I worked in PR for a long time. In organizations when I could go rap on the president's door without an appointment, things always went better than they did at places where PR was too lowly, considered a bit of fluff, or tucked away under marketing.