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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.

Tara Hunt got some serious pushback on her new Pinko Marketing idea.

I get and admire what seems to be a desire to be constructively outrageous and "out there." But, like Jeneane Sessum, I struggle to persuade mainstream business types to look past the countercultural tone of Cluetrain, or I try to help them tune into it. Tara's hook makes my work harder, so I'm glad she is rethinking, listening to her readers, and so willing to walk her talk on the community invovlement stuff.

At the same time I don't like to see bubbles burst. And I really don't like to see "out there" concepts watered down. Sometimes it's better to start from scratch with a new rallying point.

This concept certainly is provocative and attention-getting. Something about it is a little off the mark, though. I can't quite put my finger on it. I'm thinking the same spirit that made Cluetrain authentic, because it was written by people who really did the sixties, can't as authentically be picked up by someone who buys in but didn't live it?

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