Reaction to SXSW podcast

The SXSW podcast assignment discussed conversational marketing. It was moderated by Tony Conrad, and the guest panel included John Betell and Toni Schneider. They talked about why conversational marketing is important and how it is a good tool to manage your reputation online. The best ways to engage in conversational marketing was also a topic of discussion. One of the more interesting things that I learned from this podcast was how the interactive media has changed everything for marketers. Marketers are just now realizing how to manage the interactive media, because according to them, marketers have a tendency to be a little behind when it comes to adapting and coming up to speed on how to engage and utilize mediums. The main focus of this discussion panel was the importance of conversation between the consumers and the company. Conversational marketing is driven by 'conversation, not dictation.' It is important that the audience engages with each other and with the brand. The concept of conversational marketing is driven by the idea of dialog.
Another interesting thing that was mentioned in the podcast was the use of advertising in blogs. People are now starting to blog purely so they can put up ads and make money, which is taking away from the purpose of why blogs were created in the first place. Blogs were mentioned as an 'authentic and genuine' media, which is why it was appealing to so many people. For instance, Wordpress.com prevents people from using ads to make money in their blogs, even if they are getting a bunch of hits. In my opinion, it seem s understandable that if a person is getting a lot of visits on their blog, why would they not want to capitalize on it and make money. However, I also agree with Wordpress.com when they said that they are doing marketers a favor by not allowing them to control the ads on blogs because it is not always a cultural fit. In conversational marketing, it is important that marketers are invited into the dialog and that they don't just aggressively make their presence known.
Lastly, another interesting point mentioned is the use of blogvitorial (..not sure if that's how it is spelled). I never really knew that another way marketers and advertisers were contributing to conversational marketing is by contributing to the blog by actually writing one of the posts. The sponsor post is written by the advertisers and they pay to put their blog on the person's blog. I honestly did not really know that advertisers were doing this on blogs. I agree with the panel when they said that if advertisers are going to be doing this, then it is important that the same voice and tone is maintained.