Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Controlling the Conversation

Controlling the Conversation

A conversation isn’t a car—you can’t make it go in exactly the direction and exactly the pace you want. But if you’re a participant in a conversation, you do get to have some influence over where it goes. Similarly, businesses are less and less able to set their own lines of communication with stake holders—the people who use the products, invest, or work there. They can and should, however, be part of the conversation that’s taking place.

That’s why it’s interesting to read the discussion boards at the Flickr site today.

Flickr (yes, I’ve talked about Flickr before...) just sold themselves to Yahoo, and as you’d expect with any site so well-loved by its users, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how the site’s going to fare in the long term.

A user experience designer from Yahoo jumped into the main discussion and welcomed current Flickr to the company. The Flickr fanatics reacted in various ways, mostly disdainful, and then one of Flickr’s owners, Caterina, joined the flow of comments, saying

I haven’t met jkoshi and so I can say that he doesn’t have any real info on the direction of Flickr, and isn’t with the team we’ll be working with.

But I can assure you that there are no plans to add any more advertising than is currently found on Flickr free accounts, and certainly no pop-ups.

I invite everyone to quiet their fears and wait and see what we do. We are aware of potential pitfalls, and made sure in our talks with Yahoo that we clearly understood the direction they wanted to go, and that it was the same as the direction we saw.

And shortly thereafter, the conversations smooths out again. If your company doesn’t have the ability to jump in—when necessary—and affect the flow of a conversation, you’ll end up like Kryptonite locks...

Posted by Travis Smith on 03/21 at 08:54 PM • Blogs and Business