AMAZON'S WERNER VOGELS STUNS ROBERT SCOBEL AND SHEL ISRAEL WITH A CRITICAL VOICE.
My "new" marketing friends have this little tactic they deploy when you disagree with them. It's called "YDGI" - which stands for You Don't Get it. So if you challenge them to explain one of their new fangled notions with clarity and facts, they get all drama queen on you and accuse you of not "getting it" as in YOU DON"T GET IT.
Seems as if Werner Vogels the Chief Technology Officer at Amazon got into one of these little tussles with Robert Scoble and Shel Israel the authors of Naked Conversations. Werner is the host of a get together at Amazon called Fishbowl Series where they invite in authors to talk about their books. This is how Werner sets up the little dust-up:
Today Shel Israel and Robert Scoble stopped by at Amazon to present their book Naked Conversations in our Fishbowl series. As you can read in Shel's observations and Robert’s they appear shocked that we used a critical voice to address their work. Welcome to life at Amazon, we set a very high bar for our own works and we expect anyone that comes to sell us an approach to actually be prepared to really defend their ideas.
What got Scoble and Israel's little pink panties in a knot was Werner wanting them to:
"...abandon their fuzzy group hug approach, and counter me with hard arguments why they were right and I was wrong."
I keep asking the "new" marketing folks for solid case studies showing the before, during and after affects of really putting the customer in control. I keep getting examples of stupid pet tricks like cute videos made by customers or malcontent employee bloggers ripping their own companies. But no case studies of real results. Maybe it's because "real" marketing managers (as opposed to new or old) don't get it either.
Updates:
Nicholas Carr weighs in (make sure to read the comments):
James Cherkoff provides a timely demonstration of a YDGI battle with yours truly.
Robert Scoble has a rational response - make sure to read the comments too.
Learn how to wage and win battles for market share. Download the free PDF preview of the Art of Attack. Just click to get the PDF. There are no forms to fill out, you don’t need to leave your email address. No annoying questions to answer. Just click and get your PDF.
Those two doofi ( that IS the singular of doofuses, isn't it ) really lead the way in the race to see who can say YDGI the most, the quickest and loudest.
The new marketer really JDFK (* see below ) what they're talking about, in a lot of cases. They think their opinion is fact. To their little minds, there's no reason for people to not bow down to their migntyness.
A LOT of bloggers don't understand this one thing....it's just a blog and you're just a blogger. Nothing more, nothing less. There's still about 500 times more people that haven't ever read your blog and they live in the offline world and want some real tangible proof and results...not your whinyass opinion !
Sorry to rant....come see us !
* BTW , JDFK = Just Doesn't Freakin' Know
Posted by: Mike Sigers | 31 March 2006 at 05:16 AM
Interesting. I think one can in fact use blogging as an ROI-friendly component to the marketing mix. However, one needs to understand exactly how the customer buys and construct a sales and marketing process that fits hand-in-glove with that.
That's where most marketers fail with blogging. But that's where they fail with everything.
Posted by: Marketing Headhunter | 31 March 2006 at 08:09 PM
Mmmmm, you chaps are sounding very angry...but maybe that's the military coming out in you.
I think I understand your position and we can probably have an interesting debate about command-and-control. I hope you don't mind a bit of teasing along the way....I don't!
I think there are shedloads of examples of companies putting their audiences in control to very good effect including wikipedia, ebay, google, channel 9 at microsoft, red bull, boeing, adidas, converse....and all the details are on my blog. Obviously it's a new approach so there isn't as much hard data as there is in more traditional techniques. But that is starting to come along too such as from GE whose http://imaginationcubed.com campaign produced the following results....
Drawings: over 3,151,00
Global Appeal: sessions have taken place in 201 different countries
Most Popular, By Geography: U.S. (747,000+ sessions), Canada (443,000+),
India (382,000+), United Kingdom (338,000+), Australia (218,000+)
Viral: over 171,000 invitations sent via email – 88% open/response rate from friends who received emails/invitations
But if you aren't interested in new techniques and think people like Scoble etc are basically talking nonsense, you can always just ignore them....
Posted by: James Cherkoff | 01 April 2006 at 01:09 AM
The plural of "doofus" is "doofera". Know your Latin.
Posted by: yclipse | 01 April 2006 at 01:59 PM