I have to say I’ve been disappointed with the way the Republican presidential candidates have been handling the YouTube/CNN debate. When I first heard that only Ron Paul and John McCain were committed to appearing and how Romney wasn’t gonna answer no questions from no damn snowman, I immediately thought of Henry Jenkins.

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So I was waiting for this massive file copy to complete (I’m actually still waiting) and for the hell of it, I google “marketing blog”. Which, well, I just laughed in spite of myself (I’m actually still laughing). (I’ve now stoped laughing.) The first result is this: Shotgun Marketing BLOG.
Now let me just say that there are other bloggers I enjoy whom hail from generally the same geography as the author of Shotgun Marketing, Chris Houchens and so I was curious. Standard blogger template blog. Smattering of comments here and there.
But pow, the second post from the top struck me as perfect. Granted, this is no representative sample he’s talking about (18 people) but there is definitely a rat race of memetic novelty that happens among the wired crowd.
I doesn’t surprise me in the least that it takes a Kentucky blog to point that out. Good on you, Chris. I’m starting to think there needs to be a media vehicle dedicated to marketing from the midwestern/southen perspective. Just to hijack the point of his post and expand it, I think it’s interesting that those who presume to speak for what the futures should look like are largely from the coasts, and those for whom such futures are intended are everywhere. Hell, I’m even being (consiously) US-centric in this post.

John Hagel is giving rhetorical form to what I think are the most important issues at the confluence of business, economics, marketing and even epistemology. His “Unanswered Questions at Supernova 2007” post from a month ago is still consuming my thoughts even when I’m trying to do other things, like eat and sleep.

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Here’s a recent McKinsey report on Web 2.0 in business. The highlight for me was that 42% of respondents said that they, “Invested at the right time but should have more in our companies internal capabilites,” and 24% said that they, “Should have invested sooner in technology that in the meantime had a significant impact on our industry.”

I don’t know why I haven’t posted something about this before. I find myself talking about this all the time. Here’s the gist:
Marketing is dead. You can be humans again.
No, really. Not the practice of taking things to market; I mean “marketing, the paradigm”. Marketing, of necessity, has been about dealing with customers at arm’s length. This is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. In order to pass the value of economies of scale to customers, companies had to be big. They had to talk to a lot of people. Since Gutenberg, the only tools available for—indeed the only ways to even think about—talking to a lot of people have been unidirectional. These univalent tools are the currency of marketing. They offer really no meaningful dialogue.

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