Defining the Role of Dialog Facilitators ... How do They Figure In Your Marketing Strategy?

With the growing importance and need for a corporate marketing role to take advantage of the ongoing blog and RSS conversations throughout the internet, we need to actually define these new business roles.

Since real-life marketing practice is the foundation for developing marketing theory, let's develop this line of thought on the basis of what Marqui has already started doing with their Conversation Coordinator and what I have been doing marginally, as time permitted, for "Unleash".

Conversation Coordinators

Let's take another look at how Marqui defines the responsibilities of their conversation coordinator:

"- sends us a daily summary of what folks are saying about Marqui and whether or not there are any issues we need to respond to

- scans a number of high profile blogs to see what they are writing about and flags posts that we should consider commenting on (not necessarily related to Marqui)

- notes any common themes or industry trends that she thinks we should be aware of"

In essence, their Conversation Coordinator is on the lookout for online conversations about Marqui and their industry in general. Based on her research she prepares reports for other people within Marqui who decide what to do with this information.

This is basically an "upgrade" to Robin Good's definition of NewsMasters.

While NewsMasters scan the internet (news sources) to create the best possible news channels on a specific topic for their readers and act as journalists, Conversation Coordinators scan the internet for every possible conversation point and generate corporate reports and business intelligence based on their findings.

Consequently, the formal role of a Conversation Coordinator could be described as someone who regularly scans the internet for live conversations, taking place on blogs and other frequently updated online media, searching for new content concerning a specific company, product and industry.

The purpose of this is to:

a) Be constantly aware of what people are saying about our company and product with the intent of being constantly prepared to quickly react publicly, either to manage a communicational crisis, further facilitate the dialog, start a personal/corporate conversation with the public in order to manage "customer" relationships or conversationally promote our products.

b) Gather product feedback (our own products or those from our competitors) to improve our products. Also gather other business intelligence to enable the company to quickly react to market changes.

Coming out from Marqui's definition Conversation Coordinators are basically still business intelligence people, charged primarily with gathering and interpreting information.

Dialog Facilitators

Let us take a look at one of my older definitions of Dialog Facilitation, which actually started my line of thought:

"As a direct marketer, always wanting to be in control, I find that hard to swallow, and yet here I am, "facilitating dialogs about the e-book accross the internet", following Robin Good's advice.

The whole point is to spread "the dialog" from the originating point (the publisher) to multiple starting points, where the dialog itself takes a life on its own and is further spread through mulitple online media, completely losing all structure."

Starting from this, Dialog Facilitators watch the internet space in the same manner as Conversation Coordinators, but also constantly respond to all conversations, trying to further faciliate them. They respond either in the form of blog comments or blog postings in their own blogs, even writing articles and other content (such as audio interviews) and distributing it throughout the internet.

But, they also start conversations. They watch the pulse of the market and then input new stories that match that pulse in to the market, trying to upgrade conversations and prolong them.

They engage in private conversations with other bloggers and seek-out new note-worthy stories, enaging more and more people in them.

On the "automatic front", they make sure that their content is spread throughout the internet through the power of RSS, thus generating new conversation locations.

We could define the role of a Dialog Facilitator as someone who watches (researches), responds to (comment or new content), enables (RSS content syndication), starts and powers online conversations about a certain topic, industry, product or company.

Coming from my own experience I can certainly testify that this job requires at least one full person, every day of the week.

Marketing Strategy

Both roles should be integrated in to corporate marketing strategies, not replacing any other marketing roles, but adding to them.

In a way, both roles are very much in the realm of PR, but on the other hand venture in to the realms of Customer Relationship Management, viral marketing and direct marketing.

Embracing the new world of communications will require embracing new marketing roles as well, adding to the complexity of marketing management.

We now need to start considering how to integrate the new with our existing marketing strategies.

Or, as Susan Getgood notes in her Marketing Roadmaps blog, "It's not EITHER direct marketing OR blogs. It's AND! -- Developing marketing strategy with AND".