Men Without Hats

“We can blog if we want to,
we can leave your friends behind…”

Markets are Conversations. We’ve heard it so often, we take it for granted. And it may well yet stand the test of time as a metaphor that defines our future. But there is another powerful idea in the offing: You are your brand.

In essence, the second is just a logical postulate of the first. If a “market” is really a “conversation,” then there must be real people (with real faces and real voices) taking part. I’m okay with that so far.

“’cause your friends don’t blog and if they don’t blog
Well they’re no friends of mine”

To be a part of the conversation, you have to have a voice. “Blogs” used to be the atom of online conversation, and commenting was the proof. In fact, to this day I still have many coworkers and others that I respect who continue to be hung up on the definition of a “blog” including commenting. “If it doesn’t have comments, it’s just a website.” Never mind that many of the pioneers of modern online communications don’t allow comments. (Seth?)

“I say, we can write what we want to
A place where they will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this world
Leave the real one far behind”

If the Conversation is now the essential element, then those who are duplicitous in their conversations are going to freeze themselves out of the Marketplace. How can you trust someone who says one thing here and another thing there? Unlike the world of the fractured song-lyric above, there is “no place where they will never find.” Hello, John Mackey?

“Say, we can act if want to
If we don’t nobody will
And you can act real rude and totally removed
And I can act like an imbecile”

Yes, you can act like an imbecile or even worse. But remember, you are participating in a Conversation, and as such, you have a face. Or at the very least, a facade. With the interlinking and intermingling of social networks, it is even permissible to be a little more sarcastic on one than on another, as we expect each to bring out a different aspect of our personalities. At the end of the day, though – you still need to be accountable for what you say. The script is flipped, and you don’t just own what you write. What you write can own you.

“We can write if we want to
We’ve got all your posts and mine
As long as we abuse it, never gonna lose it
Everything’ll work out right”

…and that’s where the song fades out. It won’t work out right.

Some within the Blogoverse now see Jonah Bloom – the Executive Director of Ad Age – in competition with himself. Jonah wrote a blog posting under the Ad Age banner quite critical of Joseph Jaffe, whose already catching enough grief watching his crayon melt. This isn’t so much a problem for Bloom as it is for Ad Age. All of the tenets of Social Media and New Marketing lead back to the individual owning up to his/her words – yet there remains the expectation that “the corporation” has a “corporate identity” and a “corporate voice”, and the law even recognizes “the corporation” as a legal entity, just like an individual.

I know of what I speak first-hand. I used to blog in a more critical way about how other people, agencies, and businesses handled their crisis communications statements. Now that my name is more closely aligned with my present employer, I chose to pick a different direction so as to avoid confusion. I wasn’t asked to do so – not once. But I did it, because I understand human nature.

Human nature sees people with faces, and doesn’t get fooled so much by what’s on top of our heads. In the world we’re just now entering, there’s so much more riding on our personal reputation because it is all so eminently searchable. If the Market is truly a Conversation, then we’re still doing business one-to-one.

And even if there is no direct eye-contact, rest assured that we’re not paying as much attention to “which hat” you were wearing when you started dropping e-bombs on someone else. In the next frontier of marketing – we are all Men Without Hats.