Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: conversational marketing, fake blogs, voluntary time, Second Life, United States, Super Bowl (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The long and short of it is that the book is excellent…Jaffe deserves a place in Marketing history for this.” (SlightlyRoughAroundtheEdges.Wordpress.com, Tuesday 25th February 2008)

“In a series of case studies, Jaffe shows you how to bring your brand up to speed.” (Fin Week, Thursday 3rd April 2008)

Product Description

With the continued fragmentation of the media and proliferation of media options, the balance of power has shifted from the marketer to the individual. In Join the Conversation, Jaffe discusses the changing role of the consumer and how marketers must adapt by joining the rich, deep and meaningful conversation already in progress. This book reveals what marketers must do to become a welcome and invited part of the dialogue, and how to leverage and integrate the resulting partnership in ways that provide win-win situations for businesses, brands and lives.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (October 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470137320
• ISBN-13: 978-0470137321
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #413,555 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Speaking as I find, March 20, 2008

By	David Cushman (UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm one of a number of bloggers Joseph Jaffe has sent his latest book, Join The Conversation, for review purposes. I've posted about the wisdom of this strategy previously on http:fasterfuture.blogspot.com. And I enjoy Jaffe's blog enormously.

Jaffe obviously thinks deeply about the notion of human voice and its multiplied effect when the power of the network is applied. And on the vast majority of themes, on the whole big picture thing, Jaffe and I will agree whole-heartedly (after all the tagline 'Join the Conversation' has always been applied to my blog from the off!). He is one of us, he is riding the Cluetrain, he understands the power of the network etc etc.

So, all that said, it's the details that I might get picky about. And as a former sub-editor, even poor use of metaphor or lazy english ("pretty unique", for example) can set my pen a-twitching.
As a European reader, the many illustrative examples of good and bad practice from US mainstream media are often lost on me. That can grate a little. I read my copy on a beach in St Lucia - so checking the references on the web as I went along was out of the question.

But these are just details.

Provocative or patronising?
Jaffe seems deliberately provocative at times - and this can result in a patronising tone... (depending, naturally, on your point of view). It was a tone that often got me riled.
For example on page 172 he refers to the Worst Chase Scenario in which a union advertised in a New York paper asking for consumers' worst experiences at a particular bank. Jaffe writes that he was disappointed that it wasn't the bank itself asking the question (me too!). And he says:
"I don't expect you to understand this idea - nor do I expect any company to implement this form of corporate nakedness anytime soon."
My response is that the argument that finding out the worst people think of you, engaging in conversation about it and trying to fix it is the bleeding obvious to anyone who has read the Cluetrain Manifesto, Communities Dominate Brands, Wikinomics et al.
On page 216 he writes "I introduced the concept that you are the community you keep." I'm sure many of us have toyed with similar notions ( I know I have - I am part of a community therefore I am). Jaffe does a lot of this "I did this", "I introduced that". And that's bound to grate with less-than-pushy Brits.

I'll be honest. I haven't read a book that wound me up more regularly in a long time.

But perhaps this was the intention? Perhaps the tone will aid the conversation - a strong point of view will always inspire a hotter conversation, and isn't that Jaffe's whole point? So I'll grant him that. As a strategy for inspiring conversation, it is brilliant.

And when I analyse the regularity with which I get snarky about his writing there's more criticism scrawled over the pages in the first half of the book and more whoops of praise and shared view towards the end. He's building a case, winding you up and drawing you in, ready to end up on a high of mutual agreement and goading to action.

But I do have some substantive criticisms.

Conversation as science: The risk of codifying art.
Jaffe refers, quite correctly in my view, to conversation being an art (as in not a science). Yet he deploys elaborate and complex codifications of 'how to do' conversation in a measurable, transferrable way. I was reading The Origin of Wealth alongside Join The Conversation which served as an interesting mash-up in its own right. TOoW refers to art as knowledge which cannot be captured (in a schema) in any way.
Jaffe is trying to create some rules which anyone can apply - a schema if you like - and he's trying to find new measures of success. And our traditional company structures and budgets require these so I'll say a big thank you for trying but reserve judgement on their usefulness. Applying the wrong scientific thinking to a complex adaptive system can often lead us to incorrect and damaging conclusions (and I will recommend The Origin of Wealth to anyone who wants to explore that argument a little more thoroughly, where it is applied to classical economics).

On the money... almost
Some of Jaffe's examples are just shy of the mark. He wonders why MasterCard doesn't create a 'museum' (his word) for all the MasterCard "Priceless" spoof ads which circulate free and unbounded around the web. I fear a corporation doing that would be in danger of mummifying the idea. There's something of taxidermy about it. I guess my objection is summed up in this post which suggests brands should sit down around other people's campfires, rather than march in and light one in your backyard.

Another belittles Pontiac's suggestion that consumers "Don't take our word for it. Google "Pontiac" and discover for yourself."

Jaffe points out that those consumers who followed the instruction were confronted with ads for unrelated restaurants and rivals, rather than the positive PR the brand may have anticipated. He suggests that with a little more precision (read control) Pontiac could have been so much smarter.

Patronising? Perhaps Pontiac trusted consumers to be wise enough to know how google works and perhaps Pontiac also feared trying to control the search terms used would be against the spirit of the idea.

Isn't Pontiac saying, 'look we know loads of stuff is written about us. We figure we're good enough for there to be more positives than negatives - go take a look for yourself and use whatever terms you like.' ?

Am I crediting Pontiac with too much wisdom - or is Jaffe being too hard on them? Maybe we're both half right?

It's not just about selling stuff
My final critique is that despite an uplifting and over-arching final message "everything is at stake and everything is on the table" Jaffe consistently fixates on selling stuff to people.
This is quite a personal criticism. Jaffe's remit is of course to serve the world of marketing and to persuade traditional marketers of the error of their ways. And part of that is persuading them that life will be better for them should they see the light. And he achieves this in spades.
There is much value in this in the world as it is and as it may be for a couple of years more.
But for me the impact of the network, its power to disrupt what ever it touches, suggests that the message of engagement goes beyond joining 'consumers' (Jaffe's very deliberate term) in the co-creation of content/advertising, or even brand equity. It means that a new community-powered ecology emerges in which converged individuals are doing the co-creation of the very products and services. This very act is all the marketing a product ever needs. That which we create, we embrace... (Alan Moore, et al). I make this argument in rather more detail here.

In summary? (whaddya mean you stopped reading ages ago...)
Join The Conversation is a deliberately provocative, example-rich examination of the changing landscape of marketing being wrought by the high richter earthquakes of community dominance. It serves as a fine primer for marketing and media professionals and makes a good fist of offering some 'How To' advice on actually joining the conversation.
Those who've read The Cluetrain Manifesto and/or Communities Dominate Brands won't find too many new truths. But Jaffe's central themes are clearly presented and make a compelling case for change.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Would have been better as a shortened ebook, March 5, 2008

By	Marketing Engagement (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

I started reading Join the Conversation by Joseph Jaffe in December. It's now March and I've completed it. I usually pour through a book within a week or two, but this book was different. And not different in a good way. The book has good information, but it's hidden in between sophomoric humor, euphemism crammed sentences and a self-congratulatory tone. My advice - if you plan on reading this book start at chapter 18 (page 246). That's where the real information begins.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Conversation is the key to online social networking; Marketers take note!, October 16, 2007

By	Jeff Lippincott "www.Jlippin.com" (Princeton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I liked this book. It was basically simple, but it got a little wordy and longwinded. It was ALL about conversation as it relates to sales and marketing. It has the following 20 chapters:

1. Talking "at" versus talking "with"
2. The many-to-many model
3. Can marketing be a conversation?
4. The birth of Generation I
5. The rise of the prosumer
6. The new consumerism
7. The six Cs: Three phases of conversation
8. The consent-conversation relationship
9. What conversations are in your future?
10. Why are you so afraid of conversation?
11. The 10 tenets of good conversation
12. The 5 ways you can join the conversation
13. When conversation isn't a conversation at all
14. Where does conversation fit in?
15. Conversation through community
16. Conversation through dialog
17. Conversation through partnership
18. Getting started: The manifesto for experimentation
19. Does conversation work?
20. Do you speak conversation? Take the test

Back in 1999 and 2000 I took a job as a sales rep and my sales director was big on "relationship selling." He advocated contacting the prospect and shooten the crap with them on the first call. Then shoot a little less jibberish the second call and so on until the sixth call I was supposed to have developed a rapport with the prospect - a rapport that would eventually lead to a sale. Today marketing (in general) is grasping on to what can be called "relationship marketing." Build rapport with the target market one person at a time and hopefully make sales that way.

So how do you build rapport? That's kind of a dumb question - You build rapport through CONVERSATION. And this book is about conversation and how it relates to marketing. It advocates that marketers should get involved in community, dialog, and partnership. That translates into getting involved in MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, or some other online community where interaction between users of the site can take place.

This book is not a how-to for marketing managers and strategic planners to read and follow. But it does discuss the interaction of content, conversation, community, context, customization, and commerce as it all relates to the Internet and marketing. Ifelt this was a good book, but not a great one. 4 stars!