I wrote a reply as a comment, but then decided to publish it as a post. Looking forward to continuing the dialog.
http://www.chriskenton.com/2009/09/another-thread-on-the-bursting-media-bubble.html

Something was worrying me about your post, and I now see that it is this part. You see reductive definition of a customer as a behavior pattern as a sign of hubris, while I think I see it as a sign of humility. Yes, it is an attempt to control, but an attempt that is modest in its ambitions: to get you to drink orange juice instead of coffee every morning for instance.

In a sense, social media is in fact driven by a greater hubris and a greater desire to control. “Will you buy orange juice” is a simpler sales/marketing/control pitch than “will you marry me” (the social media relationship proposition can, in the hands of the most enthusiastic, be as intimate as marriage).

So one thing I like about marketing 1.0 is in fact its honesty within its limited agenda. The marketer didn’t pretend to care about you as a person (other than in ritualistic and coded ways customers could easily detect). In social media, the danger is coming across as pretending to care while a) you don’t NEED to b) you can’t. Your million customers can’t possible all be your intimate friends. The only thing you CAN do is try to gain visibility into the WOM 1:1 dynamics that have always occurred, but are now visible to the marketer, and intervene occasionally. Nothing else will scale, or be credible in its claim to honesty.

So yes, you do have to be social and engage SOME customers as full human beings, but you can’t do that for ALL of them. The rest STILL are simple modified behavior patterns. The ones you treat as full humans are merely those who are temporarily important in your WOM strategy as opinion leaders etc., and I think it is important to acknowledge as much when engaging them: “Thanks for being such a great champion for our products. How can I help you?”

So how do we resolve this contradiction: the richer, apparently more humanizing medium is also apparently more controlling and ambitious in its intent?

I think the answer is that the core behavior modification element of marketing remains the same. It is a simple, straightforward and uncomplicated pitch (which is not to say it is unsophisticated, as the examples in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational show). The rest of the engagement though is what I’d call ironic marketing collateral. A wink-and-nudge meta-discourse acknowledging theatricality of the interaction, thereby rendering it more authentic.

Haven’t fully processed this line of thought though…

And interesting that you got into a skirmish over the term ‘customer manufacturing’ here

What set me off was a private email–rather than a public comment on this blog–notifying me of the boundaries of my right to use the term “customer manufacturing” along with the insistence that I capitalize it in the future. Intended or not, that came across as a thinly veiled cease and desist, which frankly got my hackles up. My use of the words are patently within the bounds of fair use–they are used in a non-commercial blog post offering general industry commentary, and are not a reference to any product, company or even a defined process, but are used obviously as a generic phrase to describe general marketing processes engineered to treat customers as a fungible commodity. I think there are better ways of joining the discussion–and I appreciate that you took the time to comment.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but as I stated in the post, I think the metaphor of manufacturing customers is laden with dangerous assumptions about the power and control companies enjoy over consumers these days, much less in the years to come. Similarly, the concepts of “campaigns”, “targeting”, “acquiring”, and even sales “forces”, are militaristic notions of control over “consumers” that are artifacts of a paradigm in decline. That is not to say companies don’t need efficient operations and repeatable processes that can be measured and improved to the benefit of the company’s bottom line. But the degree to which the formulation of those processes is embedded with an inherent view of the relationship with customers as one of asymmetrical control, is the degree to which I think companies are entirely missing the point of what’s going on the market today.

The relationship between businesses and customers is changing, and the tide right now is moving in the customer’s favor–and I mean that on a far deeper level than Web 2.0 technology trends like Twitter and Facebook. Companies that think they can just adopt social media tools and customs as a new vehicle for exerting the control they’ve always enjoyed are, I think, in for an uncomfortable ride. Whether they see it coming or not.

/chris

We appreciate your thinking about abusing customers and agree that manipulating them is inappropriate. In addition, I would concur that some companies are reluctant to recognize that the social construct is what actually allows business to thrive. Word of mouth has been around for a VERY long time. It’s just that “mouths” can travel so much further these days and controlling those “mouths” is pretty much impractical. Though paying bloggers for commentary does seem to be in vogue by some.

In our self-defense, we do not use the manufacturing analogy as a way to manipulate or abuse customers, but rather as a way to manage a process of helping the right customers buy right.

Thanks for letting us play.

Mitch