Marcus: Can you give us a good example of conversational marketing?

Huba: One of the best conversational marketing programs is by Discovery Education, a division of Discovery Communications. (Note: we did help them with this program.) The division sells a product called unitedstreaming that teachers can use to download video clips to using in presentations and lesson plans. The division built a site called the "Discovery Educator Network" (DEN) that connects teachers around the country to use their product and other technology in the classroom.

The site contains blogs written by both Discovery employees and teachers, discussion boards, and a resource section where teachers can share PowerPoints and other helpful materials. Teachers who want to conduct local trainings can put their events on the event calendar. Discovery has seen usage and subscription renewals of the product go up after the DEN was started.

Battelle: Lenovo did it early (last Fall) with its "Black or Titanium" campaign. Dice did it with its "rant banner." Snap launched with a conversational campaign that invited authors and audiences to help them launch its new engine. Symantec, Microsoft and others have also done these kind of campaigns with us. For more, see our overview here.

Hespos: We've been working with AccuQuote for several months now, and they launched a campaign recently in which they asked their existing customers for feedback on their own customer service process in a thread on their blog. They let life insurance customers know about the thread by sending them an email. AccuQuote got a ton of comments, most of which were very constructive.

Here's the important part: they listened, and they then told their customers what they were doing with the feedback they got. They responded to every comment left in the thread, following up on individual customer cases. As a result, they wrote several dozen incremental policies, just by listening to their own customers.

We advise clients that the first step toward implementing an effective Conversational Marketing campaign is making a commitment to the conversation. If they're not prepared to do this, they shouldn't get involved in social media at all.

Look at it this way-- would you go to a cocktail party, mill around with the crowd and ignore anyone who tried to speak to you? No, you wouldn't. It would be rude. And that's a big reason why clients who can't commit to conversation should stay the heck away from blogs, community sites and social media.

Naples: Outside of our industry, I worked on some good ones in my D.C. days. There were many opponents to Affirmative Action in the early '90s. But, when the "Mend it Don't End it" campaign was in stride, nobody seemed to think it should disappear. What happened was that people began calling it "striving for diversity," and now it's expected in the workplace.

Within our industry, the conversational campaign that stands out is the one that PointRoll executed a few years back. They introduced FatBoy to much controversy, since the campaign seemed so insensitive. But, at the same time, they executed a smart byline effort with the users of their products being the ones singing its praises in the media. They knew their target so well, so they knew that the people who were using the tools, mostly young folks in the interactive arms of agencies, weren't going to be put off by the objectionable creative, they were going to laugh at it. The combination of these two created a buzz that helped move them from a fifth-ranked provider to the first ranked one.