John Battelle's Searchblog

LOL! that was hilarious!

First, John, the Percocet may have actually improved your post, your voice sounded relaxed and comfortable. This is per "Nocera's Law" which states that "Everything communicates!" And it applies to "Conversational Judo" as well:

To maximize the opportunity to build a positive experience with a brand, and ensure brand loyalty, what does the wise manager do? Encourage and reward existing customers for speaking up about how the company can do better. Listening and acknowleging, effecting the appropropriate remedy and then, to make the brand experience outstanding, offering an unexpected reward - and it needn't be expensive.

This notion John, is kind of a basic for savvy service industries; i.e.: the waiter who checks your table after serving a course to make sure of your satisfaction, and offering to remedy it, when something is brought to his or her attention. But, it is an opportunity that is widely neglected elsewhere - although we live in a service driven information age.

I find it especially lacking in internet communications. How often is there a lack of acknowledgment of an email by corporate entities - Google can learn from this - or websites which lack effective "Contact Us" information.

What John labels as "Conversational Judo" as it relates to brand building is an inexpensive, yet invaluable tactic - because it is almost always cheaper to keep the customer you already have (and boost your brand in the eyes of that existing customer which can result in precious word of mouth advertising) than it is for a company to pay the cost of acquiring a new customer and/or establishing or repositioning a brand.

So, "Conversational Judo" is a tactic that ought to be adapted by all service industries - including search. But, beyond tactics, there is also an entirely new strategy for marketing and brand building - which I have helped to develop and it is called "Ancestral Marketing" and is search engine driven. It is about data mining documented family history data, providing hitherto information about your shared common ancestors to market goods and services such as worldwide travel to ancestral homelands, or selling tickets (or DVD's of motion pictures. Even pharmaceuticals and gene therapies used to treat a number of hereditary diseases can avail themselves of this new marketing strategy. "Ancestral Marketing" is search-driven and possible only of late. It is the result of over 12 years of painstaking academic quality research in Hawaii, and the development of over 8 million lines of proprietary digital code by Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc..

Heal quickly, John, and may I suggest stashing away one of those Percocets for when you next need to do a voice posting? Like I said, "Everything communicates! And, for proof, consider the tone and timbre, affected by the emotion (or passion) in the human voice - it resonates on an important interpersonal level - adding to the words, building upon the thoughts and connecting on an emotional human to human level.