Remixing With CGM & Word of Mouth

Dave Evans and I made a "connection" almost immediately a couple years back while I was giving a presentation on Consumer-Generated Media to his then employer, Austin-based advertising agency GSD&M.  We've since become pen-pals or sorts on various marketing issues around consumer control, word-of-mouth, and of course consumer-generated media, occasionally connecting in person at Ad-Tech or WOMMA events. (Dave was a very early WOMMA supporter, and is responsible for many of the podcast interview "teasers" as part of WOMMA's January conference.)  Anyway, Dave recent joined the ClickZ network and this morning he published a very provocative piece entitled "Word of Mouth: Advertising 2.0," which basically argues that the core tenets and building blocks of word-of-mouth marketing share a symbiotic relationship with the Web 2.0 framework....which is a very good thing, he argues.  "Participation underlies what contemporary advertising and marketing are all about," he argues. "To truly persuade, you must engage."  Dave uses a concept I really like (but have not heard before in the context of marketing): remixing.

"Remixing lets me take a fragment here, a fragment there, and create personal meaning. I may combine a review on Amazon and information about that reviewer with what my friends told me to make a decision.....That same remixability allows me to craft a persuasive message of my own built from these fragments and to pass it on to those who might be interested.....Remixing, or network members recrafting messages for network ingestion, gets word-of-mouth marketing cleanly and properly into the network. Through remixing, anathema within the traditional agency creative process, genuine word of mouth is able to seep into the social networks marketers want to penetrate.

There's much more of course.  The piece is a wee bit optimistic and bullish on the self-correcting goodness of the conversational medium -- I'd extend that same critique to other aspects of Web 2.0 -- but his article represents a very good read by a very smart guy.  May the "conversation" continue.