Steve Rubel: marketing is about conversations, and he works in PR to help companies join the conversation.

Question: How can marketers become more collaborative without giving up control? You cannot control the conversation, only become a part of it. Value is created not in a vacuum, but in collaboration.

Listening is part of the focus, and marketers understand how to do this, but not what to do with the information derived from this listening. That’s stage one. Then you need to create programs to respond and interact.

The value relationship is 2-sided. The companies/PR firms want to work with bloggers to give them value back. Not use you as a vehicle for a message, but to give something back of value and relevance.

People want to talk to real people. They don’t want a plastic corporate response. Just like with politicians, we want from companies a human touch and response. Also those companies that do a lot of the listening but never take the step to respond – as fake as a bad response.

Doing it (blogs) well: Southwest
Doing it badly: Clorox

Find a voice for a product & express it well: encourage dialogue on your own site and those of others.

Boris Mann: product images (with open fair use), permalinks (easy nav), personality.

Don’t send word documents (or PDFs!!!) – be interactive. Use a survey online and let me share the results too.

You cannot create a passionate user – but you can encourage it. And you can seek it.

Don’t be averse to risk.

Question: How many startups are monetized by advertising?

Lots of hands. Steve and others consider it broken. Someone else clarifies PR is busted and Steve agrees.

Good subpoint that its not advertising which is busted, but our single definition of it in relation to the Internet. Any communication is, in a way, advertising. So, it’s a shift in perspective and therefore perhaps it’s not advertising that’s busted but our definition of it.

Question: How do you leverage technology for better advertising? Make it two-way.

Advertising cannot just give away to conversation. There is a whole industry devoted to traditional advertising one-way models that it cannot just change, no matter how the market appears to be shifting.

Control is a language of marketing, but it’s much more credible to give up the control.

It’s the product not the pitch.

Advertising is broken for bad products. Pitching a bad product is hard and tedious and so much of our viewspace is saturated with bad product pitches that we tire of advertising in general. Truth here. A good product sells itself, or needs very little selling.

There is an "us versus them" mentality. About reaching the masses. Push marketing. "Consumers" Be a part of the community you serve. Turn "consumer" into "customer" and "person".

Hack marketing the way you hack a program.

Question: What do you think about character blogs?

Steve thinks they are a pathetic way to avoid authenticity (kids’ blogs being the exception). People can express life experiences and human emotions.

Scoble: you cannot have a relationship with a facade, but you can have one with a person.

Last thought: Help us help the community.

Tags: steve rubel, gnomedex, gnomedexcommentary, gnomedex 6.0, conversations, PR, communities, marketing, advertising