Reacting to a column UnderScore Marketing’s Tom Hespos wrote about marketer’s fear and laziness to engage in meaningful conversations with consumers, I wrote a piece calling for the creation of a “Conversation Department,” a department whose sole responsibility would be to listen to what is being said about a given brand in blog posts, discussion boards, forums and other methods of group conversation, join the ongoing conversations about the brand and make sure the company properly reacts to conversational opinion by addressing concerns immediately. Today, Tom goes a bit further with this and proposes a structure for a conversation department and how it might be staffed.
The more we talk about listening, joining and learning from conversations, while everyone in a company should be doing this, it makes more and more sense for companies and agencies to created a dedicated conversation department.
