ChaCha. Ask Away.

“Conversations” is quite the catch phrase these days. Your customers are talking about/to you. Participate in the conversations. Engage your customers. Be honest and transparent. Communicate. Listen. Get into the conversations. If you don’t, your competitors definitely will.

And Mobile takes this catch phrase to the next level. Because of one super-obvious fact: Phones are for conversations.

That’s what they’re for. Purely conversational and personal.

But since it is such a buzz word, I fear that the word “conversation” is beginning to get as abused by marketers as words like “passion” and “innovative.” Let me explain this misuse:

Just because mobile marketing campaigns claim to foster interactions between brands and consumers by “engaging” them on their personal mobile devices, it doesn’t mean that everything happening on the device suddenly becomes a conversation. See, a mobile ad campaign alone isn’t equivalent to a conversation, even metaphorically, because a consumer can only interact directly with the brand in ways that the brand pre-defines as possible, using keywords that are built into the campaign. So basically, any “conversation” between a brand and a consumer would actually be quite controlled by the brand (not a freestyle conversation).

No one knows yet how much advertising will be acceptable by consumers at all in the mobile channel, but in a world of social media, conversations are where it’s at. This is one reason why, since Q&A conversations are at the natural core of ChaCha, ad campaigns are designed to fit as contextual extensions into our mobile answers service. Consumers initiate and control conversation with ChaCha (aka “pulling information”), so a brand can know that by participating in strategically preselected conversations, it is adding real value to a consumer’s dialogue.