The altercation and judging of new media vs. traditional

"Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in. "

That my friends is the beginning of the Clue Train, an e-book that dictates the beginning of online conversations. It has a similar tone as all other of these books and also sprung the pr industry's antithesis by Andrew Keen entitled, "How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture (Hardcover)." Both state valid points on the state of corporations aging processes towards marketing and retaining business with out-dated customer service tactics, but one opposes the other in how that conversation should be held and maintained. Especially from the stand point of who appropriates the initiation. One side leaves the message up to a large community with companies hiring specialists to monitor their brand reputation and the other insists on old fashioned media and traditional techniques for marketing. I stand at the impasse thinking neither are completely right or wrong, but will simply leave the decision on your capable shoulders, who is right and who is wrong or is it simply the ladder in a changing era?