Participation Marketing Defined or Gone Astray?

Microsoft enters the conversational economy fray

This is a film created by the folks over at bringtheloveback.com in association with Microsoft Belgium.

How do we view consumers?  How do consumers view us as "marketers" or "advertisers"?  This video presents a cogent answer to both in a humorous story format.

To very loosely quote CK, "If this was a PSA (public service announcement), then great!"  But it appears to be an ad.  From a digital advertising solutions group at Microsoft.  Most bizarre.  What is Microsoft doing about this? 

Well.  To their credit, Geert answered me.

"Excellent question Sean, the whole idea is to look at digital or online marketing as one of the answers (of course there is more than one). We first have to convince people to invest online before we can try to convince them to look at advertising within Messenger or at in-game advertising. Once we will have all the big spenders online, then we can start talking"

Kudos to Geert and the team for doing this and responding to our questions.  But this answer still strikes me as very "ad" focused.  I'm curious as to your reactions. CK has a great one.

They have also posted new versions that are easier to get the embed code for.  Nice.  So here she is.

[embedded video below]

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

NOTE: This is a cross-post from my post yesterday over at onedegree.ca

The CGM smoke screen

To Geert's point above, to say that advertisers don't really get this space is an understatement.  Take Sears.

This one is from the amazing Kate over at mynameiskate.

Sears launched a CGM campaign with lots of fanfare.  Only to find out it's a vote off.  You can help choose one of four images for the new cover of some wishbook publication. 

No uploading.  No contributing.  No comments.  Just vote.  Dammit!

Join Kate in creating a CGM campaign to rival theirs.  She has launched a flickr group and everything.  Come on!