I spent last Friday evening at LAX and the Burbank airport (and trafficky freeways between the two) on a 9 hour quest to get back to San Francisco. Lucky for me, I found myself distracted by an engaging and spirited discussion of advertising models, journalistic ethics and best practices for conversational marketing! A week later I find myself, again, stuck in Los Angeles waiting out flight delays -- and collecting my thoughts on last week's hoopla around conversational marketing.

Earlier this week I had a frank conversation with the folks at Microsoft to get their take. After revisiting the elements of the ad campaign, we agreed that this sort of "conversational marketing" doesn't violate ethics (marketer or journalistic) or intentionally mislead readers. Still, they are taking seriously the perception among some commentators that we all could have done more to disclose the details on the campaign. More transparency can't be a bad thing. Most importantly, Microsoft is listening and trying to learn from the feedback. I was thrilled to hear all of that.

That's what makes conversational marketing so compelling to me (and my colleagues at FM) -- it allows our customers to give us feedback. Honest feedback isn't always nice to hear, but it's important that we hear it, that we listen and that we grow from it. We'll keep at it because we're committed to finding more relevant, natural ways to communicate to our customers, and (let's hope) we get better each time.