The Market is a Conversation

Syllabus

The Market is a Conversation – The consumer is taking her power back

Marketing as we know it is under siege and may not survive in anything like its current form.

The foundation of mass media is eroding rapidly. The channels that mass media rely on are being disintermediated by direct web channels or by other media. Brand power is leaving the corporate centre and is being replaced on the web by the voice of the consumer. Trust in corporate and government leaders is falling. Customer attention, buffeted in a maelstrom of advertising noise, is falling.

A web-based and consumer-driven alternative is emerging rapidly.

The resulting fall-out in the advertising and mass media industry will be cataclysmic. The opportunities for those understand the new market will be tremendous.

This course will justify this claim and will take you inside the minds and behind the actions of the revolutionaries. You will not only see what is going in real time, you will meet and talk to the key figures. You will be among the few who know that is going on.

The Online Tool

Here is a link to the Open Source Tool that we have developed for this course.

Access is very simple. All students need to do is to register and this process sends you a password. Have a look - but please respect the privacy of the current class.

Using the "Recent Posts" tab, you can follow all the new posts and comments as they occur. Each student has their own Blog that aggregates into the main page. You can see how you are doing by going to the Statistics Tab that shows you the amount of participation of each member.

You can easily post documents, pictures and files of all types.

It is based on the Open Source Platform, Drupal. This has been modified by Bryght and by Good Basic. This is the 3rd beta and is all but in release form.

I have developed these credit courses as a lecturer in the School Of Business at the University of Prince Edward Island

What a Conversation Class Feels Like

In this type of class, everyone has a say not just the 5 extraverts. Over a period of weeks, a deep sense of trust builds and so does a sense of community. We go way beyond the texts and find out things about the topic and about ourselves that surprised us all.

Here is an unedited series of comments by my fall class of 2004. They had just completed the course on the Natural Step

A better mousetrap

Here is unedited feedback on how the tool itself works.