Robert Manning of UPS is stridently stuck in second gear in his recent piece: Blogging Is Not Fundamental.

Please, enough about blogs already.

As someone who makes his living in interactive marketing, I'm ecstatic over the flurry of effusive commentary around digital media and marketing, everything from "the vanishing mass market" and the ROI of search marketing, to new interactive television formats and podcasting. It's positive affirmation to read forecasts such as the recent Adweek report predicting that by year's end advertising revenues generated by Yahoo! and Google will rival those revenues by the big three television networks. Interactive marketing has truly arrived.

What I love about blogs is the authenticity of voice, how they further democratize web publishing, and how they provide more relevant information through contextual links. What concerns me about blogs is the signal to noise ratio -- do we really need all these niche, special-interest blogs, or will it become increasingly difficult to find relevance amidst the seas of personal web journals (or diatribes) without much to offer the broader constituency?

What I propose for those in the digital marketing realm is to stop chasing the latest fad and concentrate on the inherent utility of the medium. Digital marketers need to get back to the fundamentals: What are the inherent qualities of digital marketing that warrant an even larger share of the overall marketing spend? Digital marketing is non-linear, interactive, targetable, measurable, and most important, user-initiated -- it puts user choice and personal preference at the forefront of the experience.

Well, well, well. I guess we ought to just shut up and let the real professionals explain 'digital marketing' to would-be-marketers.

Manning's real metaphor is the individual as a consumer of information, a little pacman, zipping around taking a bit here, a nibble there. Manning has progressed from broadcast and mass media metaphors (industrial age) to those of microcast and niche media (information age), but he is reluctant to move into the social era: its a social medium, where individuals are interacting, and there won't be any -casting at all.

But then, this is example the sort of push back we will see from corporate types, who are struggling madly to get the genii back into the bottle, so they can 'attack markets' through 'segmentation strategies' instead of engaging in direct conversations with people, and more inportantly, to be willing to sit on the conversations that people outside the company are naturally involved in already.

The signal to noise ratio is irrelevant, a term brought in from engineering, and it only makes sense in the context of pushing a message through a communication channel. Social media are in part based on the rejection of the 'pushing messages to the market' mindset.

In the blogosphere, people who write dumb, uninteresting stuff will just have no interesting conversations going on, since we vote with our attention and links, here. The chaff is winnowed out by the activities of millions of independent actions. What remains are the impacts that these conversations have on those who participate. Traditional marketers hate this sort of paradigm, because they have no control, their 'messages' are changed, and their positioning is upended.

For all his love of 'digital marketing' I think Manning just thinks of it as a new bag of tricks to herd the couch potatoes, and control their 'buying behavior'. Its like the 1990s television mantra of 500 channels liberating us. But the same people who love 500 channels are terrified of the prospect of infinite channels, which really means no channels, no control, everyone finding their own shows whenever they want, the death of prime programming, and the upending of the entire worldview of television... which is happening right now.

So, beware of marketers who say they love the Internet, but that blogging is a fad. It's like saying you love democracy, but are opposed to univeral suffrage.

[Pointer from Scoble]