The Basement

Steve Rubel scooped me on this but I wanted to post on it anyway. Cymfony has just opened a "Knowledge Center" on their website that includes summary articles discussing "important trends driving change in marketing and public relations planning, strategy, and execution." Currently, they have articles on blogs, CGM, PR Measurement, and Web 2.0. Jim Nail, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer for Cymfony, has also posted a bit about in on the Cymfony's Marketing Insight blog.

I think the site is interesting for a couple of reasons. I've read through much of the information and, while I don't agree completely with some of their definitions, I think their coverage, for the most part, is fair and largely accomplishes their stated goal of giving "you the maximum information in the smallest amount of reading." That said, the information provided is really more of a primer for the uninitiated rather than providing new cutting edge information and is laced with some skewed Cymfony marketing propaganda. In this regard, I think it's a good place for business communications folks to start who are trying to get up to speed on the basics. That is, if you can bring yourself to trust any of it.

My biggest complaint of the site is that Cymfony uses the guise of objective industry informational resource as a thin facade for their own marketing message. For example, in their Brief Book for Blogs, they have a document titled "Tools for Searching and Analyzing Blogs". The document lists mostly free blog publishing, search and analysis tools such as PubSub, Bloglines, Technorati, and Ice Rocket. The closest they come to mentioning an actual competitor is listing Intelliseek's free blog only search tool BlogPulse. Now, most everyone will agree that BlogPulse is a "consumer facing" tool, but it is generally considered to be one of the most powerful free blog analysis tools on the web. This might be surprising to someone who read Cymfony's description of BlogPulse in which they say "[Blogpulse] is useful for a quick glimpse of online discussion trends, however it does not filter out duplicate or irrelevant mentions to a level required for marketing research and analysis." First off, I think whether "duplicate or irrelevant mention filtering" is required for "market research and analysis" really depends on the project and application. It feels like this statement is designed exclusively to disparaged the reader from serious investigation. Second, BlogPulse is a teaser product. It (at least partially) is a marketing tool for Intelliseek to attract attention for their commercial (non-free) products, which are also considered to be among the best in the industry, but Cymfony fails to list these products. In fact, not only is there no mention of Intelliseek's non-free products, there's also no mention of other Cymfony competitors such as BuzzMetrics, Umbria Communications and Biz 360.

There is, however, a large entry on Cymfony's Orchestra product. Someone who's not familiar with the space might infer from this "objective" document that there are no serious alternatives to the Cymfony offering. This, of course, is simply not true.

Now, is it so wrong for a company to produce marketing information that promotes it's own products on it's own website?

No, of course not.

So what is the problem here? The problem is that Cymfony is portraying their "Knowledge Center" as an objective resource. They've comingled serious objective and credible industry resources with their own blatant propagandistic marketing material. The end result is that, as a reader, I find myself wondering which pieces are propagandistic and which are objective resources. This lowers trust and credibility and thus lowers the value of the site as a serious WOMM resource.

This is unfortunate because there is actually a lot of good stuff there. The list of blog tools I mentioned, for example, is actually quite good as a list of the major free and low cost tools. Cymfony could have left themselves off the list (because the Orchestra product doesn't really belong) and had a blurb at the bottom that indicated Cymfony provides more advanced professional tools that have capabilities far beyond the tools listed. This approach seems much less smarmy to me. Separate the objective list of free resources from the marketing message of Cymfony's commercial offering. Simple.

Think of it this way. Pretend you know nothing of means of transportation. One day you meet a car salesman. He says to you "Before you can make an informed decision, I can see that you need an education. Lucky for you, I have a Knowledge Center to help you get up to speed." This, of course, sounds pretty good. The salesman goes on to say "Now, you can get around by walking, running, crawling, riding a bike - but you'd have to pay for the bike - or by buying one of my cars." He has two on the lot: a two seat convertible sports car and garbage truck. Now, maybe he's got the right car for you. Maybe he doesn't. But how are you going to feel about the salesman when you learn about other cars, airplanes, trains, motorcycles, trolleys, and skateboards? Will you trust him?

As it turns out, Cymfony does something fairly unique among it's competitors - it combines CGM with 200,000 traditional MSM resources, but because they chose to pretend that they're competitors don't exist, they miss the opportunity to contrast their offerings.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on Cymfony's site, the lead statement in a section labeled "What do we do?" says...

Cymfony helps companies keep their products and messages in tune with the fast-changing expectations of their most important audiences

Oh the irony. I don't know if I'm a member of Cymfony's most important audience, but I expect them to keep their propagandistic messages on the marketing side of the fence. A Knowledge Center is great but keep it objective. BlogPulse could easily drop all mentions of Cymfony from their search engine or move them to the bottom of the search results, but they don't. If Cymfony's site develops into a real resource, objectivity will breed credibility and that will lead to sales. The fact that Cymfony has faked their own product placement makes me question credibility. The fact that they dis BlogPulse makes me think they're scared.

In the age of transparency, you have to compete on your own merit. You'd expect a company capitalizing on consumer generated media to get that.