Is This a Conversation We Want to Be Having?

(this photo is licensed under creative commons for non-commercial use with attribution)

As last week’s post probably makes evident, I’ve been thinking a lot about conversations, lately. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how marketers are lobbing around terms like “conversation” and “dialogue” without addressing just what kind of conversation we’re going to have.

In one instance, a company called Social Media recently launched their friend-ranking and social banner systems, claiming on their blog that what they seek to do with this tweaked form of targeted advertising is to “facilitate real conversation and interaction around certain products and brands . . . [and] present you with the opportunity to interact with a product socially.”

More thorough details of how their system works can be found on a number of other blogs, including a fairly comprehensive article at Venture Beat, but the gist of it is that they will be making social ads, featuring your friends, depending on how “close” you are, a measure taken based a friend-ranking created out of data from your interactions with your network. The goal is to populate ads with people who are most likely to influence your consumption habits.

A lot has been said about privacy concerns surround this, and how much it sounds like a revisit of the whole Facebook Beacon fiasco. And while I too have my concerns, especially given that it’s opt-out and not opt-in, and it’s still somewhat unclear to me just how you end up in an ad (What are the triggering behaviors? Do you know you’ll be in an ad and who on your friends list you’ve ranked high enough with to appear to in that ad?), what interested me about this is the focus on the relationships between people.

Typically, the “conversation” is discussed in terms of one between consumers and the product or brand. But, as I discuss in a forthcoming MIT Convergence Culture Consortium white paper co-written with Henry Jenkins and Ana Domb Krasukopf, any conversation that includes brands is more functionally a conversation between individuals and groups, in which a brand or product serves some sort of communication of shared social worth within a group or community, and is capable of serving some sort of expressive purpose. Brands, in other words, are useful in “conversation” for their expressive power, for their ability to absorb and display meaning. This is something that Grant McCracken talks about at considerable depth and frequency for those interested, but my main point here is that to conceive of these banners as a means of facilitating conversations between people is probably a step in the right direction.

What concerns me, however, is that meaning exists not only in content, but also in context. Much of the expressive power of a brand lies within the context in which it is used, and by taking away the user’s ability to define the context of their “conversation,” they potentially strip it of its communicative value, and its usefulness and passability.

Another worry I have is that it puts our network relationships within a hierarchy based on factors that do not necessarily define the quality of these relationships, especially given all the different motivations we have for maintaining certain networks over various platforms. While I cannot pinpoint a particular execution problem, it strikes me as problematic when we consider how counter this runs to the associative, lateral, differentially motivated and inclusive nature of network culture.

These are all questions about execution, and I’ll have to wait and see it in action, but my question stands: what kind of conversation is this going to be? For the moment, it’s starting to feel a lot like a recent elevator conversation that I had when a complete stranger wanted to know what I was listening to on my ipod. I was suddenly demanded upon to advocate a song without the chance to explain the context in which I was listening to it, and left the elevator feeling rather ambushed and misrepresented.