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.

the "twebinar" experience: connectivity versus conversation

I hopped into the “Game Changing Moves - Doing Business with Social Media” twebinar today, a web seminar featuring streaming video of interview with experts in the field with an active Twitter Backchannel for discussion.

Despite my issues with the over-cute neologism, I was drawn to the idea of a performative promise of a seminar about social media that actually utilizes one of the best social media tools out there.

The experience, however, was a curious one. I’m accustomed to lively, robust backchannel discussions that are frequently more engaging than anything going on onstage at conferences. But what I saw here were declarations, broadcasts expressing support or agreement, but little actual discourse. Perhaps I wasn’t looking at the right tweets, but even still, the problem remains the same: twitter is predominantly a mini-broadcast tool, not built to facilitate tracking or engaging in discussion. While the idea was novel and kind of exciting, in practice I got little out of the backchannel outside a running list of people who were also following it. That, I think, is ultimately the value of this exercise.

It strikes me that we shouldn’t conflate connectivity with conversation. Both are valuable, to be sure. While I didn’t experience a robust conversation about social media through twebinar, I did get linked to people who are thinking around some of the same areas as I am, playing the same spaces. By being able to connect directly to them through twitter, I’ve begun laying the ground work for what may, in the future, become the kind of conversation I had hoped would be possible.

95% of Strategists Love Their Job

Yes, I’m one of them. I love being able to spend time thinking, contemplating and then working with others to make ideas into something real. At family functions or cocktail parties, I invariably get a “oohhh, that sounds so fun” when I describe my job.

While neither the IPA Strategy Group survey (their site requires membership) or Heather Lefevre’s Account Planning survey (not exactly strategy, but…) really account for the work that I do — Creative Strategy — they both capture many of the challenges in this line of work.

Here is some food for thought:

Strategists feel valued by their clients (87%) and have confidence to deal with the challenges thrown at them by their clients and agencies alike (87%).

69% say they are happy working where they are.

Me too.

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Are You Flucking Kidding Me?

Flying logos – er, pardon me – Flogos are here. What are they exactly? A soap-based foamy mixture that sails with the winds to deliver brand awareness from street level on up to airplane pilots and birds (these logos can travel as high as 20,000 feet).

Not to worry, they are environmentally safe. But I find them intrusive. How do you avoid an ad that lands on your head, perhaps spattering a soapy mist onto your sunglasses?

Flogos last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, so I suppose you’re more likely to see them at sporting events, festivals and the like (try not to confuse the Flogo for cotton candy). Right now they’re available in 24 and 36-inch models, but word is there’s a 6-foot generator in the works. They’ll soon be available in various colors too. The anticipation is killing me.

Alright, stepping off my soapbox now…

Be A Novice

Coming from the museum world has served me well in this line of work. Turns out that the people coming to websites want to find information in fun, entertaining ways in the same manner that museum visitors want to find information in fun, entertaining ways. They don’t want to be talked at, talked down to or really talked to much at all.

Using a conversational tone is a given, but starting a conversation is even harder. And starting an engaging conversation is harder still. When writing museum labels, I always tried to put on my novice hat. What if I didn’t know anything about this topic? What words are too jargon-y? What questions would I have? And I usually checked myself by going out on the museum floor and talking to real novice visitors.

Designing experiences with a novice in mind seems like the obvious choice. We probably even say that we’re doing it. But are we?

P.S. Those are real visitors reading real museum labels that I wrote.