Let's Talk About: The Conversation Economy

When words speak louder than actions, the human voice becomes a business requirement

"Just got done biking 2 miles, first time EVER!" - "Feeling ADHD, dont want to be here, and none of my friends are online. Bastards. ;)" - "Uncontrollably thinking to myself: Where the players play..."

Are single-sentence "tweeds" the new narratives of our lives? Can one change the world with 140 characters? Is Twitter the reality TV of the Internet? Will crowd-mobbing become the ugly collateral of crowd-sourcing? Something is happening in the blogosphere. "The truly important events ...are not the trends. They are changes in the trends," wrote Peter Drucker. Micro-blogging is all the talk now and certainly a new twist in the foray of social media. Services such as Tumblr, Moodgeist, Jaiku, Mozes, and Radar offer a new mode of communication - it's ad-hoc, ueber-instant, and caters to constantly shrinking attention spans. And then, of course, there is Twitter, that big, greedy conversation machine that absorbs and spits out "quotidian thoughts and activities," aggregating them to a public timeline. "You are basically writing on a wall and if someone chooses to read it, they can do," the Financial Times quotes Twitter-founder Jack Dorsey. The vision of a map of world chatter is not new, but its momentum is stunning. Twitter claims more than 100,000 members, and Hitwise, the web research firm, says visits to twitter.com in March were up 500 percent on January. Even John Edwards is a Twitterholic. And so is a (fake) Bill Clinton.

Welcome to the conversation age! It's not the first one ever (remember the "age of conversation" a few centuries ago?), but it is the first one in the history of economy, enabled and propelled by web 2.0 technologies. Gavin Heaton, who is currently working on an open-source e-book about the "conversation age," writes: "Technology in the guise of social media is giving rise to not virtual connections, but real conversation." Granted, this conversation started a while ago: the Cluetrain Manifesto pioneered the notion of brands as conversations - long before the triumphant rise of the blogosphere. The idea of the "Architecture of Participation" has been known for a while, too. But now, the "conversation economy" seems to have reached enough critical mass to become a new business paradigm. In the conversation economy "talking the talk" trumps "walking the walk." Words speak louder than actions. In fact, there is a "full-blown conversation going on about conversation," as Bruce Nussbaum points out, and one can even speak of a "long tail" of conversations - everyone, really everyone, has the chance these days to get the attention s/he deserves.

Conversation Architects = Evangelists?

The "conversation economy" is a sibling of the "influence economy" -- and they both have the "attention economy" as parent. In a poignant article for BusinessWeek, David Armano makes the case for grasping conversations as the currency of attention. In his eyes, Twitter has evolved from a simple service (that allowed users to express mundane thoughts) into a robust "conversation ecosystem" - based on widgets and mash-ups such as Twitteroo, Twitter Earth, Twittervision, and Twitterific that support dialogues based on feeds and feedback. But why is all this conversation rage such a rage for marketers? "Conversations lead to relationships and relationships lead to affinity," writes Armano. And personal affinity to brands is what marketers long for.

Hence John Battelle, former Wired editor, author of the standard book on "Search," and founder of Federated Media, explores economic models for "conversational marketing," whose raison d'etre he derives from the following insight: "... to have a conversation, you need to have something to say. And on conversational media sites, where the grammar and voices are so strong, you can't open a dialog with a deafening pitch, a crass come on. You have to understand the values of the site, and you have to have something that offers value, in context, to the audience." This requires a whole new breed of marketers, so-called "conversation architects;" professionals who possess the talent to understand conversations in their various contexts and modes as well have the ability to facilitate them across different social media platforms.

The main task for these conversation architects is to embrace inconsistency and divergence while maintaining personality, character, and integrity of a brand. At this point, though, you may ask yourself a blasphemous question: Aren't conversation architects essentially what companies used to call "evangelists"? And, are they, by joining and driving online and offline conversations within their community, not just simply engaging the already engaged, evangelizing the evangelizers? The answer is no. I think what's new and so remarkable about the phenomenon of today's "conversation economy" is that conversations have begun to reach beyond the boundaries of closed communities; they expand now to customers, media (and competitors!). They no longer occur only on the periphery of a brand; they become the main message and the heart and mind of the brand identity.

Empathy and Style

With this shift in focus, "conversational marketing" brings branding back to the fundamental parameters of dialogic human communication. Given influencer-driven word-of-mouth buzz and facing micro-audiences on blogs, video-sites, forums, and in chat rooms, the human voice, as the elemental medium of communication, is enjoying a renaissance. Washio Kazuhiko, a photographer and media researcher at the Institute of Media Environment in Tokyo, highlights this aspect in his book "Branding for Empathy:" There's something unique about the human voice that sets conversations apart from all other forms of communications: the ability to create empathy by tonality. We can feel and we can express empathy because of the way a voice sounds, both in verbal and written acts of communications. That's why video content will play an ever more important role in marketing. And that's why an authentic style will be substantial in engaging people in conversations.

With marketing becoming increasingly conversational, empathy becomes increasingly important. Empathy must not be confused with sympathy: Sympathy is literally 'feeling with' - compassion for or commiseration with another person. Empathy, by contrast, is literally 'feeling into' - the ability to project one's personality into another person and more fully understand that person. Sympathy is Steven Spielberg; empathy is Lars von Trier. You feel sympathy when you haven't been there; empathy is when you have. In this mediated world of omni- and ever-(tele)presence, empathy is key to effective communications. And in the world of atomized micro-audiences, empathy is key to effective marketing. Sympathy means you "liken" a brand to your own traits and virtues; empathy means you really care for it.

The ROI of a Conversation

There are some great examples of conversational marketing that is aware of its context and empathetic to its audiences. Batelle, for instance, examines the conversational nature of contextual advertising (Google Ads), elaborates on BoingBoing, and recalls the distinct editorial tone of Wired magazine (that led advertisers to gradually adopt it in their own language). He furthermore refers to the IT job board Dice. The site introduced a so-called "rant banner" and, instead of simply inviting readers to another site, invited its readers to add their conversational tidbits directly into the banner (the opening question was "Does your tech job suck?"). Other examples of smart conversational marketing are Symantec and Cisco (with its "Human Network"). All of them are "taking the conversation to another level - the conversation becomes the marketing, the medium is the message," writes Batelle.

For conversations in ad format, it is easy to evaluate their performance: You just look at the click-through or sell-through rates. For all other conversations, it is much more difficult to develop metrics. You may weigh the fact that an initially commercial conversation finds its way into a wider cultural canon (i.e. Cisco's Human network made it from Wikia, Wikipedia's commercial sibling, to Wikipedia). Or, in the case of Cisco, you may consider that a Google search returns the "human network" landing page in the #2 position - ahead of Cisco's own site - a success. For more informal, less action-oriented conversations, however, the challenge becomes to not only track conversations but also precisely measure their impact. Ideally, you want to be able to strategize and orchestrate future conversations based on the findings of today. Firms such as BuzzMetrics, recently acquired by Nielsen, have developed tools to track blog conversations, but the verdict is still out on how accurate these metrics really are. While they can provide absolute data and identify the quantity and even the quality of conversations about a brand, there is still no mechanism that - quantifiably - ties these conversations back to the business goals.

Promise-Based Management

Yet the power of conversations does not only apply to communications with external audiences; it also unfolds in a company's internal interactions. Companies may remain wary of the new radical transparency propagated by web 2.0 social media, as a recent McKinsey survey posits. Notwithstanding this hesitancy though, internal conversations are shaped by what philosopher John Austin conceived of as "speech-act theory" - the concept that written or verbal statements are not only descriptive but in fact serve as active statements that intend to "get things done" -- "in saying something, we do something." On these grounds Donald Sull, in a recent Harvard Business Review article, constructs a framework for what he coins "promise-based management." This framework understands active statements as the "strands that weave together coordinated activity in organizations" and conversations as a give-and-take mechanism that builds the social fabric of organizational behavior and provides the "essence of execution."

Anyway, I'm digressing, but I guess that's the nature of conversations. (John Batelle, to go back to the beginning, even uses a conversational format for his post and serializes it over the course of the day he's writing it.) Yes, indeed, conversing means "Thinking Out Loud." I have tried to aggregate and make sense of some of the existing perspectives on the conversation economy and condense all their complexity into blogspeak. It's a mission impossible. I don't really have a point of view. I don't have an argument to win. This is an ongoing conversation. I'm listening.

Comments

[occupation]

We are better off today than we were eight years ago

[Tim]

Hey Lois, good points: I like that you put the focus on listening. Oh, and having something to say, yes, that's the hardest part of all. ;) When is your book coming out?

[Lois Kelly]

Great post Tim. In researching my new book on conversational marketing ("Beyond Buzz")I found that the two of the five biggest obstacles companies face are 1) having something interesting to say -- points of view that the organization genuinely and passionately believe in, and 2) knowing how to listen -- recognizing, acknowledging and learning from people. Sounds simple, but there aren't a lot of companies that are good at doing either.

As for measuring conversations: there are two ways to go about it. One is putting a value of the insights from listening. The second is measuring how involved people become in your communications (posting, downloading podcasts, asking questions, etc.) because involvement is the prerequisite to action, whether that action is changing your mind, deciding to meet with a sales rep or buying.

[Tim]

Thanks, Chris, will check it out!

[Chris Abraham]

Have you checked out PostieCon which is simply about branding, generating revenue, getting better readership, more money from traffic and sharing all the best blogging techniques and tricks. The coolest thing is that Scoble is going to Keynote.