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@SXSW: Branded Conversations / Some Quick Thoughts on the Past, Present, and Future of Twitter

Someone blogged that SXSW Interactive is just like the Internet itself – disjointed, decentralized, scattered, fast, aggressive, random, fragmented, and so on. In fact, the main commonality between the two may be that the number of attributes to describe them is infinite. Like the Internet, the annual tech conference in Austin is an echo chamber of an echo chamber, a place where original thought and commentary get mixed up and mashed up in a highly self-referential meta-conversation.

That was already the case before Twitter entered the scene at SXSW two years ago but the micro-blogging service has certainly amplified the effect. It was both comical and frightening to see the uber-individualistic geeksters at SXSW captivated by the invisible rules of an ostentatious behavioral uniformity: Within one mile of the convention center you could observe the strange ritual of groups of people standing or sitting together, chained to their iPhones, twittering instead of talking: “#SXSW. Twittering about SXSW.” The real conversation was often limited to a quick “What’s your name?” or “Where’s the next party?” just to have some input for the next tweet. It is indeed a Read-Write generation that is coming of age in the wake of an all-dominant present, with no particular loyalty to the past and maybe not even an interest in the future (see Peggy Orenstein’s recent piece on “Growing Up on Facebook” in the NY Times Magazine).

Yet the rise of the social digerati is unstoppable. New data by Nielsen Online shows that social networking sites (which encompass social networks and blogs by Nielsen’s definition) are experiencing growth rates of twice as much as any of the main destination sites (search, portals, PC software sites, and email). The time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth. Furthermore, social networks are gaining traction among new audiences. On Facebook in particular, “the greatest growth... has come from people aged 35-49 years (+24.1 million). Furthermore, Facebook has added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million).”

Of all the social networks, Twitter may well be the most pervasive broad- and narrowcasting channel, propelled by an ever-growing base of users. Every day more sophisticated Twitter business models are popping up that move the service closer into the hands of a mainstream audience: charity campaigns such as Twestival and Tweetsgiving (Robert Fabricant pointed out that there is a natural synergy between micro-blogging and micro-donating), as well as San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s efforts to use Twitter as an official channel for city-wide emergency communications are just two of them. And when even Jon Stewart features Twitter and all major publications run how-to guides, this seems to be a clear sign that Twitter is entering the mainstream.

But is it really? First of all, let’s remember that it took the service, despite all the hype, two years to reach today’s level of attention. And the adoption is primarily happening in the US. Even the Internet population of Germany (40 million), the third largest economy in the world, is still lagging: Twitter has only 27,000 registered German users at this point. Let’s also put Twitter usage in context of the overall digital footprint: Twitter has 11 million registered users and attracted seven million unique visitors in February, which represents a stunning 1,382 percent growth since last year. The total Internet user base, however, consists of 1.4 billion users. The most widely used data application on the planet is SMS text messaging: three billion people actively use it. And compared to Facebook’s 175 million users, Twitter’s numbers are miniscule. In other words: The whole world may be talking about Twitter, but the whole world is not yet talking on it. The next few months will tell us if Twitter is over-hyped or if we’re witnessing a revolution – and if so, if the revolution will eat itself.

That’s exactly the concern of Twine founder Nova Spivack who might speak for many other early Twitter adopters when he warns of the implications of Twitter’s massive growth and the increasing amount of uncontrolled abundance. Let alone potential security vulnerabilities, he flags “Mainstream Adoption” (“Tens of millions of new users are going to flood into the service. It is going to fill up with mainstream consumers. Many of them won't have a clue how to use Twitter”) and “Notifications Galore” (“Every service on the Web is going to rush to pump notifications and invites into Twitter”) as the two main threats. In his opinion, “There is soon going to be vastly more content in Twitter, and too much of it will be noise.” This raises an important question: Will Twitter remain an open-ended, self-organized conversation or will we see the emergence of more filters to make sense (and money) of all this chatter? Or, more philosophically put: Can we handle abundance (the entire Twitterverse) without any scarcity (the filter/curator)?

I’d say we need some scarcity, some reduction of choices. Spivack suggests introducing adding meta-data to save Twitter from its very eloquence, and there is definitely demand for organizing the ‘entropic chaos’ that characterizes the never-ending Twitter conversation. This could be an opportunity not only for Twitter itself but also third-party brands acting as curators. So far, almost all Twitter apps either add value on the input side (Twitterphone, Twitterific), visualize the output (see Pepsi Co.'s Zeitgeist app), or combine both (Tweetdeck). But one dimension is underexploited: accessibility.

“Brand curators” – operating along the coordinates of organization (self-organization vs. curation) and timing (real-time vs. past) of Twitter content could offer just that: making Twitter more accessible. For example, they could provide vertical search feeds (in real-time) plus some additional context. Both could be embedded in a visually rich ‘landscape’ view that features ‘favorites’ (domain experts), most popular (re-tweeted) tweets, and “breaking tweets.” In addition, Twitter curators could compile past tweets within certain categories or topic areas, as editorialized search results. Or they could create some ‘artificial scarcity’ and offer programmed Twitter slots, limited in time and audience (Liz Kelly from Brilliant Ink told me recently about a one-hour panel of journalists on Twitter as just one example). The brand would act as a ‘human’ search filter, as a trusted authority that uncovers and organizes relevant tweets. This could be interesting for media companies or brands that are transforming into media companies.

It’s worth pointing out that this scenario is not identical with just a branded linear Twitter feed. What I’m envisioning is a bias to commentary instead of immediacy. Not just a stream of tweets – a handpicked collage of various adjacent Twitter formats (replies, direct messages, re-tweets, searches). Think of it as Tweetdeck for the more passive mainstream user who wants to read tweets rather than write them. First steps into this direction are Breaking Tweets, Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, and especially MyAlltop, the recently launched customizable version of the news rack. Offering celebrity MyAlltop lists, the service provides a blue print for brands: it creates a dashboard that offers curated content, features star Twitterers and their recommendations, and highlights tweets by categories. MyAlltop demonstrates that the verticalization of the Twitterverse is of most value if it goes along with a presentation that is horizontal.

The biggest opportunity may be something more fundamental, and it may be one for Twitter itself: a public archive of tweets. Have you ever wondered where the huge volume of Twitter-generated content goes? Who owns all your tweets? Are you giving away your data or sharing it? How can you access it (besides going back chronologically through the search function)? Sure, Twitter keeps tweets and doesn't auto-delete them. You can also set up a LoudTwitter account to generate daily blog posts that contain all your tweets from the past 24 hours. Or you can use Tweetdumpr, which creates a .csv file with your last 250 tweets (it used to be the entire record; the fact that Twitter has limited it lately shows that it may have an interest in monetizing past tweets). But all of these services work only for your own tweets and are rather cumbersome. What I’d like to see is a public Twitter archive. There is value in storing and distributing old conversations, the “now” that’s long gone. Clearly, the totality of tweets represents a massive library of human thought that we need to preserve and make accessible. In the future, wouldn’t it be interesting to go back in time to rediscover the SXSW tweets from 2009? Memory is a vital aspect of all communications, a prerequisite of accountability – yes, one could even consider it a human right. With traditional media eventually locked out of the conversation, we need to maintain the ability to revisit past events (even if they were just communicative) – if not to rectify them so at least to reflect on them.

Or is there no need to remember – and we just go with the feed? Can meaning be self-organized – without scarcity, without historians, without interpreters? And are we producing any meaning at all, or is true what the Boston Globe pointed out: Just as technology is giving us the ability to amplify every word we utter we have nothing really meaningful to say? I guess none of these questions can be answered in 140 characters. Let me know what you think – but take your time.

On the Beach

Someone once said that the sound of crushing ocean waves is louder than the engines of a starting plane. As I’m lying here on Poipu Beach in Kauai, I find this to be somewhat accurate. Everything else is quiet though, including my mind. Beach life brings back child memories of vacations with my parents in Tuscany: innocent flings and early scars from over-reaching -- the literal salt in the wounds, the exhaustion after a day out in the water, the crazy sunburn, in short: a premature "desire for anything" (as Walter Salles puts it in Central Station). All this makes me want to slightly paraphrase Pascal: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly on his beach."

From Confession to Profession: The Rise of Micro-Fame and Self-PR

With everyone becoming a producer in the YouTube age, self-branding ("The Brand Called You") has evolved from a fancy to a necessity. Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame have shrunk to five seconds of micro-fame, and in the contained public arena of social networks amateur paparazzi -- thanks to the viral nature of social media -- have the power to grant celebrity status. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Clive Thompson's poignant piece for Wired on the rise of "microcelebrities."

As Facebook walls make personal communications open to the rest of your trusted network, even your most private moments become public relations. What used to be said in email is now "the writing on the wall." This radical transparency lets more and more Internet users nurture their image, manage their privacy, stage their public appearances, and distribute carefully chosen content to their circle of online friends.

PR professionals will have mixed emotions about this trend as the borders between profession and confession are increasingly blurry. Thompson quotes Theresa Senft, a media studies professor and one of the first to identify the rise of microcelebrities: "People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives. Corporations are getting humanized, and humans are getting corporatized." And he writes: "In essence, I'm sending out press releases. Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and 'message' almost like a self-contained public relations department."

The growing sophistication for managing one's online reputation is supported by the findings of a recently released study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, stating that Internet users have become more aware of their digital footprint: In 2007, 47 percent searched for information about themselves online, compared to just 22 percent in 2002, and 60 percent of US Internet users surveyed were not concerned about how much information is available about them online. This stands in stark contrast to the 84 percent, who, in a similar study in 2000, had expressed concern about third parties getting personal information about them from the Internet. Teenagers, the Pew study shows, understand the implications of their digital footprint best, protecting their privacy by using pseudonyms or private accounts, and locking personal details into "walled gardens."

Portals vs. Social Networks? The New Operating System!

Over on Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel is making a bold prediction: The portals will be big winners in the social networking wars. "Social networking is certainly rising and there seems to be no end in sight to the phenomenon. However, what I do know is that people will jump around from one Myfaceborkutspace to another and not all of them will win." Rubel refers to Long Tail author Chris Anderson who points out that all good web sites should have elements of social networking and therefore suggests that social networking is "a feature, not a destination." Rubel believes that the portals' key advantage is that they "own the glue that keeps many of us connected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones -- e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net."

That's true. You could also say that our buddy list is our social network, and we appreciate just plugging it into the most convenient and trusted network of our choice. Call it the floating network. I therefore also agree with Rubel when he says that "No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central."

There are good reasons why there is a lot at stake for the traditional portals, and there are good reasons (Rubel names them) to predict they will not just sit back and watch the young social networking sites own the game, especially now that business has begun facing up to social networks. And yet, I am hesitant to follow Rubel's prediction that the portals will have the upper hand in this conflict. In fact, I think he gets the conflict wrong. I don't think this is as strict an antagonism as Rubel describes it, and I would even question the "war parties" as he identifies them: On the one side, the emerging social networks that are relentlessly trying to enhance the one main feature they're built upon ("making connections") into a platform. On the other side, the big portals, the AOLs, MSNs, Yahoo!s, that are seeking to operate more like social networks. This is an over-simplified showdown, for Rubel stages a competition where, in fact, we witness a co-evolution. The portals will adapt the best social networking features, for example by activating the "dormant social networks" they own (see Yahoo! Mash), and the social networks will adapt some of the portals' features; just yesterday AllFacebook and Paid Content speculated that Facebook is preparing to launch a music platform, either as a potential iTunes killer (according to AllFacebook) or a MySpace competitor (according to Paid Content).

However -- and herein lies the major difference to Rubel's assumption -- both social networks and portals strive to eventually become something entirely different: the new operating system. Facebook is not shy about its intentions, and you could argue that they've already transformed the site into something much bigger than a social network.

It is a not a social networking war; it is a race to become the de facto operating system for the social networker. And that is of course why Google, which is neither a social network nor a portal, is in the game, too. The company is said to be feverishly working on "out-facebooking" Facebook by introducing a meta-platform that integrates not only a suite of Google services (like iGoogle, Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut, etc.) but is also 100% open to third-party developers -- and other social networks. Google's recent acquisition of mobile social network Zingku indicates that this uber-platform may have a strong mobile component and the long-rumored free, ad-based phone service. In other words, while social networks and portals are fighting the "social networking wars," Google may be winning the actual competition at hand: to become the dominant operating system for all of our communications. You can also call it the World Wide Web.

The Next Round of Social Networking Craze – The Next New Life

Yahoo! provides another example of why real innovation is happening in some basements in South Park or Palo Alto, but certainly cannot be expected from one of the Web behemoths. Mash, obviously Yahoo’s way of quietly saying farewell to its Yahoo! 360 social network, is at first glance a somewhat uninspired attempt to catch up with Facebook. Even the name is boring - Mash! Don’t mix it up, by the way, with Mosh, Nokia’s mobile networking site (currently in beta) and Mashable, the social networking blog. Mash (invite-only as of now) looks like a cross between Facebook, MySpace, and Netvibes — and it also has a bit of Wiki DNA: anyone you grant permissions to can edit your profile or add modules they think are relevant to your profile. Besides that, nothing new.

To be fair, it may not be a super-innovative move to come up with another social networking site, but if you were a Yahoo! exec, wouldn’t you do the same? As one of the burgeoning social networks may potentially emerge as the new Internet, and yes, maybe the new operating system, Yahoo! simply can’t afford to not jump on the bandwagon and not leverage the viral powers of its broad user base.

As a user though, I have mixed emotions. I have slowly built my LinkedIn network over the years (although all my European friends remain on Xing, formerly OpenBC), jumped on and off Friendster, and just made it onto Facebook, as a very late adopter, and now I should join yet another network? What are the benefits? Besides a few neat features, what makes Mash truly different than the leader of the pack? Can I at least import my Facebook buddy lists? Is there really a market for multiple social networks? Can you, my loyal friends, please stay with me and not emigrate again? And yet, there is hope: every new social network is a chance to learn from the mistakes you made on past sites (when your invitation-happiness compromised the quality of your network…). It’s a chance to re-invent yourself, relaunch your identity, and start a new life. So I will give it a try.

Micro-Productivity: Man vs. Machine, Divergence vs. Convergence in the Interaction Economy

Credit: Urban Junkie

According to a McKinsey & Company study of US economic activity, "Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can’t be automated is the next big performance challenge." The study argues that "as more companies come to specialize in core activities and outsource the rest, they have greater need for workers who can interact with co-workers, partners, and vendors," supported by highly personalized organizing and communication tools. 40 percent of labor activity, says McKinsey, comes not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what the consultancy calls the "Interaction Economy," which it defines as the "searching, coordinating, and monitoring required to exchange good or services."

This interaction economy emphasizes collaboration, social intelligence, tacit knowledge, and ambiguity, as much as it values workers' ability to make individual decisions quickly and organize tasks and time efficiently – in a nutshell: it puts a much stronger focus on the non-formalized, individual productivity or "micro-productivity" of employees. McKinsey says that this area of productivity involves the highest-priced labor of the most valued knowledge workers and yet remains the hardest to measure and manage.

It is also the least commoditized part of the economy, for a good reason: it would be counter-productive to decrease the level of entrepreneurial freedom at the micro-level by trying to implement streamlined de rigueur organizing tools. More companies are starting to realize that it might be a better alternative to provide a vast array of tools and leave it up to the workers to tailor them creatively to their specific needs - the human being and not the application as the meta-organizer. "You’re not trying to automate the task a human does; you’re trying to complement what the human is doing,” says James M. Manyika, a senior partner at McKinsey, who co-authored the study, in a recent New York Times article about personal organizing tools and company mash-ups. Micro-productivity applications such as Scrybe or 37 Signals may indeed lead to more productivity gains than big companywide applications such as enterprise resource planning or arcane knowledge management portals, which because of their rigidity too often limit innovation and creativity. And BusinessWeek reports that E*Trade, Siemens, JDS Uniphase, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Coldwell Banker Commercial are all using enterprise mashups in some capacity. Just as personal computers released the gridlock of corporate information to employees, personal organizers and mash-ups are empowering the individual worker to effectively engage in the “soft” yet critical tasks of collaboration, organizing, communications, and interaction – and let them choose themselves how to best accomplish that.

This is an interesting premise as this new "tacit technology" combines seemingly antagonistic convergent and divergent elements (as so many innovations do these days). The demand for a meta-organizer which combines myriad schedules and calendar applications is contrasted by the demand for personalized and individualistic organizing options that are divergent because they consider the differences in the user's preferences.” David Weinberger, author of the book "Everything is Miscellaneous," argues: "What we need is the ability to associate the people and the times and the places of our lives with the broad messy context of our lives." He adds that these new productivity tools are "an early but important step toward giving individuals at companies a better way to manage their increasingly complicated existence."

The recognition of micro-productivity is part of a broader trend – the renaissance of a human-centered economy that introduces new organizational and business models to re-cast the old Man vs. Machine story. Consumers want it real and human - post-industrial, excellent, unique, provocative, sentimental, opinionated, boutique, artisan, (eco-) epicurean, handcrafted, hand-wrought, warm, attentive, devoted. And companies are getting it. From user-centered design (Apple, Cisco, HP, etc.), user-generated content (Blogs, Wikis, Slideshare, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) to human-powered search (ChaCha, Mahalo), crowdsourcing, GeekSquad (call 1-800-GEEK-SQUAD - of all places, a technology company - and hear how the use of a real human voice and humorous options helps render the company real), to the new social and green responsibilities of the "high-purpose company," the rise of a more powerful human resources function, and a new quest for "authenticity" – the human is, once again, back at the center of attention and the economic value chain.

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.

Yahoo and the 176 Papers: Content is King (Again)

A few days after an internal memo accusing Yahoo of a lack of a cohesive strategy leaked to the Wall Street Journal (“the Peanut Butter Manifesto”), the company is in the news again. The Internet portal is “going back to the future” – partnering with the old economy. As reported by several business publications yesterday, a consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country launched a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising, and technology.

In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads. But the long-term goal of the alliance is to have the newspaper content tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo. During the next year, newspapers will begin displaying their news articles and local ads on Yahoo’s online network. Yahoo, in turn, will make available local event listings, maps, search technology and other content and tools on the newspapers’ Web sites. Yahoo will also use its technology to help newspapers sell online ads.

The partnership with Yahoo marks a new era for the newspapers, which are now shaking hands with the very forces they once considered to be their biggest threat. It also positions Yahoo as a more powerful counterweight to Google, which had just signed with 50 papers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune.

Yahoo also closed a deal with AT&T (T), formerly SBC, on Monday, making it the default webpage and email service for AT&T’s DSL broadband customers.

Observers interpret Yahoo’s recent moves as an attempt to better monetize its traffic by growing the advertising business beyond classified ads and aggressively targeting local markets. BusinessWeek supposes that proper execution of the newspaper deal, as well as a successful launch of Yahoo's improved search advertising technology ("Project Panama") early next year could bring Yahoo back in a leadership position.

Social Networking Sites and Urbanization: Connection, Creation, Collaboration

Inspired by an Financial Times article on social networking “priestess” Danah Boyd, John Hagel has sketched out an interesting typology of social network sites. Rather than categorize sites themselves he contends that it may be more useful to think about three primary functions of these sites – connection, creation (both identity creation -- MySpace -- and content creation -- Wallop, Flickr, YouTube), and collaboration (commentary, conversations, construction). Individual sites can then be analyzed in terms of their relative emphasis on these three functions.

Hagel believes that social networking sites propel the “the unparalleled ability of cities to create and nurture dense and productive networks of social relationships:” “Far from substituting for urbanization, social network sites will increase the value we reap from locating in urban environments. The two will play off each other in interesting and unexpected ways.”

Bloggers are Blogging It For Themselves

According to a report on blogging released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, bloggers are a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives. The report also said that 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog, and that 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs. Despite a potentially vast audience in cyberspace, the Pew project found that 52 percent of bloggers said they blogged mostly for themselves. When asked for a major reason for blogging, 52 percent said it was to express themselves creatively and 50 percent said it was to document and share personal experiences. Didn't we know it all along?