Why “The Conversation” Isn’t
Necessarily a Conversation
Ben McAllister

frog design | [e-mail]

 

Most weekday mornings are fairly predictable: I make a pot of coffee; I walk the dogs with my wife, Eliza; I have a second cup of coffee while Eliza gets ready. This probably sounds familiar, as we all have our routines. But this is not where the predictability in my day ends.

I check email on my phone to find a daily handful of mass mail from various research firms and business publications. Many of the articles within these emails (especially those targeted toward marketers) will be on the topic of social media. Perhaps this, too, is a normal part of your morning. If that’s the case, perhaps you have noticed the content of these emails is also a bit predictable.

You tend to see these words:
engagement, metrics, conver-
sation, ROI, community, shar-
ing, measurement, dialogue.
Ultimately, these emails regress
toward some variation on “Social
media is about engagement!
Companies need to join the con-
versation!” Starting your day in
this way can make you feel a
little bit like Bill Murray in the
movie “Groundhog Day.”
I suppose there’s good money
to be made in periodically brow-
beating companies into “joining
the conversation.” But there are
problems with this advice (that
go beyond the sheer banality of
it all). The biggest problem with
these discussions is they tend
to substitute peer pressure for
insight. You need to do this because
everyone else is. No wonder so
many brands feel panicked
about social media. They feel
like they need to be there, but
they don’t know what to do or
why to do it. And if they dare to
question any of the conventional
wisdom on social media, they’re
accused of “not getting it.”
The more significant problem
I see is the tendency to lump
all social networks into one. If
any differences are discussed,
the conversation tends to be
framed as a horse race. “Twitter
is hot!” “Is Facebook getting old?”
“Does You Tube make money?”
But these various networks have
some important structural dif-
ferences. The better we under-
stand what these differences are
and how they affect behavior,
the better equipped we’ll be
to use these networks, design
for these networks, and advise
clients what to do with these
networks.

Some of the ways in which social networks differ affect the central metaphor that we often use to describe them: “the conversation.” In fact, the more time I spend in the social web, the more I’m convinced that the conversation metaphor isn’t quite right. Just as one’s “friends” aren’t necessarily one’s actual friends, “the conversation” isn’t always a conversation.

Take Twitter, for example. Despite consistently being described as a medium for conversation (its tagline is even “Join the Conversation”), there are some tangible, structural reasons why Twitter can actually be quite hostile to real conversation.

Reason No. 1: Public by default

In a post on the PopMatters blog
Marginal Utility, Rob Horning
wrote: “Because the online space
is devoid of conflict—everyone
is ‘friends’—it is anodyne; ‘the
Tyranny of Positive Energy’
assures that politics is screened
out of online social behavior.”
This statement might hold
true in an environment like
Facebook, in which one’s online
“friends” are more likely to be
one’s real-world friends, and
status updates are private by
default. But in the Twitterverse,
communication is often any-
thing but anodyne. In fact, it
can be downright incendiary, a

September + October 2010