Publishing as conversation.

This is the generation of publishing. We can talk about social media, but at core, it’s the mass adoption of publishing and distribution as a part of everyday life, and the creation and acceptance of tools to do so.

This is the biggest shift that companies aren’t understanding: publishing isn’t only about creating a durable state to share information, anymore. Publishing has turned into a form of dialogue, enabled by the speed and ease of creation and distribution.

Blogging, and social networks like Facebook, are akin to traditional publishing, if you ignore the specific means used.  That is to say, content is created, published to make it durable and shareable, and then distributed to an audience, large or small, personal or impersonal. While there is a definite back and forth here (comments, wall posts, private messages) the key focus is publishing and distribution: the framework exists as a bunch of blank spaces for you to input information, and a means to discuss and share that information. But this isn’t the game changing behavior here. This is the application of old behaviors and frameworks across new technologies; the form is new, but the human reaction makes sense once we actually figure out what we’re looking at.

Publishing as conversation is a very different thing. Twitter is an example of this, but so are message boards, the forgotten precursor to social media. These formats are focused on interaction, not about content creation. Publishing is the means of holding the conversation, but durability is an incidental benefit, not one directly tied to the way it is used. THIS is what changes everything; a conversation is now something that can be dissected, analyzed, and distributed on a segmented level. A single tweet is most often part of a wider point, exchange or idea. And we haven’t developed a standard system for tracking the connections and context of these conversations. 

You can look at a Twitter feed as talking with instant replay, of sorts - a conversation or dialogue that let’s you stop at an individual moment, and examine the context, metadata, and responses to that specific element of the whole. This is on par with being able to create annotations on an article and send them to the writer, focused on a sentence rather than the whole.

Think of it as augmented conversation: much as AR is a data layer over reality, letting you add to the seen or felt with digital content and context, reactions and responses to one element of a conversation-via-publishing, expand and explore each individual subunit.

Publishing as conversation means we’ve made stream of consciousness something that can be created, challenged, and sifted through for value. We haven’t figured out how to create great content through publishing as conversation, and we haven’t really figured out how to interpret it, either.

The key point is this. We thought we’d stumbled on to a revelation when ‘internet people’ began noticing that everything is publishing, now. We missed the point entirely, as we always do: publishing no longer means what we thought it did.  Publishing is breaking into many, many little pieces, and the magic is going to be in finding how these flavors of the greater concept influence, and are influenced by, human behavior.

The Death Of Comments

Blog comments are dying off.  This isn’t sad, it’s a natural evolution.

Many of my favourite bloggers, and people, have been reduced to flat out asking people to comment more, in posts, on twitter, and sometimes in conversation.  It makes sense, commenting was currency at one point, it was an indicator you’d said something intelligent, conversation starting, insightful or controversial.  But I’ve been noticing something of a trend of declining comments, and I think it’s probably a good thing.

Comments are an attempt to corral the conversation, which is generally the worst plan in social media.

The refrain has been coming for a few years now - the brand of the future won’t have a web page, it will have a dozen presences on existing sites, each tailored to the audience that dwells there.  I have a feeling this is related to the decline in blog comments - the people who most want to interact with content, use it to start a conversation, or discuss it with the author - they have their own forums.

Blog comments have moved to twitter, or youtube, or facebook, and to our own blogs.  They’ve moved to places where we can bring the conversation, and our ideas, to the audiences and friends that we have established individually.  When I comment on your blog, I am talking to you, and maybe, if both of us are lucky, the community of people who read your blog on the page where it’s published, rather than in RSS.  In realistic terms, other than a means of speaking with the writer, commenting on a blog is putting your words into a corner, and forgetting to tell them time out is over.

When a friend, company or colleague suggest building their own social network, building their own place to host a community and a conversation, I always ask why.  I almost never receive a satisfactory answer.  Are you going to build a community better than Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn has?  Are you going to attract more users than them to yet another service, but this time with such a niche focus that you’re asking them to segment their lives another step further?  If your product, your brand, your niche so essential that people will craft another online persona just to interface with it?

If so, we should really go for coffee ;)

And if not, you need to stop trying to own the conversation and the community.  You need to start feeling lucky that you get to participate in it, and start figuring out how you’re going to serve it.

Most importantly, you need to stop being disappointed that people are talking about how much they like you in public, rather than waiting until they are inside your living room to do so.

Social Media: Reducing Conversational Fluff.

Social media has made it possible for the last decade or so, to inform my friends, en masse, about big events in my life. I have said, dozens of times, “did you see my blog post on (insert subject)” allowing me to jump in to the actual conversation I want to have, rather than spending precious time with people I care about giving out background information.

The same principle is in effect when you find out about a friend’s wedding, or birthday party, or break-up, or career change through a blog, twitter, facebook, etc. This is a sub-unit of conversation that you no longer need to waste time exchanging in person. More than that, it’s the extension of a relationship to a wider world than direct, real time conversation.

When I hear about using data from social networks to target, I feel people are missing the point. I’d rather the (truly staggering amount of) data available online related to my interests, my personal life, etc, be used to cut the wasted time out of transactions and conversations. The same way I would expect any potential co-worker to have researched the firm I work at, the same way I research every client and client corporation before meeting them, I expect people who specifically want to interact with me, to (at some point in the near future, at least) take advantage of the mass of data I leave in my wake.

Social media, in my experience, is most powerful when it’s being used to build or intensify real-world connections. When I say real-world, I don’t mean ‘in person’, but instead ‘not confined to a single platform’. You can walk into your first face-to-face meeting with someone, and know enough to conduct a genuine, meaningful conversation. The information is out there, and with the right mixture of looking for it, and asking if you can see it, you can be prepared.

Don’t worry about scalability or lead generation. Worry about reducing conversational fluff.