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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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The irrelevance of the broken conversation

Shel HoltzI was standing among a group at a gathering of communicators, chatting about this and that. During the course of the conversation, a colleague raised an interesting point and the discussion veered off into opinions and analyses of the issue he raised. Later, I found myself in another group, where I brought up the earlier topic of discussion. This group was somewhat less interested; we chatted about it for a few minutes, then digressed into something else. One member of that group, however, apparently brought it up over drinks with his girlfriend, who passed it along in the ladies room where she and some friends were touching up their makeup during a girl’s night out.

Ultimately, the topic raised initially in the first conversation was addressed in many different places. But is it one conversation? And while the word-of-mouth may ultimately lead a lot of people to form some opinions about the issue, is it important for anyone to be able to connect the dots?

The scenario never actually happened to me. I made it up to illustrate a point. On the other hand, it has probably happened to me hundreds of times. Organizations at the heart of such word-of-mouth relays are, of course, interested in what people are saying and how it affects them. They may even want to know if somebody influential is shaping the opinion and spreading it beyond the reach of the average Joe. But knowing exactly who said what to whom and how the word spread? That knowledge just won’t make any difference.

And, I suspect, it won’t make any more of a difference when these word-of-mouth baton handoffs occur online.

Several recent posts have lamented the lack of cohesion to conversations taking place in the ever-fragmenting social media space. Discussions that used to be confined to blogs and message boards are now dispersed through several distinct categories of social media. As Todd Defren put it:

You write a blog post.  You tweet about it.  It gets posted to your FriendFeed profile.  You share it via Facebook.  You save it to del.icio.us. Your friends, followers and colleagues comment on the blog. Or they say something nice via Twitter (where a conversation related to your post ensues). Or, they comment directly via your FriendFeed profile.  Or they comment on your Facebook post. Or they save the post to their own del.icio.us account and add a comment there.

This, Todd suggests, means the conversation is disjointed and unthreaded. It’s broken. Brian Solis agrees:

As the host of any given conversation, it is almost impossible to expect your community to discover or congregate around your content in any one given place, especially the point of origin. It???s both the challenge and the promise of micromedia and social networks. The comments section of your blog, for example may not truly represent the community response or reaction because it may thrive across other disparate networks and communities, whether you???re aware of it or not.

There is no denying Todd and Brian—and others who have commented on the issue—are right about the fragmentation. There is also no question that the fragmentation makes it difficult to figure out where the conversation started. But that’s also the case offline, and always has been. It may not be fair that I don’t get credit for a conversation I kicked off because someone who read it took the story to a Facebook group instead of confining herself to my blog. But life’s not fair, and life never had the equivalent of a blog, where every conversation was contained in a single place, except maybe group therapy. The fragmentation of social media, then, is an evolution into something more like the real world, with which we must cope the same way we do in the real world.

At the conclusion of his post, Todd says he doesn’t have the answer and wonders who does. I’m not sure there is one. More to the point, I’m not sure there needs to be one. Somebody may create an application or site that somehow manages to piece all the threads together, but to what end?

In a comment on the meme, Daniel Riveong wondered if the concern over the broken conversation is targeting the forrest or the trees. Katie Delahaye Paine (author of the terrific new book, “Measuring Public Relationships”) commented that Daniel rasied an important point. “The point for all measurement is to figure out what the program is doing for the business or the organizational mission (if its a non-profit),” she wrote. “Until people stop worrying about capturing every blog mention, and look instead at what impact it’s having on the business, we???re all wasting our time.”

So the conversation is fragmented. So what else is new?

04/15/08 | 8 Comments | The irrelevance of the broken conversation

Comments

  • 1.Perhaps the concern is on a much simpler, more practical level. I'm with you in that, strategically speaking, looking at the big picture, the minutiae of exactly who said what to whom isn't particularly relevant.

    However, for people trying to understand and catch up on even the basics of what's going on with online communication -- "I just signed up for Twitter, and now you're telling me there's this new FriendFeed thing?" -- I can see a legitimate cause for concern. The fragmentation, while natural and unstoppable, makes things more complicated than many people would like. That's all.

    Mike Keliher | April 2008 | St. Paul, Minn.

  • 2.I hear ya. I really just think it the splintering of The Conversation is kind of a bummer for both the blogger and the reader.

    As a blogger, some of my best blog comments happen on Twitter; I am quite simply saddened that those thought-provoking reactions aren't being captured and addressed at the original content source - for the edification of my blog's readers, and even "for posterity."

    As a reader of blogs, I can sometimes miss-out on fascinating conversations about topics of-interest because they happen away from the content source.

    Is it a huge problem? Naw. World Hunger, Endless War in the Middle East, and the Climate Crisis strike me as more pertinent!

    But I think that eventually BLOG POSTS will be enabled with FRIENDFEED-style capabilities, i.e.:

    THIS IS THE BLOG POST.
    -THESE ARE THE COMMENTS @ THE BLOG
    -THESE ARE THE COMMENTS ABOUT THIS POST THAT HAPPENED ON TWITTER, ON FRIENDFEED, ON FACEBOOK, etc. (aggregated and threaded AT the post itself)

    Todd Defren | April 2008 | Boston (today, anyway)

  • 3.Conversation fragmentation is a healthy thing, too. When the conversation spreads to different places, these sub-conversations take on their own personality. I've occasionally written about something on more than one of my blogs - all of which have different audiences and focus on different things - and entirely different conversations take off. One may be among marketers talking about how a new technology affects them, while on my personal blog the discussion gets into privacy issues. Each of those online communities has its own personality and its own set of participants, and they have their own take on things.

    I'm certainly interested in seeing all of it - but some of it is likely to take off in directions that are interesting for participants, but perhaps not so relevant for me, or for people in other communities.

    John Whiteside | April 2008 | Houston, TX

  • 4.In my social circle, we refer to this as a "paradigm shift without a clutch" :-). You wouldn't believe some of the tangents we diverge onto.

    On urbanohio.com, one of the web boards I frequent, the mods do a decent job of wielding the topic hammer and thread splitting and redirection to keep conversations from digressing too far. Conversations, however, are as organic as the people they are composed of, and a certain amount of mutation will take place over time. THIS IS A GOOD THING, because mutation is the basis for evolution.

    It's also why effective search is a wonderful tool in piecing together all of the information on a topic, as it may be scattered in places where you'd least expect it. Let it scatter and grow, then use search to reassemble the bits and reinitiate the conversation after interest has spread.

    Mike Cermak | April 2008 | Cleveland, OH

  • 5.Thanks for bringing up this point, Shel, as it has been on my mind as well. As you point out, "broken" conversations take place everywhere, not just on the internet. It's natural. If I want to talk about something, I don't go find the original blog post, I talk about it where I am, or where it's easy to find the people with whom I want to discuss it.



    It is an issue for PR tracking, but we just have to deal with it.

    Doug Haslam | April 2008 | Boston

  • 6.It IS a bummer, Todd, but a minor one, since it's something we're accustomed to in the offline world. If it didn't work this way, how would anything ever go viral? And, of course, how do we track the conversation once it leaves the Net and becomes a topic of conversation at a dinner party? Is conversation conversation, or is it somehow a completely different beast when it's online?

    Shel Holtz | April 2008 | Concord, CA

  • 7.I ain't losing sleep over it. ;)

    Todd Defren | April 2008 | Boston

  • 8.This is precisely the 'what happens next?' issue once the option is taken to start a conversation on multiple systems at the same time through, say, Blog It or FB. I like that bloggers still have a learning curve, because the community around their conversation is splintered - it's not enough to use Twitter to flag a new post on your blog, you have a different conversation/community around Twitter than you do around your blog. Maybe bloggers will need to better understand which parts of a conversation are suitable for which parts of their community, and adjust their approach accordingly. Having pointed out to MSM that the conversation/community/feedback is distributed, it is the blogger's turn to realise that the same now applies to them.

    Jasbinder | April 2008 | London

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