I recently bought the second iteration of the Age of Conversation project, begun by bloggers Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton, entitled the Age of Conversation 2: Why Don’t They Get It? The book is a collection of over 230 authors from around the world that talk about conversation and what it means to today’s world of marketing. I find this information fascinating because of it’s enormous impact on and insight into the digital world. As I read through I will be updating the blog with some of the books content and my thoughts.
Reg Adkins, in Veritus Exostra: The Truth Revealed, lists “six trail markers that can help us on our way toward shared meaning.”
1. Edutaining is requisite: it’s about the reader/audience not the author/storyteller.
2. Remember the truth of conversing in faceless space: Six billion individual calling voices are just noise until they share a common concern.
3. The currency of conversation: consistent creativity is not an oxymoron.
4. Inclusion, control and affection are universal needs; the tolerance levels for the same are not standard.
5. Suspension of disbelief: I must momentarily reject my own reality in order to embrace yours.
6. In five years electronic publications have transformed concepts of plagiarism, research, borrowing, and disowning into the Disneyesque concept Imagineering.
Adkins uses an illustration of your finger displacing water in a glass. The water represents a person and your finger is your message. Your message displaces what was in existence at that moment. The catch is, if you remove your finger from the glass, the water returns to it’s original state, now unaffected by your message. What was the long term impact of your conversation? “That is why people don’t get it. It’s not about inserting a message; it’s about communally finding meaning.”
People (viewers/customers/readers) are looking for a relationship, not a message. Use conversation as a way to build a lasting relationship, not as a technique to sell something. The lasting impact will be much greater.
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