Conversations and Dialogue

You know how ideas sometimes seem to appear in two different places at the same time?

I noticed a case of parallel spontaneous idea creation today when my RSS reader included an entries from John Battelle and Seth Godin.

Battelle is doing a form of liveblogging (or web-enhanced writing as he calls it), where he’s adding to the entry throughout the day as a way to watch him think out loud. Today, he posted the third part of a series on Conversational Media & Conversational Marketing (part 1, part 2, part 3). This third post adds a new term: The Conversational Economy. To summarize:

There are two major forms of media these days. There is Packaged Goods Media, in which “content” is produced and packaged, then sent through traditional distribution channels like cable, newsstand, mail, and even the Internet.

The second major form of media, is far newer, and far less established. I’ve come to call it Conversational Media, though I also like to call it Performance Media. This is the kind of media that has been labeled, somewhat hastily and often derisively, as “User Generated Content,” “Social Media,” or “Consumer Content.”

Godin, on the other hand, posted a short but eerily similar thought:

Tony pointed out a neat idea to me. Some organizations are good at listening. Some are good at talking. A few are even good at both.

But having a dialogue is different. It’s about engaging in (sometimes) uncomfortable conversations that enable both sides to grow and change.

Two marketing minds having the same idea in two different places at the same time. Parallel spontaneous idea creation rocks!

Author: Mike Lee

An idealistic realist, humanistic technologist & constant student.