January 3, 2005
smarter conversations
(More thoughts on “The Hughtrain”:)
A year or two ago there were people going around, in an initial rush of enthusiasm, saying that perhaps blogging was going to put professional journalism out of business. Avast, ye scurvies!
The uber-lucid Clay Shirky wrote something about it here: “Help! The price of information has fallen and can’t get up!”
Anil Dash also made the point, to paraphrase, that blogging wouldn’t kill journalism, but it would make bad journalism much harder to get away with.
I think that was a brilliant observation. And I don’t think it just applies to journalism.
The smarter a market becomes, the better your product has to be in order to survive said market. It isn’t rocket science.
If you’re in the advertising/marketing business, the issue isn’t about blogs or the internet, or all the “marketing is dead” rants you may hear in the blogosphere.
Sure, blogs make markets smarter, the internet makes markets smarter, but so do a lot of other things.
The issue is about how smarter your market is becoming, and how well you are able you to adapt. More importantly, it’s how well you can help your clients to adapt. Succeed and thrive. Fail and die. Again, it isn’t rocket science.
[PERHAPS:] “Smarter Conversations” is a big piece of the puzzle…
I think I think that blogs can help you adapt smarter and quicker.
I think currently these ‘smarter markets’ are found only in significant, but (relatively) smaller areas: IT apps (some of them, people still sell bloated apps for fortunes), finance (in larger scales: ‘old’ banks still have clients), etc.
The key here is ‘inertia’: speed x mass. And while new things have high speed, but not real mass (hope just yet…) the old world still has a significant inertia: people’s interests –financially, power-wise, whatever — in old things and ofcoz the last one: people change slowly.
Hugh: YES, Smarter Conversations. I like this idea because it addresses the quality of the conversation. And it relates to all the conversations inside an organisation as well as those with customers.
For me, smarter would have to mean more assertive, direct, honest, heartfelt etc. Not smart as in smart-alec.
On days when I’m feeling more than usually bored of branding and all the branding books and models, I think getting people to talk better (I won’t dare say authentically to you) is what needs to happen.
Rock on.
Smarter conversations
Two days ago I saidI yearn for simpler ideas, more lightly held. Or some nice poetry maybe.Well, I wouldn’t call Hugh’s cartoon poetry exactly, but it comes close. Here’s the Extended Edition of Hugh’s argument:If you’re in the advertising/marketing…
Hugh, I showed this site to a businessman I thought would be very interested in your ideas. His one and only reaction: “Obscenity never impresses me.”
Take it for what it’s worth, but my free advice is that as you continue this conversation, you might want to remember that Americans are typically not as receptive to some of the language and sexual stuff you use. I think you are needlessly limiting your audience by seemingly talking to male friends around a bar instead of males and females around a conference table. The former may give you sloppy wet kudos, but the latter has the money.
I can see where a person might be offended at the language. But that’s not my gripe.
Mine has to do with “it” not being so fucking obvious. The whole “markets are conversations” idea hasn’t even caught on (outside this select venue for leading edge thought). Thus, “smarter conversations equal better products” is only obvious to the people who follow this entire line of thinking like it was some kind of football team.
David, you mean it isn’t so obvious to people who don’t agree with me?!!
Heh.
Damned if you do…
It not only about the “smartness” of the market which drives better thought, it is also about removing the friction in the market. Once the information, product, experience, or whatever molecules are available instantaneously and easily found, then it becomes about how “good” they are, instead of how available they might be to a particular geography, constituency, segment, etc.
Boring, obvious and very valuable
As previously mentioned, I am involved in a very interesting project at the Concours Group, called tools and techniques for business experimentation. We had a very interesting teleconference yesterday, discussing the use of experimentation as a busines…