Markets aren’t conversations?
Dave Rogers takes issue with Doc’s famous assertion and disputes the chapter on marketing Doc and I wrote in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Dave says that markets were always about “the sale,” not about the conversation that surrounded the sale.
Dave is right (IMO, of course) that markets have always been places where buyers and sellers have different roles and interests. But I disagree with Dave that the fact that we have the phrase “caveat emptor” means that sellers are always rapacious and untrustworthy. Quite the contrary, we only need such a maxim because sellers generally are trustworthy. People route around frauds, making fraud a bad marketing strategy.
In any case, “Markets are conversations” doesn’t mean “So take the first price quoted” or “And all conversations are among people without competing interests.” Nor does it mean that markets are nothing but conversations. What it means historically is that markets were also social places, not merely locations for the exchange of goods. And, today it means that markets are not merely demographic abstractions but are actual customers talking with one another about what they’re buying. Smart companies engage in those conversations honestly, openly and with passion.
There is, of course, also a place for frictionless transactions. The Net has many mansions, and in some of them there’s no talking allowed.
As for Dave’s claims that large groups can’t operate efficiently without a hierarchy, we either disagree about how large groups operate or we disagree over what constitutes a hierarchy. Or we may agree, although I think it’s useful to differentiate organic hierarchies from imposed ones. [Tags: cluetrain DocSearls ChristopherLocke RickLevine marketing DaveRogers]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I think we may have differing definitions of “fraud,” because I happen to believe you understate the effectiveness of fraud in marketing.
Do words have meaning?
What does the word “authority” mean?
In its marketing Technorati makes the claim that it is “the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs.”
Yet it specifically disclaims all responsibility, instead telling people that they in no way, shape or form should rely on that authority. I think it’s telling that they don’t happen to mention that on the same page where they make their claim to authority.
We know that Technorati is having difficulties with its technology, and that often, quite often in fact, other search engines yield better, more “authoritative” results. So I think Technorati’s claim to being “the authority,” (note: not even “an” authority, but “the” authority – an ordinal claim if ever I read one), is false on its face.
Yet even though two Cluetrain authors serve as “advisors” to Technorati, even though I’ve been pointing this discrepancy out for many months now, their claim goes unchallenged and they seem to continue to benefit from an inordinate amount of “mindshare” and good will.
So do “marketing” words mean less that “real” words? Do we tolerate one definition of authority, one that allows one to claim authority while disclaiming responsibility, for “marketing,” but demand another one from everyone else, say government, doctors, lawyers and engineers?
How can we have a “conversation” if we don’t even agree on what the words mean?
“Authority” has several meanings, Dave, as you know. An authority on Indian culture is not an authority who can demand to see your papers. Authorities don’t always have authority. Language is funny like that.
In Technorati’s marketing sense I believe it means “We claim to be the best place to go for searching for blogs.” I doubt anyone except you takes it as a more serious claim than that.
So, yes, certainly when we hear marketing rhetoric we’ve learned not to take words too seriously. When a chewing gum claims to taste better than a spring day, or whatever, we don’t (and can’t) sue them for false advertising…because no one is fooled. We adjust to the rhetoric around us: If I tell you over dinner that we had an awesome time at 6 Flags, you know that I’m using the term differently than if I tell you my experience of God at the Grand Canyon was awesome.
Technorati’s mindshare and goodwill have to do, IMO, with the service they provide. They also get dinged regularly – as is appropriate – for crapping out on occasion, being laggy, etc.
So, why does Technorati’s use of that one word stick in your craw so much that you’d rather talk about that than the more important and more general issues you raise in your piece?
Because David, I don’t happen to believe “everything is miscellaneous.” I believe there is a hierarchy of ideas and ideals. Some ideas are more important than others, because ideas can alleviate suffering, or create it. Some are more worth our time and our thought than others.
Authority is one of the important ones, one of the ones worthy of our thought, attention, and respect.
I chose Technorati because you and Doc are affiliated with it in some capacity, and it’s a clear example of what’s deficient in the “conversation” metaphor.
While chewing gum may not taste as fresh as a spring day, we know a spring day doesn’t have a taste; and neither the human sensory apparatus that governs “taste,” nor chewing gum, happen to be ideas that can significantly affect suffering. Note the operative word, “significantly.” Things that taste bad are a form of suffering, and a breath freshening chewing gum is likely to alleviate the suffering of those around the chewer.
But authority is an important idea, and Dave Sifry and his company understand that. That’s why the make the claim, and that’s probably why the used to claim that their rankings were based on “authority.” It’s a word with weight. Yet they choose to treat it irresponsibly to gain an advantage in the marketplace.
They understand the value of the word, the weight of the word, and that’s why they deliberately choose to make the manifestly false assertion that they are “the authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs.” If they said “we’re number one,” given their affinity for ranking things, I’d probably think that was false too, but I wouldn’t care. The idea of someone’s ordinal rank in the hierarchy doesn’t matter to me very much. I don’t really care what the number one search engine is, or the number one car manufacturer. I’m sure there is some measure someone could come up with that would make them #1. But that claim isn’t as powerful as a claim to being “the authority.”
Dave Sifry and Technorati are in the marketplace to make money. Either there will be an IPO, or, I suspect more likely, Technorati hopes to be acquired. They are marketing Technorati, they are selling it.
And so those in the marketplace looking to buy what Technorati sells, either search results or a search engine, are trying to take the measure of the various people and companies offering what Technorati offers. And Dave Sifry is, in effect, standing there with his thumb on the scale. And that is apparently just fine, because it’s “just marketing.”
Well, I don’t think so, and so I say so. Not many people seem to agree, but I’ll keep trying to persuade you and Dave that markets aren’t conversations, and that someone trying to sell you something is someone you should be somewhat skeptical of.
Important ideas ought to be treated with respect, and not abused in the selfish pursuit of self interest.
Regardless of which of the meanings of “authority” you care to examine, all come with some attachment to the idea of “responsibility.” Even an authority on Indian culture can’t deliberately deceive someone on matters of Indian culture and expect to retain a claim to authority. Once we accept that we can detach authority from responsibility, then we’re all prey to autocrats, frauds and charlatans.
Technorati doesn’t need to abuse the idea of authority to sell itself. They just choose to.
Well, for my part of “the conversation,” I’ll object.
I agree that markets are conversations, especially in terms of product development. If someone creates and attempts to sell a one-stringed guitar, the market may respond, “too limited”. If someone creates and attempts to sell a 50-stringed guitar, the market may also respond, “too complicated”.
Technorati is guilty not only of poor word choices (putting it mildly), but of poor performance. More and more, users are grumbling about the frequent blown crawls and “sorry” messages, which says, “clean up your act or I’ll find someone else who did.”
This is no guarantee that those same people won’t jump ship at the news of a reportedly better service. But as people jump from place to place, and service to service, they are indeed sending a clear message.
While it may not be a conventional “conversation”, it is a conversation nonetheless. I liken it to the optometrist who keeps cycling through the lenses and asking “this, or this?”
Dave, Technorati is clearly making a marketing claim. Why you choose to take it literally is beyond me. It seems to me to be well within the sorts of things marketers say. Of course you’re entitled to object. I myself would not have chosen the word “authority,” but not because it’s a lie; since we hear the term within marketing rhetoric, it’s allowed (imo) to exaggerate, just as when I reply to “How are you doin’?” with a cheery “Great,” no one thinks I’m attributing greatness to my doings. I wouldn’t have chosen the term because it implies that inbound links are a good measure of authority and that authority matters in blogs. But, to me it’s just a marketing decision Technorati has made, not a moral failing.
So what does that have to do with whether markets are conversations? If you think that the phrase “Markets are conversations” means that all markets are always conversations, then you’ve misunderstood Cluetrain. That book was an argument that marketing _ought_ to engage in conversations, instead of what it’s been doing for generations. So, finding examples of marketing that isn’t conversational doesn’t count as evidence against the book’s thesis.
Yes, authority does imply some sense of authority. If Technorati’s results were consistently or often shit, then we’d have a good argument that Technorati’s marketing claim is also full of shit. I happen to think that T’s results are actually pretty good, especially comparatively. They are the first place I turn to when searching for blog info. Hence, I’m ok with their claim. But this leg of the argument has absolutely nothing to do with Cluetrain. It’s merely whether Technorati is claiming to be good at blog searching when in fact it isn’t.
Likewise, Ethan, Technorati’s performance has long been an issue. That’s something worth talking about and it could kill the site, but it seems to me to have zero to do with Dave’s original point that markets are not conversations.
Finally, Dave, do you know Dave Sifry? I do. I’ve come to count him as a friend, and I’m proud of that. So, your assertions about why Dave created Technorati strike me as over-simplified. Dave started Technorati because he thought the Web needed a blog index. He was brought up to believe in being of service; the message has taken root in his brother Micah, as well. Dave has grown T as a business, and if it heads into IPO or gets acquired, I hope he makes a whole bunch of money. But his motives are far more complex than you’re claiming.
“Likewise, Ethan, Technorati’s performance has long been an issue. That’s something worth talking about and it could kill the site, but it seems to me to have zero to do with Dave’s original point that markets are not conversations.”
Re-read my comment, please. I will elaborate a bit though, in case I wasn’t really as clear as believe my comment to be. The “conversation” aspect does apply to Technorati, as something that either is, or is perceived to be “crappy” drives people to look elsewhere for whatever it is that they aren’t getting from in this case, Technorati.
Conversationally, it’s going like this:
T: Are y’all ready for some extreeeme ego surfing?
Market: Heck yes!
T: *Error message*
M: I’ll try again. Sh*t happens, no big deal.
T: *Error message*
M: One more, and I’m outta here.
T: Look, your links! Ta da!
M: Where are my posts from the last week?
T: *Error message*
M: Hey, does anyone offer these features reliably? I want/need this functionality, and I’m not getting it over here.
Competitors: We do!
M: Coming!
It doesn’t get much more “conversational” than that, does it?
Sorry I misunderstood. I’m just trying to unstick the discussion from the particulars of Technorati.
While one can criticize Technorati’s claims to authority, it’s hard to dispute its leadership in traffic — at least over the last few months. Right now it’s running at close to 80 million pageviews a day. See here.
You can compare other services and see how they do on the same chart. Among the RSS (or “feed” or Live Web, or whatever) search engines, none of the others comes close. Bloglines was ahead for awhile (occasionally passing 100 million page views per day), but then they got bought by Ask Jeeves and dropped back.
Technorati currently ranks among the top 1000 sites on the web, at #860, according to Alexa. That’s not #1 overall, but who else is ahead among the blog search engines?
This doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. They do. This morning, in fact, I got search feeds for keyword combinations from PubSub and Feedster in advance of the same from Technorati. This is unusual, but worth noting. (Usually Technorati’s results are a superset of the others, and come faster. This has been the case since June. Earlier than that, PubSub kicked everybody’s ass — at least in the searches I was looking for).
I watch all these service closely, and they all have problems of one kind or another, from splogs (blog spam) to outages to performance hits to dropped services. On the whole, Technorati has performed pretty well, I think. But I’d rather give kudos to the whole category, because without them we’d rely on Big Boys who have stayed largely disinterested (at least publicly).
As I said here, all these engines are working a frontier that the mainstream search engines have largely avoided. Problems are to be expected.
Still, perception matter. Technorati did get a reputation for poor performance among many, um, technorati. They can only fix that by performing consistently well over time and earning trust back.
“That book was an argument that marketing _ought_ to engage in conversations, instead of what it’s been doing for generations. So, finding examples of marketing that isn’t conversational doesn’t count as evidence against the book’s thesis.”
And my argument is that marketing _can’t_ engage in conversations. Finding an example from a company close to the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, who themselves are advisors to that company, seems to be a fairly compelling argument.
I won’t take up any more of your bandwidth. I’ll have more to say in my own blog.
I think, like many people I know, I thought Cluetrain was cool went it appeared, but then really got excited by it shortly after the dot-com bust. It seemed well matched to a continued excitement for the power-to-the-people aspect of the web and its sparking success alongside the dot-com blow-up.
But, since then, Cluetrain has become part of marketing vocabulary. Specifically, soundbites from Cluetrain, like “markets are conversations”, are part of the marketeers dogma for the current littler-boom (the web 2 boom? blog boom? podboom? not sure…).
I’d suggest that a number of current companies are designed around the goal of capitalizing on conversation contents, i.e., “conversation contents are marketable”. These contents are marketed as “conversations”. And, marketeers suggest their companies are part of these conversation (cue Cluetrain soundbites). Again, we have: markets are eyeballs on content.
That said, what Cluetrain is about is something that is affecting what’s going on with companies like Technorati–they do listen, talk, and try to converse differently because of the web. These companies are willing to be imperfect and make mistakes in public, and ask for help. Craigslist.org is probably the best, proven case, for this.
“‘Shut up!’ he explained.” – Ring Lardner
(Note – Imprecations are explanations!)
[Quoted to illustrate that dissonance, not as a particular commentary on any specific message in this thread]
David(W), is this really about the bugaboos of “connotation” versus “denotation”?
I’m not being original here, just rehashing, but the word “conversation” connotes qualities of intimacy and equality. There’s a denotation of information exchange. So that leaves an opening for a marketer to say “X is conversation“, which *implies* a warm and fuzzy “X is intimate and equal” (where X is in fact no such thing). Then when called on such an implication, retreat back to defending it as merely meaning “X is some sort of information exchange”.
Will the “conversation” advance productively because I spent the time to outline that?
All of human society is a “social place”, by one definition. But that hardly means everything is friendly, intimate, and equal.
Right here is where things go awry: “But I disagree with Dave that the fact that we have the phrase “caveat emptor” means that sellers are always rapacious and untrustworthy.”
Did Dave Rogers say that the phrase “caveat emptor” MEANS that sellers ARE ALWAYS rapacious and untrustworthy? I didn’t see that: “there was an aphorism that suggested that someone trying to sell you something was someone YOU MIGHT HAVE REASON to be wary of. So there’s a disconnect here between the notion of “conversation” between peers, and deception or fraud in the act of selling.”.
But that’s covering the unpleasant truth that sellers have an interest in manipulation and deception, which can be served by painting them as mere participants in some sort of chit-chat.
The “caveat emptor” maxim is to override our social impulses to trust friends, to remind us that people may merely pose as friends so as to trigger that trust-response in order to better defraud us.
Haven’t you ever heard the expression “Nothing personal, just business.”?
Two things:
* “…there was an aphorism that suggested that someone trying to sell you something was someone YOU MIGHT HAVE REASON to be wary of. So there’s a disconnect here between the notion of “conversation” between peers, and deception or fraud in the act of selling.”
The trouble is, deception and/or fraud aren’t limited to selling. In other words, it’s not selling that’s the variable here, that conversations between peers are always honest (or even unusually honest), and the speech of the marketplace is always/usually dishonest. People are people, and they’ll be honest or dishonest to a certain degree, no matter what they’re doing. So, sure, buyer beware, but also reader beware, listener, speaker, what have you. (Harlan Ellison somewhat famously opened a collection of short stories, “Caveat Lector”.)
* Does anyone else find it highly ironic that someone arguing for conversations in the abstract, untied to commercial activity, can’t be bothered to support public comments on his own blog, and insists instead on private email only?
Seth, I take Dave’s argument as being not that some markets aren’t conversations but that markets are by their nature so polluted by self-interest that they can’t be conversations. As he says in his comment above: “…my argument is that marketing _can’t_ engage in conversations.” I take his citing of “Caveat emptor” as evidence for that strong claim. I believe it is in fact evidence for the counter claim that markets default to conversation. (I’ll discuss Dave’s understanding of “Markets are conversations” as “Marketing is conversation” below.)
Dave also seems to think that it’s not a conversation if one of the sides is self-interested. I, on the other hand, assume that is always the case with humans. We’re always self-interested, as well as always other-interested. If one side in the verbal interchange is so self-interested that s/he’s lying and manipulating the flow, then I too wouldn’t want to call that a “real” conversation. It’s too debased a conversation to merit the term.
But I sure don’t think all conversations in the marketplace are like that. I buy shoes from a little local store run by two guys who take a genuine interest in putting your feet into shoes that are good for you. Our interchanges don’t get much past shoes, and we’re certainly both self-interested. But that doesn’t make them deceptive, or make me be wary of them. Caveat emptor? Exactly the opposite in this case, and in many – I’d say most – cases.
BTW, Cluetrain was not saying that all modern marketing is a conversation. Quite the contrary. It rails quite obnoxiously against current practices. So finding existing companies that lie and/or refuse to engage in conversation is hardly an argument against Cluetrain’s thesis. Further, Dave seems to confuse “Markets are conversations” with “Marketing is conversational.” Cluetrain says – and I still believe – that at one point, marketplaces were hugely important social sites and that markets (the people interested in buying goods) were and are bound together by actual conversations.
PS: “‘Shut up,’ he explained” is one of my favorites.
Hal, I agree that there’s always an element of artifice in conversation. That doesn’t necessarily pollute the conversation. (I like “artifice” better than “dishonesty” since the latter implies a conscious intent to deceive that isn’t always there. E.g., if I say something to make myself sound smart, am I trying to deceive you? Wait, don’t answer that! :)
Three points, which I’ll make briefly here & hopefully develop further on my blog.
1. The phrase “Markets are conversations” is a definitional statement: it says what (all) markets (always) are. It no more expresses an aspiration or a recommendation than “crows are black” says that crows ought to be black. To say “markets are conversations” when you mean “markets can and should become more conversational” is lazy at best. (At worst it’s marketing, in the pejorative sense.)
2. The phrase ‘markets are conversations’ is particularly misleading because – even if we grant that markets can and should be more like conversations – markets aren’t and cannot be the same thing as conversations. Markets are a class of social interaction involving the exchange of information. So are conversations. Markets, however, invariably involve selling; conversations generally don’t (unless you’re talking to a BzzAgent). I can’t see any way of avoiding that distinction which wouldn’t involve deliberate obfuscation.
3. Just in case Dave didn’t make this point clearly enough – or in case he thinks he’s the only person who got it – a brief point on Technorati.
David: Technorati is clearly making a marketing claim. Why you choose to take it literally is beyond me
But, but… markets can and should become more like conversations, right? More like someone talking to you (and listening); less like being bombarded by a succession of overblown claims and having to filter half of them out as meaningless rhetoric – marketing claims.
I really like this blog, David, and I think it’s mainly because of the way you write; very open, very relaxed. You could hype yourself up and speak from a pulpit, as becomes the author of X and consultant to Y; readers of the blog wouldn’t really mind, we’d just think “that’s marketing” and filter it out. It wouldn’t be very conversational, though.
As I think (hope) the book makes clear, “Markets are conversations” is _not_ definitional. For the reasons you say, markets are obviously not just conversations, and – blindingly obviously – not all conversations are markets. The phrase is instead an observation intended to point out a side of markets that has been ignored, akin to saying something like “Economics is politics,” a phrase that does not offer a definition of economics but does make a claim about an aspect of it too little noticed. (Please let’s not talk about whether economics is politics! I just made it up as an illustration.)
Since we spend much of a book unpacking the MAC phrase, I don’t think it’s lazy to say markets are conversations. It’s a slogan. It’s shorthand. It’s three words instead of a chapter. The chapter says (as I remember it – I haven’t reread it since it came out) that markets used to be highly conversational places. Thanks to the industrial revolution and then the mass communications revolution (over-simplifying, of course), marketing became non-conversational. (Local markets were and always will be social and conversational.) Now, with the Net, marketing is becoming conversational again (yay! – the book isn’t neutral about this) and markets (i.e., the people who may buy stuff) are actually conversing with one another.
So, Phil, I think you’re asking a three word phrase to do too much. We use it as a slogan and then try to explain what we mean. Taking it as a definition of “markets” seems to me an implausible reading, even without the benefit of the book that surrounds it (or the other 94 theses). Those are the contexts in which we used the slogan.
As for Technorati: Within the range of marketing, its use of the word “authority” strikes me as totally non-misleading because we all (?) understand the context. Should Technorati and all sites and all ads drop every bit of self-inflating bombast? I actually don’t care, unless it’s misleading within the marketing context. I care more that marketing ALSO learn to speak in a human voice, in conversation. And (imo) Technorati is a fairly good example of that: It blogs, Technorati people speak in public forums in straightforward ways, it tries to contribute to the community. It’s not the greatest example ever, but in those regards it’s a good example.
Besides, why are we talking about Technorati? For the moment let’s say it’s an abusive marketer. So what? If you want to argue about whether Doc and I ought to be on its board of advisors, then let’s start a different thread. Within this thread, it doesn’t matter how many examples of bad, abusive, non-conversational marketers are adduced because we all agree that most marketing sucks. One of Cluetrain’s major aims was, after all, to say exactly that and to point to why customers are getting fed up with sucky marketing and how we customers are routing around it…via conversation amongst ourselves.
I take Dave’s argument as being not that some markets aren’t conversations but that markets are by their nature so polluted by self-interest that they can’t be conversations.
This is correct, except I would not say that markets are “polluted” by self-interest, but that self-interest is the only interest of the market. Again, that’s neither good nor bad, but if you don’t understand that nature, then you may be injured by the market in some fashion.
Dave also seems to think that it’s not a conversation if one of the sides is self-interested. I, on the other hand, assume that is always the case with humans. We’re always self-interested, as well as always other-interested. If one side in the verbal interchange is so self-interested that s/he’s lying and manipulating the flow, then I too wouldn’t want to call that a “real” conversation. It’s too debased a conversation to merit the term.
But in a market “other interest” is principally focused on obtaining something from “the other,” whether they be buyer or seller. “Conversation,” to my way of thinking, is an activity undertaken for the pleasure of the activity, a little shared, mutual attention, perhaps a humorous or sad exchange. There is no other objective, neither to make a “sale” or to “get the best price.” But in a market, there is always another objective, and it always involves seeking advantage. Again, this is neither good nor bad, but bad outcomes can obtain if one does not acknowledge this fact. Or is it not a fact?
But I sure don’t think all conversations in the marketplace are like that. I buy shoes from a little local store run by two guys who take a genuine interest in putting your feet into shoes that are good for you. Our interchanges don’t get much past shoes, and we’re certainly both self-interested. But that doesn’t make them deceptive, or make me be wary of them. Caveat emptor? Exactly the opposite in this case, and in many – I’d say most – cases.
And I have a bar that I like to go to because I like the bartender. And I like all the tellers at my local credit union and I know about their kids in Iraq and they know about mine. And those chats have nothing to do with the interest rate on my savings account, or whether or not the payment on my loan is overdue. Strictly human social interactions can take place in any environment and have nothing explicitly to do with the nature of that environment. History records conversations between opposing soldiers in a war zone. Doesn’t make war a “conversation.” And while there are many, many businesses you can “trust,” where caveat emptor may not appropriate, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a business and they’re there first and foremost to sell you shoes, and not to pass the time of day.
BTW, Cluetrain was not saying that all modern marketing is a conversation. Quite the contrary. It rails quite obnoxiously against current practices. So finding existing companies that lie and/or refuse to engage in conversation is hardly an argument against Cluetrain’s thesis. Further, Dave seems to confuse “Markets are conversations” with “Marketing is conversational.” Cluetrain says – and I still believe – that at one point, marketplaces were hugely important social sites and that markets (the people interested in buying goods) were and are bound together by actual conversations.
While railing obnoxiously against current practices, it actually facilitates them. By fundamentally misrepresenting the nature of markets, it promotes the strictly commercial at the expense of the purely social. In effect, all conversation becomes a commercial activity, and presumably one can never be certain in a given exchange if one or both parties aren’t seeking advantage in some way.
In this country at least, the concentration of ever more wealth into the hands of fewer individuals is a product of the market. The growing number of people living in poverty is a product of the market. The high level of consumer debt is a product of the market. The changes in bankruptcy laws is a product of the market. The repeal of the inheritance tax is a product of the market. Digital “rights” management, is a product of the market. Software patents are a tool of the market. Shink-wrap licenses are a product of the market. The corruption of public officials and the erosion of the public good in favor of private gain is a product of the market.
More accurately, all of the foregoing ill effects are the result of misunderstanding the nature of markets. This, again, is not to say that markets are “bad,” or that individuals cannot have rewarding experiences working in the marketplace. It is to say, there is an important difference between the competitive nature of markets, and the social nature of human interaction; between the values of the marketplace, and the values of a community that can sometimes place the public good ahead of exclusive self interest. There is a tension there, and neither an exclusively market-based reliance on self interest, nor an exclusively community-based public interest will yield an acceptable outcome. But there must be a balance, and in my opinion, the balance is tilted sharply in favor of the market.
In my opinion, achieving an understanding of the market that can mitigate or ameliorate its less desirable effects is not facilitated by wrapping it into a warm and fuzzy metaphor that fundamentally misrepresents its nature.
“‘Conversation,’ to my way of thinking, is an activity undertaken for the pleasure of the activity, a little shared, mutual attention, perhaps a humorous or sad exchange. There is no other objective….”
I would have said conversation is first of all an exchange of information. And none of us can escape filtering the information we provide. Often it’s filtered in ways that we find comfortable or flattering, or even advantageous. And the listener, of course, may not always understand the words we use in the same way that we do.
I buy shoes from a little local store run by two guys who take a genuine interest in putting your feet into shoes that are good for you.
David has found over time that these salesmen are honest and trustworthy. But many of us have come across the car salesman who is honestly and sincerely convinced that the vehicle he sells is the best on the road — it’s what he drives, etc., etc.
But a few months after he switches agencies, he becomes equally convinced that the new brand is better. He couldn’t bring himself to cynically peddle a car he didn’t believe in, consequently he believes! He believes!
The same thing can be seen in politics, but I digress….
But a few months after he switches agencies…
And that’s another aspect of markets, though not exclusive to them. It has to do with the behavior of human beings within their given group context. I’d say “social” context, but I mean to try to discriminate between ordinary “social” events, which I think are principally what Doc and Dave are referring to in their more idyllic descriptions of markets, and mercantile events where someone is involved in an interaction as a function of their job, or role within an organization. This is another aspect of human nature, or human psychology that makes the idea of conversation, as a social activity as opposed to a strict exchange of information, inoperative in a mercantile context.
Rather than get into that here, I’ll discuss it in Part 2 of my series of posts on why markets aren’t conversations.
My own opinion is that people have heard about blogs now but still consider them as personal “diaries†rather than as business tools. That’s the next step, I guess.