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Constructive Conversation??
Doc Searls - Part I To: Doc Searls - doc@searls.com From: Doug Skoglund - skoglund@pdmsb.com Date: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 10:00 am CDT Subject: Constructive Conversation?? First, I got to your 'AdTension' post as a result of a link from Blogspotting, the Business Week experiment with blogging. That has led me to an extensive examination of a number of your posts and some of your links to other posts. Obviously, I am looking for something that I can 'hook' onto that will help enable a constructive conversation. So, with that in mind, I quote the following from 'AdTension': >>My main point here is that we need to get out of the advertiser-centered frame about how markets for information work. We need to start imagining the marketplace as it exists now, and wants to exist, in the online world. This is a marketplace where customers are participants, and not just consumers. Where they are no longer just a mass of passive "eyeballs". >>What can we do to enable conversations and relationships -- not just transactions -- between sellers and buyers in a market category? This is the question we raised in The Cluetrain Manifesto [8] more than six years ago; and we've still only begun to answer it. >>What makes that question so hard to answer isn't what Bennie Smith calls "a negative vibe toward advertising". Its the persistent disdain by advertisers and media toward the customers they insult by calling "eyeballs". I also checked out your "Cluetrain Manifesto" and found a couple of quotes: >>A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter -- and getting smarter faster than most companies. >>These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked. >>Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do. I tend to interpret the points that you have made here in a much broader sense -- the mainstream media, MSM, versus the rest of us. And the MSM must include those that have access to it's soapbox capability, in short, the Insiders. Since I have not read the entire book, yet -- I am reacting to your website http://cluetrain.com. While I agree with a number of points and my wishful thinking wants to agree with many of the projections, the realist in me says that we need some kind of political action. Granted, that a powerful global conversation has begun; however, the concept of markets as conversations contains a lot of wishful thinking. We aren't quite there until the suppliers to those markets become part of the conversation. >>What can we do to enable conversations and relationships -- not just transactions -- between sellers and buyers in a market category? This is the question we raised in The Cluetrain Manifesto [8] more than six years ago; and we've still only begun to answer it. My point is that we need to recognize a longer term goal of developing a vehicle for political action if we wish to change the world. Of course, we will need to enable conversations that allow the participants to form relationships (note the slight difference). So, how come you haven't made more progress in six years?? Sorry to be so blunt, but it's one thing to facilitate the development of relationships and it's something else to direct that activity toward some common goal. Actually, it is my desire to foster more discussion about blogs, forums and other methods of enabling conversations, with the goal of moving toward some kind of political action. Since I must recognize and accept your involvement with the Linux community, I must reveal that I am a Windows programmer and a Microsoft basher, a combination in rather short supply. Unfortunately, most of the Linux contacts I have made, so far, were unable to separate the value of Windows from the evil of Microsoft, a prejudice that baffles me no end. With that in mind -- do we have a possibility of constructive conversation?? Doug Skoglund - http://ifihadmyway - http://pdmsb.com There are responses to this message:
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