{"id":1245,"date":"2007-04-11T11:00:39","date_gmt":"2007-04-11T15:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/?p=1245"},"modified":"2007-05-12T09:20:34","modified_gmt":"2007-05-12T13:20:34","slug":"the-conversation-and-the-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/?p=1245","title":{"rendered":"The Conversation and The Message"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a fair amount of buzz surrounding David Armano’s piece for BusinessWeek, “It’s the Conversation Economy, Stupid” (Link)<\/a>. I believe a fair amount of the buzz is coming from BW’s hypemeister, Bruce Nussbaum (it’s good to be MSM). Not that Armano’s piece is bad. In my opinion, however, it misses what I believe to be a larger truth. A truth that even Nussbaum probably has trouble acknowledging; as I believe is evidenced by how he deals with the “conversation” on his pseudo-blog.
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\nReading Armano’s words (and especially the headline), I can’t help but puzzle over how it is that, as he suggests, the business community is so clueless about what’s going on in the world. Thinking about it, one wonders if perhaps… just perhaps… the business world already knows about these things. Give them a little credit for turning on the news and hearing about MySpace; for hearing about the legal battles surrounding YouTube and understanding what it is and the impact it has on Big Media (after all, even little old ladies know what YouTube is). Give them credit for knowing about Facebook and IM and photo-sharing sites like Flickr. My non-techie, social worker sister uses some of those and she’s not especially connected.<\/p>\n

Why should we assume that BusinessWeek’s audience is clueless about what’s happening around them; that they need a designer to tell them “It’s the conversation economy, stupid”? Maybe they’re not ignorant at all.<\/p>\n

Has it occurred to Armano and Nussbaum, that the business world just doesn’t want<\/em> a conversation?<\/p>\n

I’ve worked with senior business people who have openly expressed their less-than-charitable opinions of those who buy their products. These people climb the corporate ladder expecting – demanding – to find a golden parachute and a corporate jet waiting for them at the top… before they’re 40. They’re people who manage labor by entering numbers on a spread sheet… and then hopping into their new Beemer to stop by the country club for coctails.<\/p>\n

Why would these kinds of people rush into conversation with those they consider beneath them? They’ll ignore co-workers in their own organization, so is it a stretch to believe they’ll ignore the hoi polloi? Not to me.<\/p>\n

Armano may be talking about Conversation, but I think the bigger take away is the Message. Not the contrived one, but the one that comes in on other channels. Subliminal stuff. Because in the end Business can converse with the People all it wants, but if the Message – the unspoken Message – is insincere and condescending, they’d have done better to have kept their mouths shut. I have a feeling some in the business world realize this.<\/p>\n

{By the way, I forgot to mention something that struck me while reading Nussbaum’s comments (Link)<\/a> regarding Armano’s piece. This is the line that caught my attention:<\/p>\n

Personally, I don’t think we need a special code of civility online–we just need to follow society’s general code of civility. Alas many people don’t (especially when they are posting autonomously).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The definition of autonomous is: “undertaken or carried on without outside control<\/a>“. Funny that Nussbaum laments the lack of control… because control is the very issue in play, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

Who defines “civility”? The country club crowd? or the hoi polloi?<\/p>\n

I wonder. Did Nussbaum slip? was that supposed to be “anonymously”? Food for conversation.}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a fair amount of buzz surrounding David Armano’s piece for BusinessWeek, “It’s the Conversation Economy, Stupid” (Link). I believe a fair amount of the buzz is coming from BW’s hypemeister, Bruce Nussbaum (it’s good to be MSM). Not that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-administrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}