Last week Marc on twitter said that "conversation is the equivalent of a saw...it processes/transforms content but with out the wood the saw is not needed."
I really can't agree. It feels to me like a underestimation of what conversation is and how it relates to marketing especially. The content is the wood, the conversation is the building it makes. The building materials aren't king, the building itself is.
I'd posted a quote from Cory Doctorow stating that content isn't king, conversation is. I suggested that this applied to marketing because content should be created with a view to inspiring and participating in conversation, making the conversation the king.
This was met with some strong disagreement. Some very spirited, uh, conversation.
The content I created was only a couple paragraphs long, but the conversation it sparked continued for days, and in fact is still a subject of some discussion here at the office.
Such little content, such a huge conversation. The conversation has taken on a life of its own, has become so much more important than the content ever was.
To suggest that the content is the "king" here, the important bit, is to totally misunderstand the power and expansiveness of conversation. Carman reminded me yesterday that my little bit of content was my contribution into a much larger conversation about content (Cory had already written about it, and people talk about content being king all the time), and it sparked even more conversation on the subject.
The content itself served only to encourage more conversation. The conversation was the point, it was the goal, and the content was written merely to help it along. It served a larger beast. It wasn't king at all.
So how does this apply to marketing? Well, let's take the swine flu, shall we? Marc suggested that the difficulty in getting people to stop calling it that (and refer to it instead as H1N1) is due to the power of that "content."
But the content is a mere two words. The conversation surrounding how we talk about pigs, the conversations we have at work reinforcing the naming, the jokes we make about how weird the name sounds, etc etc, hold the real power. To change that is to change massive conversation, to reverse the effects of millions of discussions.
The content started it, but it holds no power. The conversation changes minds.
But not all content is created to spark conversation, right? It's just meant to teach, or change minds, or inform. Well, you might have written it for that purpose, but what you've done is created content that's by definition unremarkable. If nobody wants to talk about your content it isn't very good. So sure, you might make content like that, but why would you? If you're creating content to teach or inform and nobody uses that content to teach someone else, or contribute to a conversation about it, or use it in future discussions, you've created useless content.
But the content came first and it sparked the whole discussion, so it's king, right? It's the important bit? That's like saying that because the plane got you to the Caribbean and it started the whole thing that it's "king", it matters most. Of course that's not true. The plane isn't the point, it's not the goal, it just gets you on the right track. It serves a higher power -- a vacation. And the value in vacations is, oh right, the conversation.
Tell me in the comments why I'm wrong and I'll write another post.
Most of the comments on my first ever video post (how exciting and modern!) were about my facial hair. And there were lots of tweets about the beard, too.
