The Broken Conversation
You write a blog post. You tweet about it. It gets posted to your FriendFeed profile. You share it via Facebook. You save it to del.icio.us.
Your friends, followers and colleagues comment on the blog.
Or they say something nice via Twitter (where a conversation related to your post ensues).
Or, they comment directly via your FriendFeed profile. Or they comment on your Facebook post.
Or they save the post to their own del.icio.us account and add a comment there.
Yes, you’re highly connected with your audience. Yes, it’s cool that each of your readers can view and respond in the social media outlet of their choice.
But as a result, the conversation is broken. It’s not threaded. It’s discontinuous: lacking sequence and coherence.
Is this a problem? I dunno. But I do think it’s problem for the “ideal” of social media: in a fractured commentsphere, individual voices can be too easily discounted or simply lost.
(Further, the need to spread out far & wide to find and respond to these farflung voices leads to the ever-looming Attention Crash!)
It gets worse when you consider that there are Social Media Monitoring vendors like Radian6, Buzzmetrics, etc. who may judge a bloggers’ level of importance & engagement by evaluating the comment threads that follow each post. If those comment streams are happening in Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc., I doubt it’s being captured and evaluated by the measurement gurus – thus undervaluing many bloggers’ influence (and certainly discounting their level of “engagement”).
I don’t have an answer; it’s for greater minds than mine. Do you have the answer? Maybe Dave Winer has the answer?
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I have been seeing a lot of this, what I have been calling “cross media conversations.” I blogged about it a ways back.
Beth Kanter referred to it as “Network Weaving.” If you start a conversation, it may not be as hard to track. but if you are tracking for a client, I can see the frustration.
This is a tough one to swallow, because it tastes pretty bitter in that it initially seems like, “what’s the point?” However, it smells like a call to action on the part of developers. We need a real conversation tracker. Until the software catches up with the need, I say this is a good project for interns and staff with time on their hands to investigate manually. That means, deciding which conversations to follow, tracking the convo from blog to network and wherever it leads, and then translating it into coherent content. Nexis.com asks which publications you want to follow, Radian6 needs to be asking which networks you want to include.
Hi Todd,
You are absolutely correct – the conversation is very fragmented and it is getting more diverse as the number of mediums increase. A comment or question asked in one medium such as a blog can be answered in another medium such as twitter, sometimes without context.
From a measurement perspective, it is important to take a multi-channel approach because of the reality you have described. As an influencer you have a blog, a twitter account, a youtube account, a flickr account and you communicate on all these channels. Any complete view of influence must include all the mediums, not just a blog centric view.
It is also important to include as many conversational dynamics as possible such as comments, unique commenters, social bookmarks, on topic links, etc., since all of these social breadcrumbs say something about influence.
Thank you for mentioning Radian6. I appreciate that.
Thanks for the comments!
Interestingly, most of these responses focus on the PR agency challenge, but I am actually just as concerned with the “integrity of the conversation.”
In other words: if I take the time to comment on a blog (and even subscribe to follow-up comments), I’d be bummed to find out that MOST of the conversational activity around that same post happened on Twitter, and I might have no clue about it. As a commenter, I’m (naively) assuming the debate points are going to happen *at* the blog post, but the ensuing conversation *could* happen anywhere (twitter, friendfeed, etc.) … which ultimately “hurts” the conversation’s many potential participants.
Tracking multi-platform conversations is not only a challenge to Agencies and Corp Comms, it is also a challenge to the end users themselves!
Todd – it’s a tough situation. I sometimes feel that I’m missing out on interesting comments because of what you described above.
Though not directly related to the above, I recently read this article on the Church of Customer Blog (http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/2008/04/keeping-up-with.html) that highlighted how Salesforce.com used Yahoo Pipes to track online conversations about the company. Would this be a way to track “conversations”? I don’t know as I haven’t looked into this yet.
Hi Todd,
Makes sense and it is a tough problem. In fact, I see that part of THIS conversation took place on twitter, where you talked about the twitter killer app which could auto-import any tweets that react to a blog post. Good idea.
Would you see the blog comment section as the ideal place to show an integrated view of a multi-platform conversation? What about conversations that start on twitter, linkedIn, etc., and then migrate to blogs?
You got me thinking…
Admit it, Doug. The geek in us thinks it’s cool that we can read a blog post in our RSS readers, offer a response through Utterz or Seesmic and embed it all over the web, and then Tweet about the topic. But really, it makes me wonder whether several splintered online conversations are as meaningful as fewer but more concentrated ones?
Agree with you, Todd, that I haven’t stumbled across a solution to this, either.
Todd,
Excellent post. Wish I read this before I wrote my post today!
I definitely don’t have the answer, but agree with you completely. It seems like we’re creating more and more pointers. On the one hand, having many different opportunities to promote content is great. On the other hand, aren’t we just spending all of our time to jump into conversations saying “Hey guys, look over there!”?
@Csalomonlee – I will definitely check out that post, thanks for sharing.
@Marcel – Yea, for my part, I do see the blog comment section as “the ideal place to show an integrated view of a multi-platform conversation” … but keep in mind that not everyone has a bog, so it’s still problematic. Quotably does a cool job of tracking threaded Twitter conversations: I’d LOVE to be able to import that function into a blog post (even if it required some manual labor on my part, as the blogger, in the interim).
@Nathan – Yea, that’s part of my point: we have to not only spread the word via multiple services, but follow-up and track any ensuing chit-chat. Exhausting.
Bryan, the thing is, those distributed (spinning for the nasty negative “broken” word) conversations often are the meaningful concentrated ones.
As individuals, we may only need to follow the isolated iterations, and are likely to get invited to the ones that take place elsewhere, if they are relevant.
The challenges for PR are first, tracking them, and second, linking them together into a meaningful whole. Yup, there are tools. Yup, we need easier ones.