Flow of a conversation in social media land

Communication between companies and consumers is often perceived in a very different way. On the one hand, a company usually has one uniform external voice, providing information which has resulted from various internal discussions. This gives the sentiment that a conversation is not possible between an individual and a company or any kind of organization as it’s not personal enough. In most cases, such organizations are looking for ways to broadcast their message to a large audience, thus gaining time, momentum and limiting costs.

This of course also has a negative impact on the requested immediate response. Most of the existing media used, such as TV and radio, do not offer a way of involving the audience and are therefore seen as portraying monologues or conveying one-way flows of information. However, it must be said that new technologies encourage limited interaction on these same media.

On the other hand, customer services, panels, events, surveys and polls are activities that support a company’s desire to go a step further and involve the market. Thus, we cannot say that the information flow is only one-sided.

Now the time has come for social media. Blogs, micro-blogs, aggregators, chats, forums, virtual worlds and others bring new meaning to conversation. Paradoxically, time lags while conversing online have become acceptable, even though we look for speedy reaction with micro-blogging and live aggregators. An email exchange can be considered as a conversation even though we might wait a whole week for an answer.

Furthermore, the internet has brought unique interaction capabilities. It is possible to share information worldwide through different platforms. We can listen, read and see the opinions of many people wherever they are located on the globe. Conversations can be saved and continued later. New participants can join at any given moment and rich media provides a whole new perspective to the word “involvement”.

So, what about the flow of information? Who is the transmitter and who adopts the role of receiver? How does a company manage such a flow? Do social media reverse the flow from bottom-up?

We asked these questions on LinkedIn and received some very interesting answers albeit too long to add to this post. The most complete answer was written by Chris James, Social Media & Community Strategist at AMD, while we certainly appreciate the systematic and value driven insight provided by Marc Rapp, Sr AD at Seesaw. All the answers can be accessed in PDF.

Without getting into a complex systematic approach, let us try and understand the situation.

First of all, it is important to realize that in the past, information wasn’t only top-down. Companies conveyed their messages, but consumers had their own organizations to voice their opinion. Word-of-mouth has always existed and people also used to share their opinion or recommend particular products to friends. In a way, we could say that the communication flow came from different places, different sides and different angles, but did not always collide and interrelate. You can compare it to cities that are not yet connected by highways. We know they exist, we know it is possible to get there, but it may be too complex or too expensive to physically get there; so we use the phone, radio and television to connect with the people living there.

What has changed is the integrated aspect of the internet: the fact that using a single computer can give you access to a multitude of media services and interconnect them. It is not only about information and virtual services, but also about purchasing products that can be acquired in the real world. And we’re only at the 2.0 version of it!

It doesn’t matter if there is no highway to a certain city. We can now interact, share and even get access to goods without being physically there. The world is indeed getting smaller.

Human communication adapts to the way a computer network works, or actually, the computer network is specifically designed to help improve human communication potential.  Such development shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an improvement as certain aspects such as empathy cannot be conveyed technologically… yet.  This means that any new technological advance brings us to a new flow model. Sounds like “Duh!”, doesn’t it?

So what’s all this fuss about this next evolution: cloud computing? Doesn’t it simply mean that human society is ready for a new conversation mode?

Social media has provided ground for a communication environment with various inter-and-co-related flow models. Like the chicken and the egg, there is no sense to start looking for the transmitter and the receiver; everybody can wear both hats. Also, like the Arab phone, a message transmitted can be transformed a thousand times and the resulting messages will be read a billion times by any kind of audience. Whereas the flow direction used to be very important and was useful for companies in measuring the audience receptiveness and return, today a phased (in time and space) dialogue remains central.