Lately, I have been noticing a lot more talk about “enabling conversations” with the use of various communications tools such as blogs, podcasts and the like. Let me take a moment to dissect this trendlet and give you my thoughts.  Back in the day, we used the phone to have conversations when we weren’t physically in the same place. Few of us have that luxury anymore. So what would you consider second best – maybe an email exchange? But we all get too many emails, and besides, it might go into my spam bucket for some reason, so you can’t be sure that I will get your message. This is especially true when I send out my Web Informant, not that there is anything wrong with sending it out. It is just that a lot of newsletters get caught by the filters and trashed, so you can never be sure that someone actually got them.  Another issue with newsletters is that they are one way. Sure a lot of readers will respond and I enjoy your responses, but then the others don’t get to read these responses. I can post these to another newsletter (and sometimes I have in the past), but that still is a cumbersome process and far from the natural conversation of a phone call.  Another choice is Instant Messaging. I have taken to using IM for those critical conversations where I need to locate a source or a PR person Right Now, and that works relatively well — for those people that I have their IM address, and are available during the day, or at least deem to say to me that they are available.  

Perhaps better than IM is the blog. Our readers can post at will, or at least, when we approve the postings to weed out comment spam. But not every reader is going to take the time to read our blogs every day/week/month. That is where RSS was invented, to alert people when new comments or content arrives. But many PR people still don’t know what RSS is or how to use it. Shameless plug: I am giving a talk next week in Vegas on this very subject at the New Communications Forum, you can find the information on the conference here:.

 Then how about podcasts? Some podcasts are recordings of actual conversations between two or more people — and some of the best ones like Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcasts are just that, him and Leo Laporte just talking for 45 minutes or so. Is this “better” than reading comments in a blog? It could be — and in the particular case of Gibson, you can learn a lot about security tech in those 45 minutes, and much better use of your time (especially if you listen while driving or flying) than reading a transcript or an article.  And finally we have video blogs, where you would think this would be the height of conversation since we are talking to a camera, not just recording audio. But to make an engaging video isn’t as easy as it seems, and I’d rather watch those pirated Colbert/Stewart clips than some of the things that I have seen posted on You Tube. Plus, finding the more relevant ones isn’t easy either.  So many of us have gone full circle on this conversation thing and are back to just calling people on the phone — perhaps first after IMing them to make sure that they are actually available. Gee, isn’t this tech stuff wonderful?