One of the pitfalls of working in marketing, and particularly digital marketing, is the amount of buzzwords one has to wade through on a daily basis.

Rarely does a meeting go past, either internal or external, when I don’t feel like whipping out the bingo score sheet and shouting house. On one occasion a colleague actually bet me that I wouldn’t use a particular buzzword in a meeting, with a wager of a fiver to make things more interesting. I did, but only because the client was a friend of one of our team and had a very good sense of humour.

However recently there has been one particular buzzword that has begun to grate on my nerves more and more, yet didn’t feature in the IAB’s list of most hated lingo. And this isn’t because the word in question is some horrible mangling of the English language (like tradigital, the word that won me five quid) or a ridiculous misappropriation of a phrase from a different sector (how can you salute an idea?)

No, instead this particular word is a perfectly normal one that is starting to lose all meaning due to repeated misuse by people like me (and, I’m ashamed to say, people including me).

The word, of course, is conversation and from now on we will never use it again when describing a relationship between a brand & a consumer when it is nothing of the sort.

If we look to the Cambridge Dictionary for a definition of the word conversation, it states:

talk between two or more people in which thoughts, feelings and ideas are expressed, questions are asked and answered, or news and information are exchanged

The important parts for me in this definition is the word people. The reason the word conversation has been so widely adapted is because  Clay Shirky and the other authors of the seminal book The Cluetrain Manifesto (correctly) identified the fact that corporations are, in many ways, an unnatural way of looking at commercial relationships. As points 1-3 of their theses stated:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

They pointed out that with the coming of the interconnected world, companies wouldn’t be able to hide behind corporate speak and that successful companies would be those which could talk to their customers in a truthful manner, all ideas I agree with.

So why then, if I agree with The Cluetrain Manifesto, do I feel that the word conversation should be banned from business meetings and corporate documents? Because for 99% of the time that the word is used on such occasions, it describes no such thing. Instead it is used to describe a new form of marketing that, whilst it can be incredibly engaging, is often just as interruptive as the old forms it’s supposed to be replacing.

One could easily add three more theses to add The Cluetrain Manifesto:

1. Having a blog is not the same as having a conversation.
2. Neither is being on Twitter.
3. Or Facebook, MySpace or any other site which is regularly described as being social.

As Danny Sullivan said in an AdAge column back in 2007:

“Getting into” conversations. Yes, how we enjoy that. You’re in a coffee shop talking with a friend, and suddenly along comes the spokesperson for an artificial sweetener, just wanting to have a chat.

Go. Away.

Now at this point many some people may be thinking, “Hang on a second, don’t Altogether always preach the importance of understanding what consumers are saying about you and reacting to these things, and engaging with these consumers?” And the answer is yes, we absolutely do.

But the point is that monitoring the web to find people who may be discussing your brand, or a sector your brand is interested in, and then contacting those people does not make for a conversation: it’s just a more thoughtful form of PR or direct marketing. And neither does responding to customer complaints on blogs or Twitter: that’s just better customer service. Or, in the case of Ryanair, abuse.

And nor is responding to inaccurate press coverage, as last.fm recently did regarding a piece on Techcrunch, “hosting the conversation when under attack” (a quote from Andy Beal, a digital marketer we have a lot of time for, whose blog Marketing Pilgrim is essential reading). It’s simply clever reputation management – there’s no conversation, just a very honest & amusing rebuttal with a space for consumers to put their own point of view. That’s no more a conversation than letters in The Times responding to the previous day’s leader column.

No. Real, honest-to-goodness conversations between brands & consumers are so rare as to be remarkable when they do exist. Dell’s Ideastorm is one such example: created in response to unprecedented online criticism of the brand, it truly provides a space for Dell staff and external developers to come together and swap ideas. In which, to go back to the Cambridge Dictionary, “thoughts, feelings and ideas are expressed, questions are asked and answered, or news and information are exchanged”.

I’m sure that there are plenty of people who would like to respond to this post with their own examples of brands having real conversations (such as those described in Wikinomics), but due to an almost perfectly ironic technical issue, we’ve had to disable comments. And I’m not denying that they exist. It’s just that the vast majority of the brand/consumer relationships that are described as being conversations are nothing of the sort.

And whilst that’s the case, we won’t use the word conversation unless there really is one. Which is, of course, in and of itself, something to talk about.

Header image by Kris Hoet on flickr

Ryanair comment image from Travolution.

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