Blogs are conversations between two people or hundreds of them. Understanding the need to create dialogue or conversation is central to the marketing of higher education or any business for that matter.

In the book Markets are Conversations, authors Doc Searls and David Weinberger suggest that we typically think of the Internet in the wrong terms. “When you think of the Internet, don’t think of Mack trucks full of widgets destined for distributorships, whizzing by countless billboards.

Think of a table for two. The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears, or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets, or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs, or seats. Most of all, not consumers.”
Searls and Weinberger further define the evolution of markets in this excerpt from Markets are Conversations.

The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell — and to talk.

The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: “Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm.” “The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?” “Taste this apple. We won’t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today.” Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.

Market leaders were men and women whose hands were worn by the work they did. Their work was their life, and their brands were the names they were known by: Miller, Weaver, Hunter, Skinner, Farmer, Brewer, Fisher, Shoemaker, Smith.

For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.”

These were the kinds of conversations people have had since they started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self. “Markets were conversations” doesn’t mean “markets were noisy.” It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other’s work. Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by authors Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger discusses the lack of one-on-one conversation relative to marketing and communicating the attributes of an organization or product. Organizations put forth messages regardless of whether we want to hear it or not. This is also an inherent problem with managers who don’t understand the dynamics of communication. It generally ends up costing more to reach the target than is necessary.

“One problem: there is no demand for messages. The customer doesn’t want to hear from business, thank you very much. The message that gets broadcast to you, me, and the rest of the earth’s population has nothing to do with me in particular. It’s worse than noise. It’s an interruption. It’s the Anti-Conversation.”

Applying this simple and pragmatic approach to communication and in the larger sense recruitment advertising is paramount to the success of the institution. Lynne Bowen-Lowe, Vice President with Quantum Communications, a national nurse recruitment and communications firm said, “integration of one-to-one relationship management strategies must be part of the successful recruitment mix.

Utilizing broad reach media is a given. It is the personalizing of the message that gives an institution the edge over the competition. Prospects feel that the institution knows something about them as an individual by the very nature of the media they elect to communicate through. It all becomes very personal. It’s all about me”

Successful marketing practitioners understand this. Marketers who do not understand this fundamental principle continue to broadcast messages that people don’t want to receive. Every advertisement, press release, publicity stunt, and giveaway engineered by a marketing department is colored by the fact that it’s going to a public that doesn’t ask to hear it.

“The Internet is a place. We buy books and tickets on the Web. Not over, through, or beside it. To call it a “platform” belies its hospitality. What happens on the Net is more than commerce, more than content, more than push and pull and clicks and traffic and e-anything. The Net is a real place where people can go to learn, to talk to each other, and to do business together. It is a bazaar where customers look for wares, vendors spread goods for display, and people gather around topics that interest them. It is a conversation. At last and again” (Searls, Weinberger, 2004).

A case in point is that people will turn to a website such as Amazon.com or Epinions.com to read the viewpoints about a given product or service that interests them. Angieslist.com is a rapidly growing service that rates local service providers. The ratings are by people who have used the product or service ¬-no commercial endorsement just personal experience. These are all blogs and people are having conversations and making important decisions based on these conversations.

“I’m in the market for a new computer,” someone says, and she’s off to the Dell site. But she probably won’t buy that cool new laptop right away. She’ll ask around first — on Web pages, on newsgroups, via e-mail: “What do you think? Is this a good one? Has anybody checked it out? What’s the real battery life? How’s their customer support? Recommendations? Horror stories?”

“I’m in the market for a good desk dictionary,” says someone else, and he’s off to Amazon.com where he’ll find a large number of opinions already expressed:

I love the look of this book, and the publisher did a great job; but I made the mistake of buying it without realizing that it was first published over 7 years ago….

I’ve had this book for two days and I keep going back to it. I may not be typical since I collect dictionaries and wanted this when I heard about it last year, but….

These conversations are most often about value: the value of products and of the businesses that sell them. The conversation is not limited to just prices, but the market currencies of reputation, location, position, and every other quality that is subject to rising or falling opinion” (Searls, Weinberger, 2004).

Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a research foundation, believes that “people will become not less but more aware of differing arguments as they become heavier Internet users,” because contradictory views are just a hyperlink away.

Chris Anderson author of The Long Tail says “opinion is a marketplace, and marketplaces work when you have liquidity.” Liquidity is exactly what participatory media provide.