Writing in a Digital Age: Response

November 14, 2007

One reason I’m not an A-list blogger is my apparent inability to complete a blog series in a reasonable amount of time. Without further ado, I present to you the final installment in my series on screenwriter John August’s speech, The Challenges of Writing in a Digital Age (which I started a few weeks ago).

The fourth and final point of Writing in a Digital Age is response.

• Response

Writing used to flow in one direction. I wrote, you read. Sometimes, if you were incredibly motivated, you might respond: a letter to the editor, or a letter directly to the author. But the initial writing and the response weren’t linked together.

In a digital age, they are.

This is my favorite part about the digital age. It’s very empowering to consumers. And, initially, it can strike fear into the hearts of companies. But when companies embrace response, they can learn to build solid relationships with consumers. They can turn consumers into customers, customers into repeat buyers, and repeat buyers into brand evangelists. It’s all about relationships, which start with conversations. It’s give and take instead of a straight sales pull. Consumers love it and brands benefit from it (when they do it properly).

Response to the response - We’ve all been in forums and threads where the original topic is long gone. It’s now just these disembodied voices shouting at each other. If you’re the author of the original piece, how do you get control back? Are you even allowed to? Who owns the discussion?

Good forums have moderators, but I’d like to see conversation marketers to be experts in facilitation. Facilitators are able to help a group maintain focus while providing everyone (who wants it) with the opportunity to express themselves.

Companies need to establish ground rules for comments on their blogs and forums and then have dedicated facilitators to monitor the conversations. This isn’t unlike a “style guide” that is used for more traditional communications.

In order to become an authority, you have to participate. You have to offer your thoughtful opinion when appropriate, and you have to invite others’ responses. Remember: an expert is someone who knows something. An authority is someone with the reputation to back it up. You get that reputation from your peers. That’s why your professors publish articles in journals with peer-review.

The only caveat I would throw in is that you have to prioritize how important your peer’s opinion is. There is very little that is black and white. Even doctors will admit that medicine is part art and part science. As a thyroid cancer patient, I know many endocrinologists, surgeons, and nuclear medicine specialists who are authorities by August’s definition who also disagree with each other.

Still, participate in the community for which you are an authority. And remember that disagreements are not reason to flame another authority.

Your comments. Remember–they have your name on them, and once you’ve made them, you can’t take them
back. So make sure you’re going to be willing to stand by them a year from now. Or twenty years from now.

If you’ve been trying to maintain separate professional and personal identities on the web, I encourage you to begin the integration process. Anything you put on the internet has the potential to be seen by employers, partners, co-workers, family members and friends. Playing hooky is not fun when you get caught.

The last word goes to John August himself who summed up these new writing challenges in a most-insightful manner:

No matter what career you end up choosing, or what career is chosen for you by fate, you will be a writer for the rest of your life. As the digital age accelerates, I’m convinced that writing is going to get more important each year. It’s not a noun anymore. It’s not the term papers and the memos and the screenplays. Writing is a verb. It’s an action. It’s a crucial way in which we process the world around us.

Posted in Conversation Marketing by Nathania Johnson