The Age of Conversation launches today. It is a collection of mostly marketing writers who have contributed some thoughts on what conversation means in the branding world. I found myself among them, contributing a short piece on open listening. The book is available at lulu.com and proceeds are going to charity. We’ve even had our first review.
Here is the list of authors for your perusal:
Gavin Heaton
Drew McLellan
CK
Valeria Maltoni
Emily Reed
Katie Chatfield
Greg Verdino
Mack Collier
Lewis Green
Sacrum
Ann Handley
Mike Sansone
Paul McEnany
Roger von Oech
Anna Farmery
David Armano
Bob Glaza
Mark Goren
Matt Dickman
Scott Monty
Richard Huntington
Cam Beck
David Reich
Luc Debaisieux
Sean Howard
Tim Jackson
Patrick Schaber
Roberta Rosenberg
Uwe Hook
Tony D. Clark
Todd Andrlik
Toby Bloomberg
Steve Woodruff
Steve Bannister
Steve Roesler
Stanley Johnson
Spike Jones
Nathan Snell
Simon Payn
Ryan Rasmussen
Ron Shevlin
Roger Anderson
Robert Hruzek
Rishi Desai
Phil Gerbyshak
Peter Corbett
Pete Deutschman
Nick Rice
Nick Wright
Michael Morton
Mark Earls
Mark Blair
Mario Vellandi
Lori Magno
Kristin Gorski
Kris Hoet
G.Kofi Annan
Kimberly Dawn Wells
Karl Long
Julie Fleischer
Jordan Behan
John La Grou
Joe Raasch
Jim Kukral
Jessica Hagy
Janet Green
Jamey Shiels
Dr. Graham Hill
Gia Facchini
Geert Desager
Gaurav Mishra
Gary Schoeniger
Gareth Kay
Faris Yakob
Emily Clasper
Ed Cotton
Dustin Jacobsen
Tom Clifford
David Polinchock
David Koopmans
David Brazeal
David Berkowitz
Carolyn Manning
Craig Wilson
Cord Silverstein
Connie Reece
Colin McKay
Chris Newlan
Chris Corrigan
Cedric Giorgi
Brian Reich
Becky Carroll
Arun Rajagopal
Andy Nulman
Amy Jussel
AJ James
Kim Klaver
Sandy Renshaw
Susan Bird
Ryan Barrett
Troy Worman
S. Neil Vineberg
Enjoy!
[tags]age of conversation, marketing, engagement[/tags]
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I’m just tucking into to David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous. (I chose to start reading at the beginning by the way!). In the second chapter, on alphabetization, Weinberger talks about the arbitrariness of classification schemes for organizing knowledge. Everything ordered by human beings is done so arbitrarily, and no one scheme is going to capture exactly the right kind of order that needs to happens. This is why tagging is so important (and I confess to being a lax lately with tags. Perhaps this is a good time to change that practice).
“Knowledge is what happens when the joints of our ideas are the same as the joints of nature,” Weinberger writes. In the execution of a chaordic path, where groups and organizations are leaping to and fro between the poles of chaos and order as they find their way, harvesting knowledge must be useful to the endeavour. If the organization is evolving well, it is doing so in a natural way and so the knowledge that is being generated must be useful also in a natural way.
When I worked for government, the classification schemes we were required to use to file documents were so completely aribitrary that in three years I never filed a single thing, for fear that I would never be able to find it again. Instead, I kept files in my office, most often in piles and binders relating to the work I was doing. Things were tagged by post it notes if they could exist in more than one pile. I needed my own scheme. Since 1999 I haven’t used a filing cabinet and in the last year I have gone completely paperless, depending instead on Google Desktop to find what I am looking for in my digital world.
This is nothing new, but it has major ramifications for harvesting. We want to be helpful as facilitators and create clusters for groups of people that seem to reflect patterns we are seeing. The problem of course is that any scheme developed by one person excludes the social reality of the group. And so lately, I have been turning over classification to groups of people and using post-its to tag things so that we can find them again later. As soon as possible getting a harvest into a taggable digital format is essential so that it can be remixed and used in innovative ways, reflecting the chaordic journey a group is on.
This is something to add to the Art of Harvesting materials we are working on.
[tags]David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous, tagging, chaordic, filing, knowledge management[/tags]
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Just in the process of buying a beautiful piece of Canadian art for our business and we discovered that accountant said we can even depreciate it. Depreciate it?
“Yes,” he said, “but only if it’s Canadian art.”
What the hell? Who struck this Faustian bargain for Canadian artists?