I was in the middle of writing a blog post on Living with Uncertainty when I came across this poem from Tom Atlee called Let’s Nail It Down, Before It Gets Away!. This is the third time in as many days when the emotional learning brought on by a poem has been great and swift - when the creative use of words has helped me understand something more deeply. A timely reminder of the power inherent in true wisdom, spoken from the heart. The ability to help people understand expansive concepts in simple terms through the power of words is something that every human shares.

It is the power of conversation. It is at the heart of all media.

In every form I have examined, media is about some one, or some organization communicating with you - having a conversation, or at least wanting to have one. The Broadcast models is often referred to as one-to-many and is unidirectional. The Internet is about one-to-one conversations, which is bi-directional. Now social media has truly enhanced the Web with many to many conversations, held within some broader context, but always a personal conversation. Some examples to consider:

• Blogger
• Nightly News Anchor
• Rock Band
• Print Ad
• Television Commercial
• Play
• Movie
• Radio Talk Shows
• Poem
• Press Release

Are they not all examples of people holding conversations? While you may consider the Rock Band to be giving a performance (as do I), on the most fundamental level they are communicating with you, telling you a story - even the instrumentals do so. It is all about the connections between people, their ideas, their emotions and their actions - and how we communicate those via mediated conversations with one another.I am not quite sure where this is going yet, but I think it is a key insight that will be at the core of another big idea in the near future. I spoke a little more about the idea of media as conversations (ok, perhaps I rambled on about it) with Eddie Codel in this NetSquared Vlog entry. I had not yet worked out the idea of media as conversation fully, but the original question was how do you use Blogs for your non-profit community. My answer was simple, the blog is my site, it is my primary media, it is my way for communicating with everyone - it is where I have conversations with the people who care about what matters to us.

At the same time, it is just one of the many ways in which I have conversations with people and with groups of people.

The lesson though is that we should perhaps think about Media as we think about having a conversation with someone. That blogging is just a conversation between me and you. Perhaps you have something you want to say, so you can comment on this. Or perhaps you have something so important to share that you want to more closely associate it with your online identity, so you write about it on your blog and (hopefully) you link back to me. But the blog is adaptive - it is both a broadcast communication, from me to everyone out there who reads it and a potential one-to-one conversation. Most importantly, it is as easy to do as it is to type and click a button.

This is what makes blogging so powerful from my perspective, and why my answer about how we use blogs was so simple. Once you make the conceptual shift to this understanding and enter the flow with a genuine vooice, the world will change ‘write’ before your eyes.

Categories: Blogging, Conversation