social computing

At the opening day of Supernova in San Francisco, and I’m sitting in on a session about “Markets & Relationships” in the world of Web umpointoh.

What’s nice is it’s a gathering of all my homies, from Doc Searls to Jerry Michalski to David Weinberger, who are facilitating/presenting to the too large of a number of friends I see as I scan the room and wave to people I know.

What’s more problematic is that we’ve been talking about this subject for more than a decade, and I really wonder whether much has changed. Companies continue to declare the customer king and then ream the king. So lets see what comes of the session, eh?

David looks back at the early idea of the Web and marketing, which was that “here we add a cheaper way to broadcast to ‘consumers.’” Doc, who invented the catch-phrase ‘markets are conversations’ which got elaborated in The Cluetrain Manifesto, of which he and David were two authors (along w/ Chris Locke and Rick Levine), talks about the imbalance in organizations of sales vs. marketing. David points out that it is hard for marketers to blog, engineers do a better job, because they are less trained to “broadcast.”