Midterm Exam Question 5

What kind of conversational patterns can you expect to encounter using social media as a PR professional? What will consumers of your content expect? How can you level these expectations?

According to Clay Shirky in the book Here Comes Everybody, we can see three main conversational patterns. The three patterns are Broadcasting, Loose conversations and Tight conversations. As a PR professional we will be encountering all three of these. The best way to describe these patterns is through the use of a long tail graph.

The relationship on the graph is between audience size (vertical) and conversational pattern (horizontal). Web blogs on the left had side, also known as the head of the graph, is the broadcast section. It is called this because of the there are so many readers it is more of a one-directional message to the readers. As size of the audience falls, loose conversation becomes becomes possible as there are less people to interact with. As you continue through the long tail of the graph, although there are less individuals reading your blog, there is an exponentially greater amount of two way interaction. Readers and writer can all pay similar amounts of attention to one another, this then forming tight conversational clusters.

We can see on the web that individuals, including PR professionals can have fewer and deeper interactions such as personal blog posts on a specific subject with a specific audience. Or they could have plenty of superficial ones, such as tweets and social media news releases. An example of this could be your 21st birthday party. You have invited 50 people to the event. You can take 10 guests into the V.I.P section and have long deep conversations or you can have shallow conversations with everyone. I think i order to fully engage your audience you need a balance of both.

Consumers of the context expect you to be actively involved by listening and providing feedback. Also, Building of relationships is important through continual conversation.