What I took away from the conversation was just how valuable conversation can be, an idle chat which allowed Tony to probe my inner mental workings and I to exercise thoughts and feelings. A conversation recently sadly lacking from my life (and no disrespect to my super intelligent wife or parents) having recently moved back to the UK.

It reminded of Chris Locke’s essay in The Cluetrain Manifesto when he talked about his role as a PR guy for an AI company back in the early 90′s.

“I started having genuine conversations with genuinely interesting people. I’d call up… no agenda, no objective – and we’d talk.”

“These conversations weren’t work. They were interesting and engaging. They were exciting. They were fun. I couldn’t wait to get back to work…”

Locke found this approach to be far more productive generating, in his case, far more positive attention for his employer.

So back to me then – after all this is my space for socialising thoughts and as a reader you can always change the channel.

I like to think of Social Media as a shelf full of toys for facilitating conversation, I am by no means a Social Media expert but my dialogue with Tony help me revisit long since filed away thoughts on the underlying purposefulness of Social Media. More to the point; is there a singular reason behind why conversational approaches work so well?

Is is because of some deep human desire for inclusion into a thought or decision making process, or a narcissistic want to espouse one’s own knowledge (which certainly drives me for sure)? Well probably both of those and a pile of other rationale, but I suspect that underpinning the lot is trust. Or more correctly a notion of trust.

You see Trust is really just a personal perception of how much faith we place in another entity based upon a set of very personal criteria. Each of us will have very different notions of how much faith we place in certain brands, people, thoughts etc based upon things that matter to us personally.

Conversation in a professional context helps to build a relationship, one in which each party not only understands the content of the conversation but the position from which the other party comes from. Trust dictates the weight of that conversation within it’s context.

So in the case of my ramblings with Tony, he as an educationalist (well ex) was interested in the thinking behind some of my thinking on the whole social space, he was looking as the sociological side of my thought processes. For him, I suspect (read hope) his interest was piqued by some eloquent elaboration on why this is that, and that is this. From Tony’s perspective I appeared to know what I was talking about and therefore he was able to make a personal assessment of how much trust he should place in my thinking.

I on the other hand wanted, no needed, Tony’s attention and at some level validation of my thoughts. I wanted his trust. Why? Because as an ex-educationalist, as a fellow Tuttle Club attendee, as an interesting and inciteful thinking I trusted Tony’s opinion. It mattered to me as in my judgement Tony was qualified to pass judgement.

And this surely holds true for conversations in all sectors; brand to consumer (yuk word but hey), business to business, even government to electorate. I mean just look at the unprecidented use of social media by the US Democratic campaign to engender trust in the Obama/Biden ticket. Would people really have voted for Obama if they hadn’t trusted that he was the best option for the role? I certainly hope not.

So I am going to have to explore this area again, more, a lot more as to my mind everything revolves around trust.

My thoughts on this are yet to be fully formed but it raised a couple of immediate questions;

1) Does 2-way video calling potential level the telecoms playing field for those with a hearing impairment in that now that can use the service to lip-read (assuming they can)?

2) Has anyone done any research into this?

3) Does the differential pricing for video calls, whereby the operator’s charge more for a video call than a voice call, represent discrimination against those unable to utilise the voice service?

Rather obviously for the deaf SMS, IM and microblogging services are a level playing field already.

Hmmm. This needs more thinking.