That’s my topic for ‘The Conversation Age’. It’s an interesting subject I formally read about in James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, and am now laterally exploring in Wikinomics.
But my first encounter with it was in the field of Competitive Intelligence, a discipline I have studied in the past and still highly admire. You see, apparently there’s a lot of gold in them there conversations with various departmental employees, partners, and customers. You just have to strike up a conversation and you’ll get plenty of fun facts, insight, and often directions on who else to talk to or where to research next.
If we decide to expand this conversational range horizontally (in topic) and vertically (in audience category)…you can get an idea of the depth of field we’re looking at here. Yet wait! Don’t think you’ll get a big bag of intelligence by simply chatting and asking for feedback. There’s a common process to this game. It doesn’t have to be strictly followed like we would the scientific method…but adhesion to the rules will yield better results if you’d like to go from “that’s nice to know” to developing strategies and tactics for the wide variety of applications you might imagine.
With only 400 words and one diagram, I’ve attempted to make my case without being too technical nor trite. I hope you’ll like it 
I look forward to perusing what the other authors have to reveal.
