Thinking about conversations and Social Media; a lot of focus has been on “let’s have a conversation” or the “number of conversations” (and where they come from or who).

What about the definition of a conversation?

Has anyone in the Social Media space defined what a conversation is (never mind how it’s measured)?

In my Information Technology background, which has analogies for social media, in order to send a message and have it acknowledged, you have to communicate information in certain sequences and formats. For example, when you send data via TCP/IP you wait for a response, then the next set of data is sent. With UDP, you can send the message, but don’t check if anyone got it (your not waiting for an “ACK” from the message receiver). Fast forward to Blogs …When someone leaves a comment, is that comment really a conversation if no one responds to it? At most, it can signify a willingness to have a conversation when you leave a comment on someone’s blog or message board.

Sure, if I talk to myself, is that defined as a conversation?  Maybe, but it so, is more a one way conversation.

Normally, unless a message stream is acknowledged, I would not think to call it a conversation, (unless taking to yourself is having a conversation) much as a system, communicating with itself, via a “loopback interface”) handles messaging.

There’s also the sense of a “listener” and “listening” inherit in the idea of what a conversation is.

So…I propose we count as conversations the number of instances of comments on a blog that are replied to (by the blogger or another reader).

Samething with Facebook; my news has a lot of content in it lately, but only a few responses from other Facebook friends to any single item-that’s a conversation, in my book.

I think the same approach can be applied much more broadly, like YouTube or Seesmic- your conversations are the number of responses that are responded to.

Once we can count conversations, we can examine their quality-that will be the subject of another post.

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• SocComm / The Social Communications Summit – February 10-11 2009 in NYC (hopefully I’ll be invited to speak at SocComm, btw, by Jeff Pulver)