I figured I’d share with you my Age of Conversation post.  Let me know what ya think…

My guess is that those of us that are becoming emerging leaders in social media, those of us that are authoring the Age of Conversation, are a pretty homogenous lot. We’ll friend one another on Facebook, follow one another on Twitter, read one another’s blogs. And while we won’t agree on everything, general consensus on many matters quickly turns to gospel.

This takes me back to an experience I had a few years ago. I traveled to San Francisco to attend one of those dynamic online marketing conferences that’s filled with energetic people who are on the forefront of marketing communications and the technology that will make it possible. The optimistic attitude was never more obvious when 400 of us piled into a room for a major session. Top speakers giving us their views on the future and how we’d be leading it, creating the strategic methodologies of marketing communications. Yes, that will be us.

I began to look throughout the audience of hundreds of heads nodding in agreement and then realized something that troubled me.

There wasn’t one black person in the room.

This really isn’t about race. It’s broader and less tangible. It’s about the cultural touchstones that make up each of us. That gives us a certain affinity with those that we seek out to connect with through social media, those that share similar character traits and personal experiences. As with the offline world, that’s the way the online world – and the world of social media – is structured.

It’s imperative that we in social media seek to understand the diverse world that we’ll be looking to engage. It’s imperative that we realize that many of those that we see as “not getting it” will end up “getting it” on their own terms and in ways that will reflect their own cultural experiences. And it’s all the more important if we’re correct in our assertions that this is how we’ll be receiving our marketing messages, our news…the information that we need to live by.

The challenge before us is not only to overcome the barriers of those who seek to resist the changes we are embracing; it is also to develop a deeper understanding of the diverse peoples that are becoming users of social media.

If we fail to do that, we’ll simply be a bunch of nodding heads mistakenly thinking that we are the future of communication.