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Everywhere I look, I see B2B marketing that spouts "join the conversation," "get in the conversation," and other references to the word that skew it's meaning into the equivalent of "talk to the hand."

In my last post, I wrote about debunking the B2B buzzword, engagement. In the same vein, I'm wondering what the heck happened to the art of conversation? Have we become so numb by the ability to publish whatever we want that we've forgotten how to be human?

The words dialogue and conversation are also interchanged without thought but, in online marketing, they have different criterion:

Conversation: an interchange of thought, information actively shared between/among people. (Requires 2 or more people)

Dialogue: an exchange of information (Only requires one person)

The difference here is that a conversation is an active exchange of information between people where a dialogue (as an exchange of information) could be between a person and a website, blog, video, etc. without the need for two active (human) participants.

I think this is an important distinction. I do not think the two are interchangeable.

Let's look at some examples of what a conversation is NOT:

• A push email – even if the recipient clicks
• A Tweet with no commentary (title and link and handle)
• A blog post with comments from readers, but no response from the author (This does, however, change if readers are commenting in response to each other.)
• A white paper download
• Viewing a video

Examples of what transforms dialogue into conversation is response.

• I receive an email, click the link, and forward the email on to a colleague who responds back to me with comment about the content I shared. We may exchange several more emails in discussion about the content.
• I receive a comment on my blog, respond back and ask a follow-on question and the person comes back to answer the question. Or another reader jumps in and answers the question I asked and I respond to them.
• Someone posts a question to a LinkedIn group and provides a link to a blog post or article on the topic. Group members respond by leaving comments and referencing perspectives of others – discussion ensues.

If I had just clicked the link and read the information in the first example, there is no conversation. It's the act of involving others and adding my commentary that turns the dialogue into a conversation. There must be back and forth between people for a conversation to form.

The evolution is that we don't need oral communication to have a conversation. As long as two people are involved, a conversation can be facilitated by a variety of technology platforms, from email to communities to social media and beyond.

But, it's only dialogue if technology is carrying on half of the conversation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of marketing automation. Use your technology to establish a dialogue that engages people through contextual information they want and need, GO YOU! But it's not a conversation until another person gets involved. This is because the "dialogue" is dependent on the behavior of the single participant, not both.

[If I visit this webpage, the system sends me a link to content A. If I visit a landing page and download a white paper, the system sends me content B. Etc. In a dialoge scenario, there's not a possiblity that it could veer off to content X.]

This is even more important when you consider social media. I see so many exchanges where someone is looking for help, only to be told to call an 800 number. Really? That's the best you can do? Although that fits the criterion for a conversation (2 or more people), there's also a difference between a valuable conversation and a crappy excuse for one.

So, when you think about "conversation" in marketing terms – what are you doing to make it more human?

And for those of you thinking "Wait. I get thousands of responses to my nurturing program! I can't possibly deal with this…" I would point you to buying stages and personas and battening down your lead scoring schema to get to intelligence that's useful. It's all in your approach to prioritization.

Don't let conversation become a meaningless buzzword. With a little art and science we can make marketing human, approachable, and definitely more social.

Great discussions are nothing surprising here on Lifehacker. Each day, we highlight a discussion that is particularly helpful or insightful, along with other great discussions and reader questions you may have missed. Add your two cents and jump in on the fun! More »

Great discussions are nothing surprising here on Lifehacker. Each day, we highlight a discussion that is particularly helpful or insightful, along with other great discussions and reader questions you may have missed. Add your two cents and jump in on the fun! More »

Editor’s Note:  Semil Shah is currently an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a columnist at TechCrunch since January 2011. He hosts a weekly TCTV show In the Studio and pens a weekly column, Iterations. Follow him on Twitter @semil.

“In the Studio” rolls into the dog days of summer by welcoming a guest who, originally trained in computer science, went on to found a large consumer website, worked in venture capital on Sand Hill Road, and after helping out his would-be business partner learn the ropes of “hacking” the fundraising process, set out on a journey to build what a platform for startup investing and other related activities that has been gaining momentum and strength over the past few years.

Naval Ravikant, the CEO and co-founder of AngelList, originally began helping his current co-founder, Babak Nivi, navigate the funding process years ago. Nivi began writing down the ideas, and their blog, “Venture Hacks,” born. Since then, the duo has known they’re committed to doing something meaningful at scale, but had to take many attempts. What first started out as a social network (“Dealflow”) morphed into a Google Group, then a Yammer setup, and then in 2010, AngelList was born with an email list. The initial response was so positive, Naval and Nivi realized that they may had found the initial product their market craved.

Since that point, AngelList’s influence has compounded. More and more companies, investors, and other startup ecosystem players began not only creating official profiles, but also searching for and discovering information on the site. Companies began not only being able to raise small seed rounds via introductions channeled by the site, but also closing larger financings, sometimes even with institutional players participating in the rounds. As more and more information about fundraising has come online, and as more and more companies are being founded, and as people look to the web to help create and maintain a reputation, AngelList has been a key force in the current overall reinvention of venture capital, though it has not occurred without differences in opinion among some of the web’s savviest investors, as well.

I invited Naval in for a discussion because most people think of AngelList as “a place to get funding,” but when you start to peel back the layers, what he and his team are building is really a full-blown product, a powerful platform with an API already in use by some of the largest venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road. In this video, Naval also shares more nitty-gritty details about how he and his team think about product features, their hopes for their API, and examples of the vertical and horizontal features they are playing with. AngelList feels poised to be *the* startup ecosystem identity platform, and while Naval concedes some limitations about how much of the process can be facilitated online, this discussion brings to light just how much AngelList is doing to create more transparency and efficiency within the process.

Google announced changes to the Knowledge Graph yesterday.

The big change is that Google’s Knowledge Graph is now available worldwide for all English language versions of Google. So now if you are in the UK, you will and should get the knowledge graph results.

The second big change is that Google added a carousel to the knowledge graph results. The carousel expands up at the top of the page, and then flips through various results. Here is a picture:

In addition, the knowledge graph results show up in the search box as you type now:

Here is a video showing these features off:

I personally do not see these results yet, so I haven’t personally played with it.

Forum discussion at Google+ and WebmasterWorld.

A Google Web Search Help thread has confirmed reports of a bug with Google Search and the next page button.

When you get to page three of the results, the results continue to repeat themselves.

For example, you click next from page one to page two and then from page two to page three and it works fine. But when you try to go to page four, it cycles you back to page three. You can reproduce it yourself for the search phrase [MAFPS flight planning].

Here is a video:

This is not the first time we’ve seen this bug. We reported a similar issue in 2009.

Googler Sarah responded saying, “Thanks for reporting this. I could see the same thing and we are investigating now.”

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Great discussions are nothing surprising here on Lifehacker. Each day, we highlight a discussion that is particularly helpful or insightful, along with other great discussions and reader questions you may have missed. Add your two cents and jump in on the fun! More »

You should read Mat Honan’s heartbreaking tale of a hack attack and the ensuing discussion on Techmeme. Much of the story is about Amazon or Apple’s security practices, but I would still advise everyone to turn on Google’s two-factor authentication to make your Gmail account safer and less likely to get hacked. More »

Typically, Google updates the reports within Google Webmaster Tools daily but it typically is two days behind.

Right now, the reports have not been updated since August 2nd, which puts us currently six days behind schedule.

Google has had delays before with Google Webmaster Tools, so this is not new.

Google’s Gary Illyes from the Zurich, Switzerland office responded that Google will be looking into it.

He wrote in two Google Webmaster Help threads:

Thanks for posting! I let the engineers know and they’re going to take a look.

So if your reporting is delayed, do not panic, it is everyone.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google announced they’ve expanded their traffic data to over 130 smaller cities across the world.

The expansion is not just in the US, but also in places like Colombia, Costa Rica, and Panama. Google also added cities in the US such as Kalamazoo (Michigan), Portland (Maine), Tuscaloosa (Alabama) .

Personally, I love Google Maps traffic and with Apple Maps replacing Google Maps in iOS 6, despite Apple Maps having real time traffic, I am a bit nervous about it’s accuracy. I love being able to see how much longer that red line in Google Maps is when sitting in bumper to bumper traffic in New York. So expanding Google Maps real time traffic to more and more cities is great!

As you know, Google Maps crowdsources most of the traffic data, so it is pretty good.

Here is a coverage map of traffic data covered by Google Maps.

Forum discussion at Google+ and Google Maps Help.