Can we all stop agreeing with each other and have some arguments please?

Hey Edward, Geez, 85-comments to get through before I can leave mine?! I was at Ad:Tech/Chicago, today. And the funny thing is that there was some great arguments on one or two of the panels. Sadly, they seemed more personal-based than perspective-based. But I digress, the mutual-admiration society that is our business, has to come to end for us to truly progress. Love the blog. Paul .-= Paul Marobella´s last blog ..Live Blogging: Ad:Tech Chicago - Client Bashing =-.

;) u must visit the brazilian world of twitter... we only have FIGHTS! everybody hates each other... you will love it ;D .-= gabriela rolim ´s last blog ..Xuxa Meneghel ganha profile falso no Twitter =-.

I think we can agree that the photo for this post is pretty awesome. Nice pick. .-= Leo Bottary´s last blog ..Why You Should Interview Anyone Who Asks =-.

You know what the best part of this post is? The comments! The way this post is constructed allowed a dynamite conversation to evolve. Some bloggers state very obvious things. It isn't meant to encourage a conversation. Perhaps it's only meant to elicit a "thanks for the thought". When you post to provoke, though - it seems you're bound to get more stimulating commentary.

oh, and just for the record, i blame it on dale carnegie. :+) -bowerbird

What a firestorm of comments! Very interesting stuff here. But after debating this for a week and talking about the need to engage in more disagreements, it also occurs to me that maybe we're going a bit too far in the other direction. Blogging doesn't have to always be about opinion. Sometimes blogging is about education. Sometimes it's about honest sharing. Sometimes it's about personal promotion. Sometimes it's about a Kmart gift card. (That last one's for you, Ben Kunz. ;) Debate is a good thing and I believe it sharpens ideas. But it's simply not always warranted. Agreement can be a good thing as well, because it enhances credibility for ideas that are solid. I think the bigger takeaway of this discussion is not to disagree more, but to think critically and give credit where credit is due. Just thought I'd throw a little balance on the scales. Bob Knorpp Host of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast Posts Every Monday @ http://beancast.us

Long-standing problem in blog land, Edward. One that's been debated quite a bit in the past (how's that for passive-aggressive disagreement;) I have given up reading many of the blogs you site above precisely because the majority of the comments are "Brilliant, Bob! You wrote it was Tuesday and you know what? Today really is Tuesday! Traditional agency types would never figure that out!" And I know I am not the only one who's lost patience with those blogs and stopped reading the comments (and the blog) as a result. But you can fix that. Just be a little argumentative back. Disagree with people on your own blog and they'll stop with the sycophantic comments. Worked on the Toad Stool, anyway, .-= Alan Wolk´s last blog ..Location, Location, Location =-.

Great conversation Edward! You should pick fights more often. ;-) .-= Leo Bottary´s last blog ..Why You Should Interview Anyone Who Asks =-.

oh yeah, edward, i'd appreciate it if you would _not_ remove the hard-line-breaks i insert so carefully... it's that poet-thing, you know. (as well as being another way i mark my postings.) thanks. -bowerbird

edward said: > Your comment is here. Though you aren’t are you. > You appear to be the only one with no link and > no real identity. Perhaps that is one of the issues. i understand your thought process. but a pseudonym is not the same as being "anonymous". "bowerbird" started out as my performance poetry name, over 20 years ago, and gradually became the name i used for all my creative purposes, until now i use it exclusively. which is something i explain to anyone who brings it up... in the worlds of performance poetry and electronic-books, my two passions, residents know me _only_ as bowerbird... (that's in my face-to-face relations as well, not just online; it's only when i'm hiding online that i use my "real" name.) i can direct people to some of my sites, if they really care, but i'm guessing that most people don't. my e-mail address is bowerbird@aol.com, and has been ever since 1995 or so, so it's not like i'm going incognito. indeed, for a poet, i am a remarkable display of stability... i usually offer to buy lunch for anyone willing to travel to santa monica, if they should want to meet me in person... and if anyone wants to e-mail me with their phone number, i will call you, with my number exposed, so you can call me any time you wanna check whether i'm a real person or not. all of this is something that most people understand fine, once it has been explained... and the people who continue to harp about "my real name" are the people who just want to dismiss what i have to say without really thinking about it. it's precisely because i want people to know the exact human who wrote each of my posts that i'm happy to sign each one. -bowerbird

Edward, I would argue, like some of your commenters even, that we're loosing the ability to accept constructive criticism as a natural response to something we write. By default, we all want to be encouraging, and even if we think something sucks we're discouraged from being anything but nice. This is especially true in the social media arena because I think people like the idea of being able to connect with others, and they search for common ideas and ideals within the subtext of articles that have been written. Much like when people immigrated into the United States in mass numbers and tended to identify with others in the same situations through community and religion, we are tending to gravitate to others with whom we identify first as we all become accustomed to having social media in our lives. Once we're more comfortable with it and confident that our arguments can be substantiated by our following (or whatever makes us an authority), I would think you'll find more healthy discourse all around. I do try, however, to both accept and respond to constructive criticism or comments with which I disagree. I wrote a lot about autism on a separate blog I maintained for a long while and had a couple of colorful comments about the topic. It definitely made me think carefully about my response, and challenged me to concisely word my answer (just as this is!). But I attribute that mainly to the fact that I'd been blogging for a while and felt confident that I could provide a counterpoint to their argument. As always, I enjoy your posts, even if I disagree with them and never voice it. Thanks! .-= Mariano´s last blog ..How Often Should I Blog? =-.

Edward, thanks for your thoughtful reply and encouragement. There's never enough of that to go around. This thread is one of the best I've joined in, so hats off to you and everyone on it. Tom Cuniff put it even more strongly than I would when he said "Orthodoxies become calcified before they have a chance to be examined." I don't know if they're "orthodoxies" exactly, but one reason your post resonated with me was it’s so tiresome and unnerving when advice/tactics/pseudo-rules for social media or new marketing best practices are treated by the vast majority in the blogosphere/twitterverse as "settled law." AS IF. Being popular is no substitute for being right. Calling for respectful disagreement and debate is very important. (Almost) everyone on the thread saw that, so it struck a chord. The reason it's important is because a) marketing best practices are NOT all settled law, b) there's a lot of experimenting that needs to be done, c) there's a lot to learn that needs to be proven or disproven (not assumed), and d) argumentation and debate is essential to discovery and continuous improvement. Aren’t best practices in any profession by definition a collaborative, group learning process? We won’t discover America if we all sit around tweeting how smart we are to know the earth is flat. That's my current riff. I wish I could direct you to my blog for more, but it's not baked yet. Dozens of unfinished drafts are piling up in my corner. I *hope* to find the time soon to get it off the ground.

Edward, I followed your provocative Tweet here and was disappointed. Because all of this chatter is about social media. How it should be different than it is. It sounds like you're complaining about the guests at your cocktail party. My 2 cents on the root of your issue: it's time for a different reason to get together than to discuss what social media is and isn't. .-= @bradnoble´s last blog ..AM ride to work around Mystic Lakes =-.

yes, the groupthink is pernicious. i was trained as a social scientist-- a social psychologist, actually, so i am familiar with groupthink. good argumentation is key there, and you actually seek out evidence that'll disconfirm your hypotheses, in an active search for _the_truth_. but that attitude hasn't gotten me very far vis a vis blog commenting. indeed, i'm widely known as a "troll", even though i work very hard to be constructive, and avoid ad hominem. (plus, i stay away from the "opinion" issues, where there is no real answer.) the thing is, bloggers are praised by their readers so often that they come to actually believe they're golden, and are "shocked" when anyone disagrees. it's as if you've come "into their house"and pissed on their living room carpet...(more than one has actually said this!) so they attack you, as if "in response", attributing the worst of motives to you. or remove your comment, or ban you...they _take_it_ personally, even if you were careful to write it so that it wasn't. and even if the blogger himself doesn't insult your input, the reader/friends will. they're there to trade favors, and you are upsetting their precise environment. the other thing is that a lot of bloggers are using their platform to build their "personal brand", and it doesn't benefit that effort if people disagree with them. (they can even construe it as you taking food out of the mouths of their children.) plus the only thing a blogger hates worse than having you say "you are wrong" is to have you document clearly, with a dozen solid reasons, exactly why they're wrong. so it's not as if they are open for dialog... so the odds of having a productive thread are greatly reduced, to the point of zilch. i persist, because many of the lurkers are smart enough to see through the charade, so i know i reach these objective observers. but some days, it can become very tedious. -bowerbird

There is a wonderful back-patting nature to social media now. Part of that is good. If you repost my tweet I'll do the same to yours. Adweek is more of a broadcast media where readers are not hoping for something back in return. That may change as the space matures and we have too many Twitter followers already. .-= Mark Harmel´s last blog ..everglades, sanibel island and airboats =-.

Steve Parker hits the nail squarely and painfully on the head: "The color theme of Twitter should be brown for all the over-the-top brown-nosing... (why) ruin our chance to be popular by disagreeing with the popular kids?" One could answer, "Well, what's the harm in being nice and agreeable?" There's no harm in being nice, but there's MASSIVE harm in being endlessly agreeable. 1) Everyone's ego gets stroked, but nobody gets smarter. 2) Weak ideas -- and some genuinely destructive ideas -- flourish. 3) Cults of personality and group-think thrive. 4) Innovative ideas are ignored and people who think different are exiled. 5) Orthodoxies become calcified before they have a chance to be examined. When we lack the intelligence, people skills or nerve to engage in spirited and healthy debate we stop learning. There's a risk of becoming an exceedingly polite but entirely brain-dead group. Some people, like @amandachapel, believe we're already there. I've seen this movie before, in Web 1.0 before the bubble. Nearly all of us got cocky. A very few of us got rich. But not one of us escaped getting burned when the bubble burst. Arrogance and insecurity seriously slowed the growth of digital, and I fear it's about to happen again. Here's the irony about social media. The gurus demand that corporations think differently, take risks and stretch. Yet, it never occurs to anyone that these are things we ALL need to do. Disagree with me, please. We can all learn something from it. .-= Tom Cunniff´s last blog ..What If Your CEO Is Right To Be Afraid Of Social Media? (Part Two) =-.

I'm finding less and less value on Twitter because of this. The way I see it: a) most everyone on Twitter agrees about most everything or... b) many of the so-called social media experts (as most people know I have a big problem with them) are hacks and don't have enough experience to disagree or... c) even those that know what they're doing don't want to disagree with a big shot like You (Edward) or Brogan for fear of looking incompetent to colleagues or potential customers. I know this last one to be particularly true as an industry opinion I voiced on Twitter certainly cost me a job. You'd think that the relative anonymity of Twitter would force more disagreement, but as Twitter's population explodes, it's filling with more and more noise, burying the good content. Can't wait for the next place we go after Twitter.

A creative director who really wants to be argued with? Say it isn't so. It's actually a very small segment of Internet users (ref Forrester) who actually feel inclined to leave a comments on blogs. So you should feel pretty awesome getting as many comments as you do for a niche blog. And BTW this is taking up way more time than an @reply would have. Killing my bandwidth. Oh yeah, great post. .-= Jimmy Gilmore´s last blog ..Ten things advertising people need to know about social media =-.

I might be terribly cynical, but I think the chain of agreement is often pure brown-nosing AKA starf***ery. In society we are generally conditioned to not express opinions contrary to an individual who has made a name for themselves. Plus, a lot of Social Media folks are either entrepreneurs in search of clients, or job-seekers in search of leads. So they're doubly careful to only spread around the sweetness. I see Tweets all the time that go something like this: @FamousAdPeep:Holy crap, I love me some egg salad sandwiches!!! Booyah! @Sycophant: @FamousAdPeep Wow I like egg salad sandwiches too! Let me DM you my recipe! @Sycophant: Egg salad is Great, I agree! RT @FamousAdPeep Holy crap, I love me some egg salad sandwiches!!! Booyah! However, sometimes I err in being TOO argumentative when i disagree, which is just as annoying. I'm working on that. .-= Mark Trueblood´s last blog ..Under The Influence changed =-.

Ben Kunz, Annabel Candy, and Mike Morris make the first point that I think we've all caught onto and agree with, that is, we are all attracted and typically follow those we are like-minded with. Therefore, there isn't much reason for debate. Further more, we sometimes develop relationships with those individuals and funny enough, do we debate with our friends even offline? Then you have Stuart Foster's and Davina Brewer's basic comments that we've all pretty much been taught by our mother's to "play nice" with each other, so we shy away from confrontation or debate. I like Anthony Butler's response in that it takes us respecting one another's position to have a useful debate and that, in my opinion, usually doesn't exist! We get so defensive, we take it personal, we think you're attacking how smart we are, what we believe. That is oftentimes not the case. For me, there are two things I need for this to happen: 1) I need someone who WANTS to be challenged! I look for many different perspectives and I follow many different people. They all present valuable feedback, information, concepts, and thoughts that help me continually improve and define who I am. SO, if I want them to continue to be valuable to me, I have to make sure they are continuing to grow, improve, and redefine! As Edwards states, by me challenging those that I follow, I am actually building them up, improving them, by getting them to think from a different perspective. That is GOOD! That is what makes us better and how we learn! Let's DO that! BUT, in order for that to happen effectively, we need this... 2) I need someone (the leader/blogger) to have the patience and understanding of how to moderate a debate! We talk about flamers and trolls, we talk about those that won't ever see someone else's view and yet will viciously defend their own. This takes a person who has the patience and respect to see everyone's point of view even if they do not see each others. If we all respected one another, this wouldn't be the problem. That is hardly the case, therefore, the "leader" has to take charge and somewhat control the discussion/debate. Until someone can clearly and consistently do this, other bloggers won't take the chance of having debates in their communities. They need an example of how to do it right, consistently. .-= Brian Hamlett´s last blog ..Survey Says: Twitter is a Waste of Time =-.

The question then becomes: how do we seek understanding? How can we create a forum that both invites and supports dissenting opinions so that folks on all sides of an issue fee heard but -- more importantly -- understood? And is that possible in the asynchronous pattern of blogging and commenting? .-= Tamsen McMahon (@tamadear)´s last blog ..Vacation from reality =-.

I have to agree with your post (sorry). What I find fascinating are three things that you didn't really mention specifically but which are important sub-texts that did show up in others' comments. First, as a society we're losing the ability to disagree without being disagreeable...to have what used to be called a "healthy debate." This is a great loss, especially in a democracy. It's good that so many are too polite to trash others without cause or knowing them, but that moral good now gets in the way of healthy debates, because we don't wish to be seen as personally attacking those with whom we disagree. (We know many will take it that way.) Second, this situation is made worse by choosing to take in ONLY "news" and opinion that we already agree with. This started prior to social media, but social media is doing nothing IMHO to improve the situation, and may be making it worse. Third, your observation made me realize that social media is not fad OR trend, but rather both fad AND trend. The trend part is its permanence and significance, but the fad part is its' ridiculous junior high-ness. Seth and Chris and Amber and 200 others are the popular kids, and we all want to be popular like them. (The color theme of Twitter should be brown for all the over-the-top brown-nosing and atta boys that goes on among the A-listers. Puh-leeze!) It's much easier to agree with them, and hope they notice us and like us. Why would we ever want to ruin our chance to be popular by disagreeing with the popular kids? The real answer to the question you pose may be just to "get comfortable with ambiguity." I for one have, out of necessity. I follow as many of the leading marketing voices as I can, and with many I totally agree with somewhere between 60-90% of what they say, but STRONGLY disagree with the rest. Unless we embrace the ambiguity, we just won't be comfortable appearing to "trash" someone with whom we agree most--but not all--of the time. By the way I strongly agree with your reason for calling for debates, which is that maybe we'll learn something. Ultimately learning is the only reason to debate.

What a great discussion! Group think has long been an issue which I think is easily exacerbated by social media. As many have already pointed out, we tend to follow and read those that we agree with. Actively seeking out opinions that disagree with your point of view is the exception,not the rule which continues the group think cycle. I agree that we do need to have more constructive disagreements, but as has already been said, that requires more effort and whether or not people are willing to put forth that effort remains to be seen. .-= Melissa Dafni´s last blog ..Analyzing Yahoo’s Know Your Mojo =-.

Some great comments here, specifically from Ben, Leo, Bob and Mike about 1) people self-selecting similar personas to read online and thus not usually disagreeing and 2) it's just easier to head-bob than to craft a dissenting opinion, so most often those who agree comment and those who don't just move on to another place, another post. I'm guilty of this myself; sometimes it is because I don't want to take the time to draft a response that disagrees and other times because it's because I don't trust myself enough to take on an "authority" (though I realize that's a no-good excuse and I need to ramp up the confidence). I wrote a similar post a few weeks back and a few of the comments left there - one of which was that people want to be liked and LINKED - and so they try to score points by being agreeable. One commenter said that it's especially true for newbies in social media who have "mini 'Aha!' moments" as they continue to learn, and fall into a natural agreement pattern in the beginning as they soak in all this new knowledge. http://www.amymengel.com/2009/07/a-little-less-conversation-a-lot-more-discussion/ Another commenter on that post made the "be careful what you wish for" argument - just look at how much "argument" happens on newspaper blogs, for example. Oy. .-= amymengel´s last blog ..Social Media Smackdown: Tacoma Art Museum vs. Cincinnati Art Museum =-.

If a post deserves to be called out, it will be. I don't care who you are or what your reputation is - if you've written something that's BS, then I'll call you on it. And I'd expect you to do the same for me (which many of my commenters do, and what makes the conversation so much better). :) And for the love of God, man, switch on threaded comments! It's not 2008, you know... ;-) .-= Danny Brown´s last blog ..Passion Drivers =-.

What concerns me about calls to action for "disagreement" is that disagreements all too often turn into battles of judgment or simple exercises in contradiction: I'm right, you're wrong. (Rarely does it go the other way: you're right, I'm wrong.) From that standpoint, I see nothing wrong with manners and consideration. But I do agree that sycophancy is a problem: the less we seek to disconfirm that which we think we know, the more extreme (and tenaciously held) our views become. But I don't think the answer likes in asking for commenters to disagree--disagreement is easy. (this comes to mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM). Disagreement, to me, implies arguing positions, instead of debating issues. It's a catch-22, of course: to build an audience for your blog (and raise the probability of thoughtful discourse in the comments) you need a wider audience base. The most common way to get that wider audience base is to have your posts shared and cited...and who is most likely to do that? People who agree. To seek out disagreement means that you run a real risk of limiting the very audience that would provide the interaction you desire. This post is a perfect example: what I think you're really asking is for commenters to be thoughtful, not sycophantic. Since your readers do not appear to be those solely in this for the numbers, it's a false construct: Who would--really--disagree with the "be thoughtful" premise, even when cloaked as "please disagree"? .-= Tamsen McMahon (@tamadear)´s last blog ..Calendar on your phone. Simple. Right? =-.

I disagree with myself all the time. :-) be sure to listen to conversations in places like Twitter and in real life not just blog comments. There's probably more hearty discussion than at first glance. .-= David Armano´s last blog ..Brand U.0 on YouTube =-.