Guest post by Mark Schaefer, author of {grow}.

I was reading a blog post the other day and this comment captured my attention: “Content is NOT king. It is the conversation around that content that is king.”

I recently wrote about how many of these conversations we THINK are occurring on the social web that are not occurring at all. A blog comment is not a conversation. A tweet or a status update is not a conversation. Pushing a “like” button is not a conversation.

So if you accept that we rarely have real conversations around here, what ARE we doing and does it have any affect on sales? Yes, I said sales. Marketers do not exist to drive re-tweets or page views. We exist to sell more stuff to more people for more money. (more…)