Wired Magazine published an article in their last issue about the rise of right-brained thinking. It’s the best case for Conversation Marketing I’ve ever heard. And I didn’t even pay the guy…

The author, Daniel H. Pink, suggests that just as analytical left-brained thinking drove the Information Age, balanced, left- and right-brained thinking will drive the new, Conceptual Age:

To flourish in this age, we’ll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are “high concept” and “high touch.” High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn’t know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

This article does more to explain why Conversation Marketing works than all the graphs on my overloaded hard drive. It’s not just about the statistics, but they’re important. It’s not just about the creative, either, but creative assets are just as critical to successful Internet marketing. It’s the marriage of the analytical and creative that makes and Internet campaign really work. You learn about your audience (analytical) and then you design a site (creative). Then you start receiving feedback in the form of statistics and conversion measurement (analytical) and make appropriate changes to your site (creative).

If we ignore the analytical, we’re making decisions based on our own needs, rather than the needs and wants of our audience. If we ignore the creative, then we create sites that are at best ugly, and at worst irrelevant.

It’s by bringing it all together – analytics, design, architecture, search marketing, PR, and who-knows-what-else – that you create real value for your visitors, and real returns for your organization.