Content is not king; never was. Content is cheap. When I want quality, reliable content on any topic, it is easy to find, usually for free. We consumers are not starving for content; we are drowning in noise.

In a recent BNJ blog post, we suggested rightly that you hold the ad until we’ve taken off our pants. Well I for one am not going to drop trou in a bazaar. I need a boutique.

So the question to ask is not how to generate more content. The question is: How to create a boutique? How to create quiet, intimate, comfortable spaces in which to have a calm, sincere conversation? How to entice your nervous prospects in, put us at ease and—finally—to get our pants off?

Now that we know the question, let’s Google it.

Google is enormously successful at getting us to opt in to all kinds of insane stuff. We prowl the Google blogs waiting for opportunities to check new “please collect my personal information” boxes, yet Google produces no content of its own. Here is what Google is doing right: Google subtracts content. Google uses those shadowy databases filled with our most intimate data to take away ads that we are not interested in seeing and sites that are not relevant to us.

Google creates silences in which messages can be heard.

How can we create similar silences in order that our messages will be heard? One possible answer might be special interest forums. While Twitter is a thronging bazaar, filled with every kind of content and every kind of noise, and Facebook is always struggling between the bazaar and the boutique—make your circle as small or as large as you wish, but no matter its size, it still gets invaded by irrelevant ads—smaller-scale forums devoted to specific topics flourish.

Everyone can name a few, ranging in size from Etsy and Instagram to smaller sites like Ravelry and other, far more obscure ones. No doubt you belong to a number that I cannot name. Yet these are where the real conversations are happening.

Many companies I have worked for have had forums on their sites that get active use despite being commercially branded. The conversation continues when the moderators go to lunch. And when the company has something to say, they can say it in a quiet room filled with people who are actually listening.

Small forums may be one answer, but they are certainly not the only one. What other ways can we subtract from the conversation?