Engaging in Social Media to Spark Conversations

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Social(izing) Media

• Engaging in Social Media to Spark Conversations

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Markets are Conversations Participation is
Marketing

• the cluetrain manifesto

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We Are Media
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Whos Participating?

• Social Networks
• Facebook, Myspace
• Technorati
• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Vlogs
• Social calendars
• meetup, upcoming
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Comments
• RSS feeds
• Wikis
• New Media Releases

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How Social Media Evolved

• Word of mouth
• Others refer to the original facilitation of
  online conversations
• bbs and forums
• The evolution placed the power of media into the
  hands of the people
• Transformed content consumers into content
  producers
• Encouraged shift from monologue to dialogue

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What is Social Media?

• It doesnt replace traditional PR
• Its about people
• Its about community
• Its about participation
• The shift from monologue to dialog
• Its about respect
• It has changed traditional media and marketing

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Social Media Defined

• Social Media is the democratization of news and
  information
• It represents all of the channels that we the
  people use to read, write, create, and share
  information with each other, including blogs,
  tagging, wikis, socialized networks, RSS,
  communities, podcasts, vlogs, etc.
• Its more about a classification of a new type of
  media rather than just another buzz word

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Social Media vs. social media

• Social Media (in caps) defines the socialization
  of information New Media
• social media (lower case) refer to the tools that
  facilitate conversation

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Social Tools

• Widgets
• Tags
• HTML
• Trackbacks
• Comments
• Memes
• Blogs
• Wikis
• RSS
• UGC user generated content
• Crowdsourced activity
• Plug-ins

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Whats Preventing Adoption?

• Many still dont know what it is
• Tech learning curve
• Fear
• Lack of champions
• Misunderstood and underestimated
• Absence of compelling ROI metrics
• Lack of information on how to jump in or how it
  even helps
• Failure has huge costs

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Youre Not Invited to the Party

• PR is suffering from the lack of PR
• Jen McClure has a great story about how PR
  graduates are forced to poll the crowds to ask
  them about their impression of PR
• Viewed as a new way to create value
• Were too stupid to participate we dont get it
• Were just trying to hijack media
• We try to control the message
• PR knows only hype, jargon, buzz words

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We are the people formerly known as the
audience.

• Jay Rosen

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How To Participate

• It is about people do not market to audiences
  or targets, engage in conversations
• Its not about companies and markets
• Read
• Know what the hell youre talking about
• Participate
• Contribute
• Engage
• Be a resource, not a sales person
• Become part of the community
• Listen
• Learn
• Respect the communities and they will respect you

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Summary

• Social Media has yet to reveal its true impact
  among those around the world who have yet to
  embrace it and participate
• The way we read and share information will only
  continue to change until it completely transforms
  from one-to-many to many-to-many
• The revolution will be socialized

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Resources

• Businesses are benefiting from social media
  because they are enabling the many rather than
  the few to participate
• SocialMediaClub.com
• PR2.0 www.briansolis.com
• Society for New Communications Research
  www.sncr.org

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• Humanize Your Brand!
• Robert Scoble humanized the Evil Empire
• His blog posts put a face on the beast
• Scobles conversational, sincere style actually
  engendered sympathy and support for Microsoft
• Do-it-yourself, impromptu, style Scoble trolled
  the Microsoft campus, capturing scores of
  staffers in their real-work environments,
  unscripted, and without handlers. More important,
  Channel 9 used numerous social-media tools
  video podcasting, audio podcasting, blogs, wikis,
  RSS to match the right expert -- via the right
  medium -- to the right audience.

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• Change the Rules
• Thousands of employees, including the CEO and
  lead counsel blog at Sun
• Suns website receives more than 1 million user
  hits a day
• "My blog is syndicated across the Internet by use
  of RSS technology," Schwartz wrote. "Thus, its
  content is 'pushed' to subscribersWe encourage
  you to look to the Internet to achieve the
  (SEC's) objectives of greater investor access to
  information."
• In an official response this week, the SEC
  invited Schwartz to discuss use of blogs for
  company disclosures

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• Share the Knowledge
• If your organization has many experts who can
  connect with many important audiences, why limit
  your communications team to a few corporate
  spokespeople?
• IBM team designed a social-media portal giving
  all employees the knowledge, tools and policy
  guidelines to blog
• Today, more than 15,000 IBM employees blog
  internally, and more than 5,000 blog externally
• The portal has provided IBM with a distribution
  mechanism for enabling important and focused
  conversations to take place between experts and
  audiences