Personality Not Included – a podcast with Rohit Bhargava

What if you placed a call to GM and the CEO answered the phone?

You would think perhaps this company is too small to suit my needs. This is why the bigger a company gets the more faceless they become because they layer on infrastructure to foster a certain perception.

But new media changes that paradigm and enables every brand to have a voice. From the smallest of firms to the largest and from the most obscure products to the most complex services. This is something every brand manager in every company should be working on right now – opening up your brand to be more conversational!

Which is exactly why Rohit Bhargava wrote his new book entitled Personality not Included. It’s not just another book about social media – it’s a book about how to regain a brand personality.

I had a chance to catch up with Rohit and discuss questions I had after reading the book. I hope you enjoy my interview with him as much as I did.

About Rohit

Rohit is a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy, a leading agency, in helping clients navigate the social media universe. He publishes the Influential Marketing blog, ranked among the top 50 marketing blogs in the world, and is often featured as an expert in media including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Fast Company.

Rohit is also the author of the newly released book, Personality Not Included, published internationally by McGraw-Hill. A guide for companies on how authenticity is the new standard that brands need live up to in the social media era, the book has received significant early praise and features a forward by bestselling author and entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki.

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This is a new map of what the emerging news ecology looks like, based on a Value Network Mapping and Analysis tool developed by Verna Allee for the recent NewsTools2008 conference among 150 journalists, technologists and educators. Talk about change!

According to journalists and bloggers Chris Peck, Peggy Holman and Stephen Silha over at Journalism That Matters, here’s what’s emerging:

• Some reporters become “beat bloggers” tapping into networks of bloggers to bring complex stories into focus.
• “Community weavers” create a sense of community among the former audience and with formal news entities.
• “Information architects” make intelligible the vast amounts of data and images now available.
• While editors continue to be sense makers, connecting facts and making story lines visible, ultimately who filters news from noise, how it happens, and who pays for it is still unfolding.
• Even the definition of “news” is up for grabs as memes — cultural units of information equivalent to genes in the body — replace an event orientation to story.

Fascinating model that can be applied to traditional media, online communities and social networks, or company communities for customers or employees.

Last week I had lunch with an editor of a major daily newspaper who is trying to innovate his paper. The question his execs keep asking: “How do we make money on a different kind of model?” As with this news ecology model, no one has figured out a magic money-making model.

What is clear is that if newspapers do nothing as they wait for the magic model, they will continue to lose their customers, many of whom are no longer just “readers” but active participants. Ditto for marketers and corporate communications execs.

Jerry Yang of Yahoo yesterday blogged (“OK, so now what?” ) about Microsoft’s decision to withdraw its offer. I give Yang credit for writing something and allowing comments, which is more than most CEOs do.

But Yang’s post doesn’t sound genuine; it sounds like something the corporate PR folks wrote in a committee. Too bad. In today’s world, people want the real language of the person behind the ideas. After reading the post my reaction was, “Does Yang really care — or is this just a PR move?”

A better approach would be to give the CEO a few of the major points that communications thinks should be conveyed — and then let him express it in his own words and style. Who cares if the words and grammar aren’t perfect. Neither are real people.

What do you think about his post? A good example of Marketing 2.0 — or misguided?

The reason why corporate communications no longer works is not all that different from why traditional marketing communications no longer works.

Whether your internal culture encourages it or not, there is an emerging infrastructure of participation that enables democratization of participation for all employees - with or without your consent or employee snooping techniques.

They enable conversations that are much more powerful than yesteryears water cooler conversations or the inevitable rumor mills. If your corporate communications slogans don’t live up to reality, as is often the case with employee empowerment stories that are not backed by policies or budgets that truly empower people, they will be outed in an instant.

Thankfully for employees, and especially younger ones, there are some large company visionaries, like BT’s CIO JP Rangaswami, who get that and who encourage the proliferation of the platform of participation, which enables employee empowerment, within their corporate walls.