So, I got asked this question on a call today with a fellow social media expert and I just had to blog about the ensuing conversation.

In reality if you look at the Latin origins of the word social it would most likely have a definition akin to the free give and take of conversation and collaboration amongst multiple parties. Slap on the word media and that ensures it is some form of digital media these days.

So with this as a backdrop the answer would logically be – NO!

A podcast is a new media. A podcast is a new channel. But it is still at the end of the day a one way dialog – you listen to one or two people having a conversation. If you were listening to two people having a conversation at a party are you being social? I think not – its only when you get involved in the conversation does it become social.

So just how social are podcasts?

Take it from me, I have personally recorded and handed edited over 100 podcasts for this blog and other purposes and I can safely say they don’t get the level of interactivity (read comments) like my regular old blog posts do. Yes there is that element of “portability” meaning you can take a podcast anywhere and listen to it any time – but do people really do that?? The answer there is also NO. I find my listeners tend to consume the media right when they find it. Which is why I go through the trouble of tagging my podcasts with Veotag so folks can listen to only the relevant question or 2, get in – get out and on to the next thing. People are busy and you can read faster than you can listen!

So does that spell the end of podcasts?

No way, I got a little nervous when I saw PodTech get sold for $500,000 but think podcasts can be very useful in delivering messages – just realize going in you aren’t really doing social media by doing a bunch of podcasts. Does this mean I will stop my podcast series? – no, I enjoy it too much to stop!

So what’s your view – is podcasting social media to you?

When it comes to Social Media there has been tons of talk about those few influencers who are able to spread your message like wild fire. But finding those few influencers has been the proverbial challenge.

Several good books have been written about this topic by some really smart people. But when doing some data mining on my blog using a new tool called SM2 from Techrigy (special thanks to them for helping me get trained on this tool), I noted that the far reaching impact of my blog is found in the proverbial Long Tail. (see graphic below)

What this says is that the conversation about topics on my blog and where they are occurring is coming from the long tail (dang it, that Chris Anderson is right again!)

So what I think this means is that exclusively looking for reach with your social media initiatives by targeting a selected few influencers is a flawed concept (sorry Ed Keller from WOMMA). To me this graph says it needs to also contain a component that delivers adoption (ie Reach) through the Long Tail of bloggers out there.

The bottom line is Social Media is fluid so you might as well go with the flow!

Sitting in on a PR meeting last week I was pondering the thought of my internal consulting teams starting to blog and participate in social media when someone from across the room said Social Media is more relative to the younger demographics we have in our organization.

Of course the more seasoned veterans of my team all pointed to me as the NON example of Social Media being age related (don’t go asking me my age now). When I remarked – “Social media isn’t an age thing it’s a lifestyle.”

And I do believe that is true – I think the adoption or lack thereof in some companies is because the more senior folks have now adopted the internet and social media rather than growing up IN the internet with social media all around them.

What’s your view and how is the adoption of social media going in your organization? I would love to hear about it.

B2B marketers with highly complex products and services have been given a gift in the last few years in the form of Social Media.

In my opinion, Social Media doesn’t easily equate to Lead Generation for the complex sale. For example a prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand. In fact the stats show that certain forms of Social Media even out perform more traditional ones when it comes to awareness and recall. For example, unaided awareness from podcasts were 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television. Now that’s great recall!

B2B marketers need to set aside collecting metrics like page views, clicks, conversion rates and start nurturing individual leads by using the gift of social media they were given. Social Media is great for consideration so why not use it that way? Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.

Sales generated from your lead nurturing program are the only real measure of engagement with your campaigns!

The other week, I attended KOOZA, an experience in intense storytelling by Cirque du Soleil. It was the shortest two and half hours I ever spent - that’s because I invested them. My return was a full immersion in the passion and joy of the actors and athletes who shared the product of their love for the art of movement and skill. Plus one insight.

The Juggler

Who could not identify with someone handling multiple items at the same time? Let’s do five, then seven, how about nine? The speed and agility were truly impressive, I think I did not hear a blink in the tent. Yet, the most impressive part of the performance was the smile on his lips.

He was not acting as the juggler, he *was* the juggler. An expression of radiance and an act of love. The rapid-fire movements only added charm and elegance to his performance. There were no boring repetitions, just grace and enchantment.

Can you?

Can you look at your products and services in the every day routine with the same kind of attention?

Can you deploy the same kind of concentration while under pressure to deliver?

Can you display the same level of passion about what you do?

Then you are a creator - of product, price, place, promotion; of experience.

There is Love in Creation

In marketing 2.0 experience is key. When you open the door to conversation, what comes through is your stance, the smile on your lips, the belief in your mind, the love in your heart. That is the passion that triggers participation, inspires empowerment and leads to purpose, the four Ps of new marketing.

How do you learn to love the stuff you market? In the same way you learn to embrace the marketplace for the stuff you’ve got: by letting your customers be part of the action. They call it 2.0 for a reason - you are the second, they are the first.

[The Juggler is at about minute 5:30 of this 7:36 minute video]

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and reediting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works.

Most companies see the groundswell as a threat. But you can see it as an opportunity!

That’s the reason that Charlene Li and her Forrester Research colleague Josh Bernoff wrote their new, appropriately named book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

In the book, they describe the strategies and stages every company needs to go through to listen to, talk to, energize and embrace the groundswell. I had a chance to catch up with Charlene to get some answers to questions that came to me as I read the book and compared my social strategy with their recommendations. So I hope you enjoy this podcast …

About Charlene

Charlene is one of the leading voices in the area of Social Computing and Web 2.0 through her work over the past nine years with the respected technology and market research company Forrester Research. She is one of Forrester’s most quoted analysts. An accomplished and frequently requested public speaker, she often appears at industry events and delivered the keynote speech at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in 2007.

Charlene analyzes how companies can use technologies — like blogs, social networks, RSS, tagging, and widgets — to meet business objectives. She started her own analyst blog in 2004 and is regularly cited as America’s most influential analyst blogger. She shares her blog with Josh Bernoff.

Previously, Charlene led the marketing and media research team at Forrester and ran its San Francisco office. She has also been publisher of interactive media for Community Newspaper Company, a group of newspapers in Massachusetts, and served on the board of directors for the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation. Charlene has managed new-product development for the San Jose Mercury News and has also been a strategy consultant for Monitor Company. She holds an M.B.A from Harvard Business School.

Charlene lives in San Mateo, Calif., with her husband and two children, all of whom are happy, engaged members of the groundswell.

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 Riding the Groundswell of Social Media: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (38)

For years, classic brand strategy has always been about the creation of a single message that can be used with all of your constituents; investors, employees, senior management and customers about who you are and what value your company provides. Brand managers tend to write it up and paste it on every wall and train every new recruit in it. It’s a classic approach to command and control brand messaging which then gets deployed via all the traditional media and used in every communications channel.

But these days you hear a lot of discussions about the explosion of new media types and formats like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, video, communities, micro-blogging and other emerging forms of social media. And it is causing plenty of concern that this disruption of media is eroding the traditional command and control branding that has become such common place for marketers.

Well, I say hallelujah and good riddance!

I believe that there is a very compelling argument that media doesn’t have to be fragmented while at the same time the message need not be command and control anymore. It is only a matter of knowing how to orchestrate it.

One of the first instances of this to hit the marketplace was Ogivly & Mather’s Dove “The Campaign for Real Beauty” (ok yes it is B2C but sometimes we marketers can take inspiration from our B2C brethren) Which won the 2006 Grand EFFIE Award and for good reason, They did a great job finding a powerful attribute of their brand and made a very inviting campaign around it that engaged their key audiences into a conversation. Evidence this by the nearly 3000 blog entries about it on Tecnhorati, the 2,000,000 viewers of their video on YouTube and you will see that they got the blogosphere humming about an ad campaign. Now I am not professing you drop everything and just do some clever video with your ad campaign, I do applaud the use of video to make their campaign more viral. What can we learn from this as technology marketers? Take a look at my next example.

Now compare this to the “Greg the Architect” campaign from TIBCO. Here is a B2B example that took a very different approach to making their technology funny, and engaging. What they have done is told the TIBCO story through a series of episodic vignettes and allows the viral component to kick in. Viewers are bound to have an opinion on these videos and so is the blogosphere. Also they have given the audience something to react to for better or worse rather than say “we do SOA better than the next guy”. Also don’t forget about the reaction internally to these videos and how that helps give everyone in the organization a conversation starter for the next meeting.

So why is this good news for technology companies? Because for the first time ever, technology companies specifically in B2B can lead the way using technology tools to get their message out to the masses for very little money. Just one tactic like using a video on YouTube can reach 325,000 viewers and engage them with your brand but more importantly with a message that they have sought out. But how to you take something so tactical like a video and make it part of an overall approach to your brand?

Here is the secret.

First, the brand manager needs to architect a single theme that can be used across all media traditional or otherwise. Notice here I didn’t say command and control at all – just to create a theme that is broad enough to use across every aspect of your media plan and “invite” customers and prospects to “engage” with it.

Next, you need to give your customers and prospects the digital tools to comment, to interact, and to add to the conversation. Then you add in more traditional elements of a media plan that all point to the online conversation and you will end up supercharging your media plan!

The bottom line for technology firms is your customers and prospects are perhaps the most savvy engaged technology users of any buyer in any industry. You can’t expect to reach them with traditional media only any more, you need to deliver your message in a way that is targeted to their exact interests. So why not get out there where they talking about your product or service, and give them a conversation starter along with the permission to start a dialog with your brand!

Over the past few years marketers have been working on tracking conversations about their brands on the Web (you are tracking and listening, aren’t you?). But once you have that in place, then what?

Strategies for understanding and dealing with the flow of all these conversations are the natural next step. As more and more conversations are coming online, you need to respond quickly. So knowing things like “sentiment,” who in your organization is on point to respond, and whether they have been doing so are becoming more important. It’s like being at a party and having several conversations going on that you want to participate in.

I met Michael Spataro a few weeks back as I was researching tools to help me with this exact problem. I think what I found out was important for you to hear as well. I hope you agree.

Link to Original Audio Source

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About Mike

Mike is vice president with Visible Technologies, a leading provider of social media analytics and online reputation management services. An early pioneer of interactive marketing and PR, Mike has been devising and implementing digital communications and social media strategies for global brands for more than 10 years, including The Walt Disney Co., General Motors, Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard, MasterCard, Eastman Kodak, Verizon, Hanes, and the renowned “Got Milk?” campaign.

Prior to joining Visible, Mike led the interactive and new media divisions for Interpublic’s two largest PR agencies, Weber Shandwick and GolinHarris. He was the strategic force that established both agencies as leaders in digital communications and consumer-generated media services. During his nearly 10 years at Interpublic, Mike created and executed a variety of award-winning campaigns that blended traditional and new media ideas that produced outstanding business results for his clients.

“New media has created a new marketing environment where the old rules of marketing no longer apply.”

- Cindy Gordon, VP New Media and Marketing Partnerships, Universal Orlando Resorts

How are you different? How are you relevant? Who loves your brand? Answer these questions with confidence and you can harness the speed and efficiency of online tools to allow your fans to spread news of your product. The key idea is that other individuals, not you, are spreading the word.

In addition to having a product or service that is buzz-worthy, what are some of the ingredients you need to reach word-of-mouse status? According to David Meerman Scott in his recent ChangeThis manifesto - The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How Word of Mouse Spreads Your Ideas for Free:

Great Web content in the form of a video, blog entry, interactive tool, or e-book that provides valuable information (or information that is groundbreaking, or amazing, or hilarious, or involves a celebrity)

+

a network of people to light the fire and links that make your content very easy to share

“‘Make Your Message Memorable.’ Simply put, you have little chance that something will go viral unless, like a disease, it can be spread easily mouth-to-mouth. For that to happen, your message has to be super tight and easy to transmit in as few words as possible. ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’ is the answer to ‘what is an iPod?’ Before that, the Macintosh was introduced as ‘The computer for the rest of us.’”

- Steve Chazin, author of Marketing Apple

Is word-of-mouse guaranteed? Not by a long shot says Meerman Scott, and I agree. If you think like a venture capitalist or film producer, you will have an easier time taking a lot of bite size content to market and see some of it take off. Some of the ideas shared in the eBook are:

• invite people from outside the organization to brainstorm with you - they will have less bias towards certain aspects of the execution and provide insights on how to make it more fun and different

• develop a host of ideas, instead of working on just one. There is a bell curve in everything, including content-driven marketing initiatives. If two out of ten work out, you will gain a lift from those two so care for them. Don’t persist in backing ideas that are not taking off.

• have no buts, please. Since you don’t know what will work, stop trying to guess or talk yourself out of not pursuing an idea. My favorite example in the manifesto is the IBM mockumentaries on page 20.

• be a storyteller - give yourself license to create a compelling, engaging story that entertains your audience. Try different things. I find that much of the problem with corporate white papers and brochures, aside from not being exciting to read, is that they are cookie cutter.

• try video - we are visual creatures. Three minutes of home made narrative that is light, clear in its simplicity, and playful can do more for your brand than the most expensive message. If it works out, it could become a series.

• tell everyone. For example, although the contributors to this blog are well known, this site is relatively young still. If you’ve found the content her useful, help spread the word.

Word-of-mouse or viral marketing is not about buying access. Meerman Scott concludes:

The best word-of-mouse efforts promote your organization and its products and services by delivering great online content (video, an e-book, a great blog post, an interesting photo or graphic) that is directly tied to your products, services, and ideas. Successful viral marketing campaigns sell your ideas in a creative way that people want to share with their friends, colleagues, and family members.

Sen. Harry Reid, the U.S. House Majority Leader, sent me an email today about his new site:

“I believe it is important for you to stay updated on the work I am doing on your behalf in Washington. As part of this effort, my website has been completely redesigned with the latest online tools available to help keep you informed about the issues I am addressing and the services my office can provide for you. “

I checked out the site, but it misses something very, very big: there’s no way for me to talk back. No way to post comments. No way to see what other folks have to say and connect with them. If I want to send Sen. Reid an email I have to fill out a long form.

Social media and marketing 2.0 has fundamentally changed our expectations. We don’t want to be communicated to; we want to be able to connect with.

Sorry, Harry. Hope you didn’t spend a lot of our money on just prettying up a Web site and adding a couple of videos.

PS — When I have sent Reid emails with questions and concerns, he sends back form emails saying he can’t respond to me as I’m not a Nevada citizen. If you’re the Majority Leader shouldn’t you be willing to listen to more of us? In a Marketing 2.0 era listening and making people feel heard is a fundamental strategy.