I've been in several meetings and presentations lately where I find myself hammering on the point that there is a conversation going on online with or without you, and that the best way to engage and benefit from it is to participate yourself. "It's a participatory medium," I keep saying.
I find that this is still a hard point to drive home. I've developed Social Media training for clients and companies I've worked for and found resistance to the parts of training where I include a) comment on a few blogs first, b) set up a page in one of the social networking sites, c) write a blog entry for someone you know that has a blog (or start one yourself) or even d) contribute to a wikipedia entry on something you know a lot about. (there are several other exercises we could include here) My favorite was when the big PR firm asked, "can't you just give us the bullet points so that we can get this in front of our clients quickly?" Really?
Well, ironically enough, I noticed that all my blog activity was on company blogs aimed at internal communications, or personal entries on another site. I didn't have a voice in the online conversation that surrounds what I do professionally every day. So this is the beginnings of what I hope will become my voice in the conversations that mean the most to me and my profession. In the footsteps of Now is Gone, it will speak more to how to engage and get others engaged in business beyond the theoretical of social media.
I also hope to bring questions that don't get answered in presentations and panel discussions I speak at here and continue the dialogue. Be on the lookout for topics on social media in social marketing, reputation management, training, how government and non-profits engage in the conversation, elastic marketing, why the big agencies are struggling, and others.
