At any rate, this Loren Feldman interview of Chris Brogan is a taste of why I’m bummed about missing the event – two very smart guys talking about social media and where it’s going:

It’s about 8 minutes but definitely worth watching.

Topic today: social media and creating a coherent strategy.

What keeps you up at night? What do you want to know?

J: Definition of web strategy: long-term decision-making for your website that includes three areas: users & community / business objectives / technology.

B: People talk more about how to use services to push content. Few people ask “how do I listen?” You need to listen as well as make noise.

J: Here’s how you can listen.
-Use Google Alerts for yourself AND your competitors
-Use Technorati, Google Blogsearch (there are many others listed on J’s blog) Radian6 another new one to look at.
-Track regularly; weekly if not daily. You don’t want to find that your biggest customer flames you 2 weeks ago and you said nothing.

Once you’re listening, take a look at: Who is talking about you? Track them in a centralized way (spreadsheet or database, for example).

Start tracking early so you can create benchmarks. This helps you measure success.

B: Find the people with bullhorns and turn them into party hats. Example: Dell Ideastorm, Saturn cars at BlogHer. Customers spend time and attention on you; make that valuable for them.

J: Use tools to help energize your customers and empower conversations, but the tools themselves are not as important as your strategy.

B: What if you had 2 fairly similar USB flash drive companies, and one of them came with all sorts of cool stuff? You’re differentiating by extending products and making them more people connected.

B: The elephant in the room – what do you do if someone says something bad about you? If I wrote that Blogworld Expo is stupid, what should Chris Calvert do? First off, say thank you for the comment.

J: Let’s imagine there is a really big elephant in the room. Example: A video company that stole content. What they did – they took the well-deserved beating they got and said thank you.

Case Study: Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign.

An integrated campaign theme across ALL mediums and regions. They embraced parodies. They also launched a campaign across school systems to educate young girls about beauty. Successful.

Case Study: Hitachi
Integrated system across a number of organizations within Hitachi, throughout the product cycly.
Hired a company to provide reports on initial state of the social market vis a vis Hitachi.
Took on thought leadership by launching a blog (CTO blogger). Integrated it into the rest of their marketing.
It took time!
Figured out how these could be sales tools:
1) “Living white paper”
2) Door opener for sales – they could send the CTO blogger’s posts as conversation openers
3) Ongoing training
4) Rapid Response tool
Notes: they did not force registration for comments and did not pre-moderate, only pulled spam and swearing.
Created a “User to User” support forum to build community.
It built community AND reduced support costs; win!

B: Veering off to talk about Zoomr & how their launch went so badly. They turned on uStream and live cameras, showed themselves working hard to try to fix the problems. It generated a ton of sympathy and turned the bad PR right around.

J: Back to Hitachi & showing the forums. It integrated podcasts, videos, even stuff from competitors. He took a camera and shot videos of people at work, uploaded it, it became very popular.

J: Strategy on the next level – he created an industry tool, the Data Storage Wiki. NOT Hitachi branded (but had J’s name and title on it). Linked to everything a customer could want to help them pick a vendor, from all media and across a number of competitors. It got a lot of positive press & reception.

B: In short: Be helpful! The more helpful you can be, the better it is for you in the long haul.

Some baby steps & takeaways:
-Understand the Elephant
-Bullhorns into Party Hats – make a party or join theirs
-Develop a Plan
-Be Holistic – these tools work in a lot of different ways. This is not just about marketing.
-Just Tools – it’s about the connections. Don’t get hung up on the technology.

Q&A:
First figure out where the party is before picking the appropriate tools to help you join the party.

For example, Facebook has more people [than Ning]. But can you engage them there? Do you need lots of people or do you need the right people?

Twitter. Also a good microblogging tool, kind of like a chat room. More of a personal tool than a professional one? Some thoughts about twitter etiquette – don’t just post links, also engage and communicate. Be careful of the SEO repercussions of Twitter.

How do you get people to care? You can’t force them. Best bet – find what they care about and help them get it.

What about small businesses? How does the corner store do this stuff? Example: Chris’ mom, a jewelry artist. She started with a blog & talking about why she started making jewelry. Now the blog is on her business card & she gets ~20 customers a day visiting it.

Running out of time……