Interactive/Social Media Insights

Welcome to my first post blogging on the Revere website. I’m the National Competency Leader for Web 2.0 and Community at Revere, which means that I evangelize within Revere and to our clients about these tools, and I work with clients to strategize and deliver solutions based on them.

More of my professional background is on my LinkedIn profile.

I’ve been blogging for quite some time in my private life, and it’s an interesting thing to see it become a part of my job as well. In the last year, I’ve noted a similar inflection point as the discussions I’ve had with my colleagues and our clients has shifted from “Why would I do that?” to “How do we do that?” - which I do take to be a positive change.

My goal in this blog is to begin to discuss what I see - speaking personally, not as the official voice of Revere/NTT - as the nature of the trends we all fact in dealing with the changes represented by Web 2.0 and Community. That means the advantages, disadvantages, pitfalls, and techniques. While I consider myself knowledgeable in the area, I won’t pretend to know everything about it, or about any part of it, and I welcome comments, corrections, and emails debating my ideas and correcting my facts - that’s the root of the difference between the two paradigms - in one, I talk and you listen,. and in the new paradigm, we have conversations.

When I talk about online communities, the term I use a lot is “social media” (which is admittedly controversial). I use it because “social networks” are made of people, and you can’t create them - you can only facilitate them. You can do that by opening a great neighborhood diner, a bar, holding a barbecue, starting a political movement - in all the ways that we interact as people. What social media does is allow us to use technology to facilitate the creation and growth of social networks, which we may do for fun (as I do at my blog), to try and change the world (any number of activist social media projects) or to make our businesses more successful.

Here’s how I typically define “social media”:

We start with “traditional media” in which the audience pays, the speaker talks (or publisher publishes, or broadcaster broadcasts) and the audience listens. The audience may pay in cash, or in attention - by allowing the speaker to sell something.

From there, the next step is “interactive media” in which individual members of the audience could interact - privately or publicly - with the speaker.

And then we invite the speaker to step out and have a Coke while the audience talks among themselves. Because somewhere in the audience is someone who has exactly the same issue with their classic 1967 Sunbeam Tiger that you’re having, and they found a solution to it. And if you could freeze a huge number of conversations and make them searchable and retrievable - you’d find that out of the millions and millions is that one conversation - that once key piece of information - that you need right now.

So your business (this is my business blog, after all) has social networks already - of employees, of vendors and partners, or customers. It’s likely that they are already talking about you online - just search on Google Blogs or Technorati. My practice is in large part about how you enable those groups - where it will be a net positive for you and your enterprise.

Let’s discuss that.