Ask The Expert
Q What are the basic concepts behind a good blogging or social media campaign?
Expert: Chris Heuer
A You have to ask yourself: How do we engage our citizens, our customers or the stakeholders in the process? How can we use the blog technology as a platform to co-create media with them? To innovate new products and services? To develop a better understanding of their needs? Most importantly, we begin by looking around to see where our people are, and then we start listening to them carefully and ultimately we respond to them, in our own human voice.
Blogging is one element of a wider social media technology. I think social media is the most appropriate term when thinking about engaging stakeholders in today's market. The reason why we call it social media instead of blogging is because we cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of being social. It's about the connections we have with each other as human beings, more than it is about the technology. Today we can DIY and do not require some authority in an ivory tower, telling us what we should be doing or thinking. This scares some people and excites others. Whichever way you feel about it, you need to be prepared to deal with it, because this Genie is out of the bottle.
I approach social media with an aspirational desire of developing a co-creation strategy: How do we co-create this media? How do we co-create our product? How do we co-create a campaign that will amplify our cause? How can we actually think about doing things together?
I think about social media in terms of the new three Cs. If you remember back in the late 1990s, there was a lot talk about the three Cs, which were: content, commerce and community. Michael Dell defined the three Cs while discussing his company's e-commerce strategy. Today, I think social media is really about 1. Context: What is the purpose? Why are we here interacting? 2. Communications: What are we sharing? What is it that we are talking about? And then ultimately 3. Collaboration: How do we work together toward a common goal?
It is a huge paradigm shift that is fundamentally altering the market and the way that organizations interact with it. This is why we don't call ourselves an interactive agency, a marketing company, a social media consultancy or a public relations firm. At The Conversation Group, we think of ourselves as a Market Relations company, because we help companies discover, engage and serve their markets in new, highly valuable ways.
Chris Heuer is a co-founder and Partner with The Conversation Group, a San Francisco-based communications strategy firm. He also founded the Social Media Club, an international organization of Social Media professionals. Heuer travels around the country, speaking about social media and is currently writing a book, "The Social Media Playbook." You can learn more about him through his blog: www.chrisheuer.com.
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