Millenium Marketer

Blogging is the equivalent to standing on your soapbox. As I read Chris Brogan’s latest post the “Essential Skills of a Community Manager“, the one that stood out:

Community managers must be experienced communicators. One thing a communicator needs to do well is LISTEN. Part of that involves building sites and community spaces such that people have a place to engage you directly, and part of that means using listening tools to understand what’s being said about you elsewhere. Upon hearing and understanding, a community manager should engage with their own authentic voice, not with a marketing message.

I’ve been really trying to understand the dynamics of influence lately and I must say that it’s not only community managers that must do this. PR professionals are guilty of marketing messages all the time because we spend so much time trying to craft stories that they can get lost in too many built messages. When that happens, you know you have to scale down and check what the market is saying, and what they are interested in.

Sometimes stories can get too lost in their own fiction and then you can become a victim of myopic marketing. We have to balance the writing craft with the strong relevance of what matters to the audience. And, if you are informed on how to listen, help your clients to know how to listen, too.

I’ve been away for the Memorial Day weekend getting engrossed into a new dimension of social media that I had not considered before. These days, I’ve been doing less writing and more listening, so if it seems like I’m a little bit silent, it’s probably because I’m silently listening.

Twenty five dollars last weekend got me Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff’s latest edition of Groundswell, and I am so excited!! This is money well spent.

To do this, you can start by searching through keywords and tags on De.li.ci.ous, Digg or StumbleUpon and find out what people like. De.li.ci.ous has so far proven to be the best search engine, and StumbleUpon is also good for sending messages and coming across random websites that you wouldn’t really know about otherwise. This takes a lot of time, so be prepared to take out about an hour, and commit to limiting this time and coming back to it later. Otherwise, you will find yourself entangled in the Information Spider’s web.

Social bookmarking sites aren’t just another form of ratings and reviews, and it really boggles the mind that there is such a fine detail in understanding your target audience. You can actually see who is digging, stumbling, delicious by checking out their profile, their gender, age, and where they are located. Of course, I knew this was true for marketers, such as those who target profiles on Facebook, but it hadn’t really occurred to me that bloggers could use this in the same way.

For example, I found Divedi on StumbleUpon. He lives in Bulgaria and he is a huge fan of social media. I now know what he is interested in which confirms my thoughts that people do want to know more about social media marketing. Thanks, Divedi!

These days, I am doing less writing and more listening. Who’s out there and what do they want to know? After all, there’s not much point in me speaking if it only contributes to the noise. This is a gap that is not often addressed on the web. Social media bloggers often say, “listening is the first step to blogging.” It’s often been a vague concept for those unfamiliar with the context that social media is a “conversation.” Plus, they don’t tell you how to listen.

Go out there, listen and let me know what you find! I’ll be sharing more on the Groundswell when another poignant moment strikes me.

Addendum: Wrapping It All Up

Three benefits to social bookmarking

(Just remember this is not the end all be all without a compelling message to broadcast)

Listening Power
You know exactly who likes what, what’s hot and what’s not. Sometimes people like videos that are outrageous and silly.

Will It Blend is hypnotic: it turns things like granulated sugar into powder sugar and beats credit cards into a fine powder.

Hunting & Gathering Power
In a traditional tribe, everybody works together to get what they need to support the tribe. This is the Information Age and now you can get others to work with you to get the information you want or need.

A friend, Travis, sent me a link from StumbleUpon that I would have never even found myself. Another blogger friend sent me a bunch of cool links, such as this smartmouth one for blog critiques, called Ask and Ye Shall Receive. After a study abroad year in the UK from 2004, and my trained British sensibilities are ruffled by the Blogspot title.

Friending Power
This is the potential to make friends out of strangers, and this can be super important! Sometimes it’s not the masses that matter, but the quality of the conversation. (There’s that word again. We now need new words in social media.)

Stumble It!