Justin Kownacki’s post, referenced in the video, can be found here (and seriously, if Justin isn’t on your daily read list, you are missing out).

Douglas Rushkoff’s book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
can be purchased here (affiliate link).

And last but not least, a link to the Pick My Brain experiment, for those to pressed for time (or lazy) to scroll down.

*the legal beagle yelled at me for not inserting something about “rates may change” in future. (I mean, duh, right?) So, there ya go, to make the legals happy.

What then, should the social media outreach for these companies include? So many social media consultants only preach content and persona, but that is a solution that does not work for every type of business. The particular company I worked with yesterday had decided to focus their initial efforts on Twitter (single platform deployment is not a strategy I often recommend, but in their case, fully appropriate based on their time constraints and resources).

In the case of a business that falls into this “uninteresting but useful” group, my advice is:

1) Be Helpful – make it a point to share your knowledge about your topic. In these cases, people may find unusual content increases your attractiveness to them as a destination site from your social media outpost, but it most likely isn’t what will get them there. Having resource pages for linking to and referencing and a willingness to have a human in your company answer questions and give helpful advice will work far better than funny videos or other content as the initial point of conversion. Then the “add on” content may help increase length of stay once you get people to click through to your site. The recommendation with this approach is a clear profile on your social media outpost that lets people know your policies (if there are restrictions on what you can answer from your industry, for example, or if you have a certain time of day you can make yourself available).

2) Be Honest – people are looking for companies they can trust in this tight economy. Be willing to say you don’t know something, be willing not to exaggerate or give false information just to land a sale. Make sure your information is accurate and your employees are interacting with integrity.

3) Be Human – much of the interactions with companies begin with customer frustration. That’s just the way of things – we should tell companies when we’re happy as often as we tell them when we, the consumers, are disappointed, frustrated or angry, but the tendency is not to do so (side note: Twitter is one of the few places where you’ll find more equal parts company satisfaction vs company dissatisfaction mentions). What this means for you is that even if your social media outpost is a message channel, a place for advice or a peer network for you, you will run into customers who will bring you customer service needs via that channel from time to time. Handle them in a way that leaves the customer with a god emotional aftertaste from your interaction, and make your company more human.

4) Landing Page – I can not stress the importance of a great social media landing page for all businesses enough, but especially businesses like these. You want to make all of your outposts easy to find, you want to make your reasons for being in social media clear, you want to integrate your offline marketing efforts clearly into the page, you want to tell people what you can do for them succinctly, and you want to have a site that is easy to navigate by a person who knows nothing about you or your industry.

5) Listen – set up monitoring sites and analytics trackers in as many places as possible. If you are on a site that offers analytics, like Facebook’s Insights on fan pages, make good use of those as well. Set aside time each day to focus on what people are saying about your company, industry and staff. Make sure you hear what they are actually saying – often a customer’s perception of a company is quite different than the company’s perception of itself! Then use your outposts to do daily outreach, always being human.

I thought I’d post my slides here for any of you interested. The panel decided to wing it without slides to promote the concept of communication and get the attendees more involved, and it seemed to have everyone engaged throughout. I expanded on all of the points in the slides, though they don’t show the additional remarks I made specifically for the grocery/shopper loyalty program industry.

The biggest point I stressed for the VRMS attendees was the importance of listening. You don’t have to have a brand presence in social media to listen to what is going on in social media as relates to your brand. Listening is free. It’s simple to implement. It doesn’t take a lot of corporate bandwidth to get going. Every brand should have as many ears to the virtual ground as possible, soaking up information so that they can begin laying the foundation for their eventual foray into this often overwhelming medium.

I also stressed how you listen as well. Listen without defending. Listen without agreeing. Listen actively, but just LISTEN. You are listening to make sure you understand what people are trying to tell you or say about you and brand. The engagement part, the part where you can try to interact with the brand’s perception online, comes later. Engagement comes after understanding what you have listened to.

The basis for the book is the simple yet heady premise that your online profile will become your greatest asset as we march toward the future. It will be worth more than your house, your car, the status of your parents, your race, your gender, your monetary background, and more. Because of the way the online world (not just social media) works as aliving breathing resume, an extension of your whole life experience, it can be leveraged continually to direct the path of your life.

Some of the things we touch on in the book:

• Why we will have more online friends than offline friends
• Why we will give money to strangers and date people we’ve never met
• Why having a strong online presence will be critical to ones social and financial survival
• The value of eliminating traditional expectations
• The diminishing emphasis of the handshake and face to face interaction
• The decline of the traditional resume in favor of the living resume
• How it’s no longer about “First Impressions” but “Lasting Impressions”
• The expectation that any online activity could be a contribution to society and your future
• Why providing information on a “need to know” basis will no longer be acceptable
• The shift to a global economy and the need for an online presence to compete
• Why social media will be at the core of our daily lives
• Online presence as validation
• Wisdom and peril of the crowd
• Industry and technology trends and how they will affect you
• So much more… I’d have to disclose too much of the proprietary information in the book to list everything here, though.

I don’t really have an “intern policy”, if there is such a thing. What happens is usually a DM or email exchange begins by someone reaching out to me about it. Depending on what I’m doing at the time, I tend to send a polite, non-committal reply thanking the person for their interest and then moving on. In the last year or so, people have begun to get more insistent about it. Lately, the insistence and persistence in following up on the initial exchange with more and more pointed requests has gotten, well, a little out of hand on occasion. To that end I thought I’d address it here and see if it helped to peek behind the curtain, so to speak.

I have no idea if I will ever have an intern. Things change, I suppose, and I am ever reluctant to use the word “never” because, hey, life shifts. I don’t mind if people ask, like I said, you never know, but… currently, I can say I have no plans to have one. I run my businesses in a very collaborative way. I am constantly listening and watching. I follow new talent in my fields, and am much more likely to reach out to someone for a project than to have someone trail behind me. I work best as a facilitator, idea person, surrounded by people and companies I trust, and I have a fantastic and connected team of individuals I’m honored to call friends as well as associates that I work with to make things happen on a regular basis.

I actively seek out new people to add to this circle of trust. If you are good, I will find you. If you are good and I can’t fit you into my projects, I will recommend you to someone I know who can, as I always seek to connect people. I may not ever tell you that I did this, in either case. It’s just … how I operate. Connect, listen, watch, connect, listen, engage, listen, think, listen and above all else, do do do.

If you are looking to be someone’s intern, I highly suggest you talk about that on your blog, on Twitter or elsewhere where I’d be likely to hear you. Or, tell Kelley Muir, who works with interns for one of her companies, or tell someone like her. There is a place for interns, and if you are vocal, and good, we’ll all help you find your place, interning with the right person for you, by listening and connecting.

That’s right – I prefer the phrase Universal Media over “social media” and any word plus “2.0″ . This new age of technology and the internet makes the world into a small town. It broadens the scope of The Everyman. It eliminates borders, crosses barriers of class and finance, and if done well, erases race and gender preconceptions as well.

This era is the first far reaching, truly global era we’ve had. When you look at how NASA and Virgin Galactic are stepping out from behind long-standing mental and cultural blocks to reach new ground in communication and aspiration, as well as how the true innovators are using this technology gift here on the ground, you begin to see why I think of this as the first phase of the true era of Universal Media. We are reaching so far beyond our scope, and we don’t even know how far our reach will go yet, or who (or what) we can and will connect, improve, help and grow.

Won’t you join me in the push to call this Universal Media? Break the pattern of self limitation we are groomed to follow, see beyond our tiny borders, and push push push to connect, learn and leap beyond our scope.

How to find the right person changes as these new agencies learn to game the system, but here are my slides from my most recent presentation to help you choose a good match for you and your company, band or film right now. I hope this helps you navigate the choppy waters and find your perfect social media match.