When you get a chance go read Jay Baer’s post titled, Is social  conversation a myth? It’s a quick read, well worth it, and got me thinking. You know what’s cool in a weird, sorta, karma like way? Sometimes in the social media bubble, there’s  a confluence of thoughts on the same topic at the same time. This is one of those moments. And it revolves around social media and drum roll please…Conversations. Or the lack thereof.

Joe Jaffe is right. Mitch Joel is right and Jay Baer is right.

Call it the short cut of social media, or the “new reality” of social media,  but it’s as simple as this.

People would rather reap the benefits of social media without putting the effort in.

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The first thing that hit me was the smell. I’ll never forget it. It was a mixture of salt water, diesel fuel and damp clothes that never quite dried. I was on the Mississippi gulf coast a week after Hurricane Katrina hit and that first moment of stepping out of the car is one which is forever seared in me memories.

Yesterday was the 5 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I grew up in New Orleans and though my family had all but moved away by the time it had hit-watching the aftermath unfold on TV, was as painful as anything I have ever been through.

Some thoughts  came flooding back to me of my time on the gulf coast.

I remember just how quiet it was. Just completely devoid of life. Not even birds or bugs wanted to be where I was. I was in Pass Christian, Mississippi-a little over an hour outside of New Orleans. If there was a ground zero for where the Hurricane came across, this was it. Nothing was where it used to be and what was left, I barely recognized.

This morning though, five years later, I was wondering if social media could have “helped”. The year was 2005 and we were just on the cusp of social platforms roaring into our lives. If we would have been able to use Twitter and Facebook specifically, would that have helped pre-and post-emergency services?

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Is it reputation management, perception management? Or search management?

I was recently directed by Tom Martin to read an updated post by Rohit Bhargava on Social Media Optimization and while it did get me thinking again about something I had not given much thought to in a while, it, like many other blog posts, opens up another footlocker of thoughts.

As I’m wont to do oh so frequently, I started thinking about the term reputation management and what that really meant. Literally defined for us in the digital world, it’s about managing your reputation online.

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Call it an epiphany. Over the past few days I have gone back to my roots and I feel better about it. It’s almost as if I’m reading Naked Conversations again. What is it that has reinvigorated me? A new tool? A new app? Nope, it’s even more simple than that. It’s right there in front of us and yet I think we’re getting so caught up in a perceived race of sorts that it has caused us to lose sight of a stark reality.

Here’s what it is.

About 5 days ago I decided to start reading “other people’s” blog posts that caught my eye. Prior to that, I read the faves of my peeps and moved on. I was just consuming. In some cases I commented on the new blog posts I read,  in others, I would point out to others that this person is worth following on Twitter. If not that, I reached out to that person either publicaly or privately, and just told them that I thought they were doing great things. Simple.

The effect?

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You do everything at your company. You wear lots of different hats. Enter social media. You’ve been reading a lot about Social Media and it has invaded your ecosystem.Blogs are your in reader but your involvement in it is marginal at best. Consultants and evangelists are outside your door.

You’ve been hearing that you should do it.  You don’t know what to do.

Every day you keep hearing more and more about social media. You’re freaking out. OMG.

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As I was glancing at my other machine, I saw this post tweeted by Tom Cummings from Dachis Group-Social Media Middlemen: The Missing link between brands and Consumers. If you get a chance to read it, do it, because Tom brings up a really good point and it’s this: If you are truly a social company or business, then that “socialness” needs to extend all the way down to your frontline, people facing, employees.

I’ve said for quite some time that in order to really be social, you have got to start from within, as soon as you have a firm base of knowledge that all of your employees can stand on, then you, as an organization, can do some really exciting things externally.

Why?

Wouldn’t it be great if your employees not only knew what Twitter was, but also knew what a Twitter discount code was so that they could also explain the benefits of following your organization on Twitter to anyone who walked into the business?

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This might be the dirty little secret that no one wants to admit. That if they had their druthers, they would outsource their social media activities. Why? Because what they won’t admit is that social media is a big time suck and furthermore, they might not even admit that they are tired of “engaging” every day. Why? because they didn’t know it was going to be like this.

It’s hard to be “On” every day isn’t it?

There is the pretty side of social media, the stuff that you read about every day about how cool it is and glamorous and sexy and blah,blah,blah, but the dark side is that social media is hard ass work.  In fact Amber Naslund just the other day, wrote a”be careful what you wish for” post about the down n dirty aspect of social media.

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Given that we have been punked by the dry erase girl it has become apparent to me a few things about our new social transparent world and why marketers want to tap it.

1. We love to share stories where good triumphs over evil
2. We love to talk and tell others about train wrecks for companies and people
3. We can be easily punked
4. We love watching video-and then sharing it-it takes no effort, none. zip. zilch.zero.
5. We are suckers for top ten lists

I know there are more, but these were the first 5 that came to mind..

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Last week I was working with a client and we were at a critical juncture of a web development project in which we were discussing the jumping off points for their initial foray in social media. We were doing this by merely adding social elements to the website in the form of a few actions.

The first was instead of creating “a website” we decided to create it in WordPress so that we would have the latitude to “turn on” commenting for starters. let me back up, I just used the word “we” but in actuality the directives were coming from me and the developer. I had suggested Worpress and a specific WordPress developer.

During the development phase we ( the developer and I) decided to make the commenting more robust and so we decided to go down the path of Disqus. Disqus is a great product for those with social profiles who bop around a lot from site to site. It eases log in issues and multiple identity problems. We were on the fence about creating a community but we (the developer and I figured we could roll it out a week or two later). As an aside-let me also add that by doing this, the user would have had to create 3 separate user ID’s to access various parts of the site.

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I was driving into Pittsburgh today to meet with a couple of clients and I was on the phone with one of my friends who told me that he had been talking with a local ad agency about social media. Before I cut to the chase, the agency is a major player in Pittsburgh but by no means a social media player.

This may help with what he said next. He goes on to tell me that the agency told him that social media is not effective and pretty much a flash in the pan type of thing.  he goes on to say that a lot of hype surrounded it early on, but after the hype, there is not much there. As I’m listening to him the opinion of the agency all of a sudden started to sound more like his opinion and it was at this point that I cut him off.

I told him that I’m not going to sit here and defend it, but I will say that you are both wrong. Which got me thinking about the intrinsic value of it all. Are they right? Is this all bullshit?

It’s as simple as this.

The intrinsic properties of social media lie in the conversations; and those conversations depend only on that thing; the conversation. What happens after that is up to you and the person that you’re having the conversation with.

There.

Republished with author's permission from original post by marc meyer.