Conversational Media Marketing

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• Experience Manifesto: What is Social Media?
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(Lastest computer tracking models as of 10:23 p.m. Friday.)

For those of you interested in following, I am providing updates via my Utterz and accounts. I rarely use them for anything else and they seem well-suited for such. Let me invite you to subscribe to the RSS feeds. Hopefully, I'll provide both regular and up-close (but not too up-close) and personal accounts.

I may be playing with a lit stick of dynamite here, but I'd like to know what you think of using online communities (whether of interest or practice) for lead generation? Does that amount to little more than prostitution?

Having come from the "purist" days of business blogging, I really don't want to use online communities for such "prurient" motives as driving marketing and sales agendas. Yet, I can't help but believe there can be a healthy balance between community and commerce, especially when it's possible the reason the community exists is for the sake of commerce.

Not a very SEO-friendly title perhaps, but maybe a bit more attention getting. I'm referring to small-to-medium B2B businesses and their use of social media marketing.

I received today's version of Get to the Po!nt email newsletter from MarketingProfs which rang my bell. It opened by saying, "If you're a small business, you're aware that Web 2.0 offers entirely new channels for attracting and cultivating customers. And in a post at the Acquiring Minds blog, Robert Lesser explains why your diminutive stature might actually give you the social-media edge over your larger (and richer) competitors."

Lesser points out a number of key benefits, including the fact that social media can be an antidote to small (or non-existing) marketing budgets, a problem I face daily. That's one reason I use social media as a marketing tool -- it's cheap!

My friend Wayne Hurlbert, veteran business blogger and SEO consultant, were on Twitter regarding corporate sponsorship for conference attendees.

The idea grew out of my expressing desire to attend the upcoming MarketingProfs Digital Mixer in October in Phoenix. He piped up and suggested corporate sponsorship as a means by which that could be facilitated. Of course, since I work full-time for a company they might frown on me going as an ambassador for another, but his point still holds.

There are many, many solo entrepreneurs and small business people who want and need to attend such events, but don't have the deep pockets required to cover registration fees, travel, lodging, meals and other expenses.

We interviewed Jason Falls, Director of Social Media at Doe-Anderson, a Louisville, Ky-based brand-building agency, on our User Friendly Thinking (formerly known as Bizzuka Buzz) Blog Talk Radio show today.

Jason is better known though as the author of Social Media Explorer blog. He literally came out of nowhere less than a year ago and has earned a place of notoriety among business and social media bloggers. (Read his blog and you'll understand why.)

We talked about social media and its implications where advertising, marketing, public relations and journalism are concerned. (Plus, a bit of conversation about its application to small business as well.) We dealt with the topic of personal branding to some extent as well.

The program ran past the 30-minute timeframe and we talked for over an hour. It was a great conversation and I'd encourage you to take some time to listen when you can.

I met John Jantsch via the blogosphere several years ago when there weren't that many of us small business bloggers. He was promoting a referral marketing program called Duct Tape Marketing via his blog and Web site.

It began to gain traction among small business owners and, before you knew it, DTM was a book, and a best-seller at that. John was on his way to becoming a household name within the small business marketing community. His approach was practical, hands-on and something that could be put to use immediately.

Now, he's taken Duct Tape Marketing from blog...to book...to software. He has been working with Palo Alto Software for about a year and today announced that Marketing Plan Pro powered by Duct Tape Marketing is ready to go.

Here are some links to give you background on the rollout:

• Press release annoucing the launch
• Tour of features of the program
• Palo Alto founder Tim Berry talks about the program
• Palo Alto announces launch on blog
• Announcement on John's blog

I know many of you are fans of John's system. If not and you're a small business owner or entrepreneur you should be.  Anyway, congratulations to John. His is an American success story and the stuff entrepreneurial dreams are made of.

I'm going to be speaking at BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Vegas, September 20-21. My presentation is "Conversations Create Clients: How to turn strangers into friends and friends into enemies customers."

I'm on the bleeding edge track, which is cool. I've never considered myself as "bleedging edge." (Bad to the bone, yes; bleeding edge, no.)

If you're unfamiliar with BlogWorld, it's like Disney World, only better. First, it's in Vegas and, well, that's kind of Disney for adults. The conference is geared toward anyone who participates in blogging, podcasting and social media at any level, whether "amateur" or "professional."

I've started writing a post or two per week over at WordFrame.com. My first post is Vertical social networks for business, a table of their own, which reports on the new eMarketer study about businesses entering the social network space.

(BTW, WordFrame is an awesome B2B social networking platform. If your company has an interest in creating a socnet for either internal or external use, I recommend it highly. It's affordable, highly scalable and has all the features you'd want or need.)

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about personal branding as it relates to its use in building awareness for the corporate brand. (Blogged about it too, here and here.)

A term I've been tempted to use as a label, but refrained from until reading Todd Defren's post, Got Some Personal Branding I Could Borrow?, is Personality Marketing.

We've always had celebrity spokespersons or pitch men/women (animals too, for that matter). Whether it's Robert Wagner touting reverse mortgages, Michael Jordan wearing his Hanes tagless T's or Reese Witherspoon speaking on behalf of the Avon Foundation, celebrity spokespersons have been a staple in our culture for years and years. (See list of Tweets below for more.)

Along comes social media and its own set of rock stars. Why shouldn't corporate brands latch hold of them and leverage some of that personality for themselves.

Microsoft did it with Scoble (or, rather, Scoble did it with Microsoft, then Podtech and now Fast Company), Chris Brogan is doing it with CrossTech, Doug Haslam with SHIFT, the many analysts of Forrester...and the list goes on and on.  The use of personalities has always been a marketing/advertising tactic.