Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and you are at another episode of Community Powered live at South By Southwest, and I am with Chris Brogan. Chris is the president of New Media Marketing Labs, an avid blogger, apparently number two, he’s trying harder on the Ad Age top 50 bloggers. Welcome Chris.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below.

Susan Bratton & Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan: So happy to be here Susan. How are you?

Susan Bratton: I am great. So we’re right in the middle of a shift change at South By Southwest panels. You’re going to have to give us some golden gems while the crowds flow by. It’s a busy South By Southwest.

Chris Brogan: It is busy, but that actually really points to the trend right now. There’s a lot of people interested in how they’re going to move community for business, how they’re going to use the right kinds of tools and really grow their business.

Susan Bratton: And you’re going to help them with that. Tell us about New Marketing Labs and chrisbrogan.com.

Chris Brogan: So New Marketing Labs is a small start-up that deals with two things: content and community management, which deals with either marketing from the side of creating good content marketing, like good blogs, good video, whatever. On the other side we’re doing community marketing, which deals with either helping people with community platforms, either growing their own or helping them participate and make presence elsewhere. I also write a bunch of events called The Inbound Marketing Summit, and those are to help equip people, both brands and agencies, with the kinds of new tools and new strategies that are working in ’09.

Susan Bratton: You’re also a founder of PodCamp, aren’t you?

Chris Brogan: I am. I’m a co-founder of PodCamp with Christopher S. Penn. It’s a on-conference model based on the BarCamp model, and the basic idea was that a jury of your peers would be able to educate everybody because we’re all learning at the same time, why have people on a stage, why have it be a sort of dias. We’ve had 77 events all over the world; Cape Town, South Africa, Perth, Australia, wherever you want to be. And it’s sort of the ultimate democracy model.

Susan Bratton: Now is New Marketing Labs more of a strategic consultancy or are you more of an agency model where you’re actually doing both consultancy and implementation?

Chris Brogan: Well I’ll tell you what, I’ve been acting more under the agency model where I’m actually doing the work, but Charlene Lee said I’m working too hard…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Chris Brogan: so, you know, I’m going to listen to Charlene. So maybe I’ll just stop doing all that and I’ll just tell people what they should do. Forrester did it for a lot of years.

Susan Bratton: Well tell me, if you’re going to tell people what to do, I want to know what are, you cover all areas of social media and community, what are you really excited about right now? What’s getting you going?

Chris Brogan: A couple things. One is sort of the location-based platforms of the world. I like the idea of sort of the annotated world where we can start floating data in space, in physical space, that our mobile devices will allow us to pick up and do something with. We’ve talked about this in the ‘90’s, we talked about it in the early part of 2000’s, but marketers always talked about giving you a Starbucks coupon when you were walking by a Starbucks. There’s so much more that can be done with it. There’s so much more community opportunity, non-profit opportunity. There’s a lot of ways to use the new abundance of GPS data, at least in the states, and the new mobile devices that are taking good advantage of it. The other thing is café shaped conversations. A lot of businesses are getting back into the idea of how do we have much more meaningful smaller conversations, even though we’re a big company, and how we can add a little bit more meaning back into our marketing and our business communications.

Susan Bratton: Lets go back to the mobile application space again. What did you call it? You had a word or a phrase for it.

Chris Brogan: Oh, I don’t know. I have a thing where I call it the secret of the annotated world, the idea that in the middle of space right around us, something as simple as Twitter is telling us what’s going on even when we’re not there, but something more like Bright Kite is telling us what’s going on in this space. So someone might say there’s 8 power outlets along this wall, but on the 6th power outlet don’t use it, it’ll blow up your Mac Book. And there’s that kind of data being passed around now in a way that you can’t see it unless you’re knowing to look for it with a certain mobile app. I think there’ll be more of that as time goes on. Some people are thinking, you know, it’ll be these QR codes, which are 3D barcodes. Other people are saying that it’s just GPS data tied to a certain place as well a person, a certain time.

Susan Bratton: What are some of the applications that excite you in that space particularly?

Chris Brogan: Bright Kite is doing really well with it. I think Bright Kite on the iPhone…

Susan Bratton: What are people doing with Bright Kite? Bring it into the real world for us. How would we use it?

Chris Brogan: So we could be at the South By Southwest conference and looking for the party that doesn’t have the line 700 people long, and I could push a button and say, “I am here”, and give you my GPS coordinates and show you a picture and type, “No lines here. Come and visit”, and within 20 minutes we’d have margaritas. The extension of that though could be that you and I are standing next to a statue in the middle of the square down here and I was standing, and it’s a guy on a horse like every other of these statues, and who is it and what do we know about them? Well if it isn’t just put on a metal placard, what if when you turn on your phone you can look at Bright Kite to see who else left a note there, and someone’s left us a URL, so we can now go to a website and read more about the person on the statue.

Susan Bratton: So it’s, it’s like a threaded conversation that’s place based.

Chris Brogan: Yes. So it’s an opportunity to do something either threaded or just to, just to pile notes on a wall. Imagine a, you know, invisible sticky board where people have come and put pictures and notes, and now we have the opportunity to build a business relationship around it. We can, we can, it can be marketing for a location, it could be community organization kind of a project. The whole goal of it is that with the advent of mobile technology meets community and mobile technology meets location, there’s a whole new opening up, a whole new space opening up for us to do this sorts of work.

Susan Bratton: I just saw Mary Hodder here in the hallways and she’s working on a new company called Appishere, which is API’s for the mobile sphere, and so it goes along the line. I always think about Mary as being one of those people who’s always on the leading edge of what’s happening, and to hear you talk about it as well being the same kind of a person that we look to for the direction of the world tells me that we’ve just come across something that’s going to be very big and very hot. How does it apply to brands? If it’s not the Starbucks coupon, what is the perfect fabulous first application that we might want to do?

Chris Brogan: Lets imagine that what brands really want, I mean what most any company really wants is they want a conversation with the right person, and it might be a conversation with a person who’s going to buy, it might be a conversation with a person who needs to accept. If we’re Ford, Ford’s business motto is anybody who buys cars. Seems like a pretty big market. So if we are using something like Appisphere, if it’s making up certain kinds of apps, Ford might have a “Lets have a Ford flex car club” kind of a motto. And so, we could set a space and time kind of location, so as the Ford flex car club gets together here every Friday, show up, and everybody can come there every Friday. Well next thing you know, there’s open PR, there’s a lot of people making their own media from that experience and it’s going out onto the web, and you’re seeing more and more pictures of the Ford flex drivers in this one locale. If you’re a film producer, you could go around and if your set, you’ve shot your whole think in Vancouver and it was supposed to actually be, you know, Prague in the movie, you can go there and do a walk through, you can do a walk through of where the different movie sets were and you could say, “Here’s where Daniel Craig was being James Bond and, you know, grabbing the bad guy”, and you could actually do a lot more interesting promotions based on location based applications. So there’s, there’s really a lot of ways to get brand messaging across. I mean there’s lots of ways to add sort of liner notes to this, and it gives you a participatory feel, a sort of community sort of feel, which are the sort of power, a better opportunity going forward, and you can power a back and forth experience instead of just being advertise or marketed to.

Susan Bratton: The café conversation, the second thing that you think is particularly hot, what is that? Is that an online conversation with a small group of people?

Chris Brogan: It could be both. So one thing to talk about is, in the book that I’m writing with Julian Smith, Trust Agents, we talk about this idea of being one of us. So when I think of Google, I don’t really think of Eric, Sergei or Larry, I think of Matt Cutts because…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Chris Brogan: Matt would actually respond to me if I need him.

Susan Bratton: That’s right.

Chris Brogan: If I think of Dell I have Morgan Johnston, Dell, sorry, Jet Blue, Morgan Johnston. If I’m looking for people out in the space now, in the social space, there are big brands who I now know a human being at; Monetem Bow at Pepsi, Scott Monty at Ford. There’s a lot of people, Christopher Barter at GM evidently. There’s a lot of people that we, we know now as human brands. Well café shaped conversations is this idea of, you know, lets look at Pepsi downstairs, disclosure, they’re sponsoring part of my efforts here…

Susan Bratton: Good for them.

Chris Brogan: Pepsi is downstairs trying to make media. And really what their goal was how do we play. So they and Blog Talk Radio said, “Lets get together and lets make some media downstairs”, and we extended it. And we have Pepsi employees, all of the Flip video cameras going out and meeting people, how do we shoot and make more media? And you think about that, you go, why would a food and beverage company want to do that? And the reason is they’re looking for more authentic back and forth. It’s just…

Susan Bratton: Well they’re a lifestyle brand too.

Chris Brogan: Not going to happen in marketing materials, it’s going to happen with talking to the people who use their products.

Susan Bratton: Got it. What advice would you give to someone, and I’m sure your clients ask you this all the time, for a brand that’s just starting out in social media? They want to have some kind of connection to a community. They want to have some kind of an initiative. What’s the advice you’d give to a brand, a newbie, a newb as they’re called in the social media space?

Chris Brogan: Well there’s a few things I’d want to operate. I’d say start with listening. So pay attention to all the different place where people are talking and see if you can find that. Search for where people are talking about you. Search for where there might be the starting point of a conversation. Second is by listening, sort of sign on, get an account for any of these kinds of online spaces, and then pay attention for a while, see how people are going to use it. Third though, within that be helpful. People don’t want to hear about your dumb product, people want to use your product to better their lives or do something different in their lives. It could be anything. It could be a Sig Water Bottle. You could say why, you know, this is going to be better for you or why it’s not such a big problem at the airport or whatever, instead of “We make awesome bottles.” The, I guess the third and final thing I would say about it is be willing to make mistakes, but understand that you’ve got to tie this thing back to real life business at some point. It’s not an island on its own, it’s a bridge to a whole new marketing strategy.

Susan Bratton: It’s funny that you said Sig Water Bottles, it’s sitting right here, and that’s why you thought of it. I always carry one around, and I’ve been pursuing them for over a year to sponsor a series of our podcasts.

Chris Brogan: And wouldn’t you be the best because now we’ve just had an interaction about it.

Susan Bratton: Right, I mean I’m like a walking billboard for Sig, but they’re still buying page four color ads in Yoga Journal…

Chris Brogan: So there you go.

Susan Bratton: instead of in the influential media space of podcasting, vidcasting, blogging, it’s interesting. And not to down them, I mean, they’ve exploded as a brand and they don’t have the staff yet to really deal with all this, which I think a lot of people go through, you know, we don’t have the staff to figure it out. But luckily they can come to you. Here’s my last question: what’s the single most important thing that if a company wants to actually create a community around their brand, they’ve decided to do that, what’s the most important thing they need to know?

Chris Brogan: If you build it, they won’t come.

Susan Bratton: That doesn’t sound good Chris.

Chris Brogan: You know, I’m just sorry, but it’s just not, you don’t put up software and everybody show up. The idea is that what you need to do is it starts with building and facilitating a way to have a conversation with a community, but then you actually have to facilitate the community, you have to make them feel wanted, you have to make them feel loved, heard, heeded. You have to water those plants, because otherwise, you know, you’ve just, it’s like buying a gym membership, but you don’t actually go to the gym.

Susan Bratton: Oh, that sounds familiar. How many people are thinking that right now?

Chris Brogan: I have two gym memberships and it’s working great.

Susan Bratton: That’s great. It makes a lot of sense. So you have listened to the great wisdom of Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs. You can find him at chrisbrogan.com. Amazing blogger, amazing human being. Apparently if you make it to number one on the Ad Age top 50 blog, you’re shaving your head.

Chris Brogan: Soon to be bald.

Susan Bratton: That’s going to be a very unfortunate day, Chris.

Chris Brogan: Thank you Susan.

Susan Bratton: Thank you so much for listening to Community Powered live at South By Southwest. I’m your host Susan Bratton. Have a great day.