Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton. I’m here live at South By Southwest, and you’re listening to Community Powered podcast. On this show you’re going to get to meet Dave Evans. Dave is the co-founder of a company called Digital Voodoo. He’s a social media expert, and he’s also just recently launched a fantastic book called Social Media: An Hour a Day. Welcome Dave.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below.

Susan Bratton & Dave Evans

Dave Evans: Thank you Susan.

Susan Bratton: It’s great to have you here.

Dave Evans: It is super to be here.

Susan Bratton: Well I want to talk to you of course a lot about social media and community and brand, but first I really want to give the listeners a minute to talk about the book with you because it’s an outstanding tome at, how many, four hundred and…

Dave Evans: 432.

Susan Bratton: 432 pages. Not only is it really an overview of every aspect of social media marketing, but you have a unique twist to the book. It’s not just something you sit down and read. Tell us about it.

Author’s Note: DISHYMIX INTERVIEW WITH SPECIAL “COMMUNITY” BONUS MATERIAL

Dave Evans, Digital VooDoo on Interruptus Vulgaris, Trusting “The Cloud” and Social Media: An Hour A Day

Dave Evans: Correct. The book has exercises, each week split into five days, each day has a one hour exercise that goes with it. So as you work, for example, through blogging, right, a topic like blogging, I actually take you out to the Ted Blog where you get to read some really interesting things, so that you get an idea of what people talk about. I take you to the IBM blogging policies so that you see, you know, sort of the gold standard or certainly one of the high regarded standards in how to establish an internal blogging policy so when your employees are blogging, they’re doing it correctly, they’re, you know, disclosing themselves, they’re being transparent, they’re not revealing company secrets, they know what to do, right. As your workforce moves into this, it’s important that they understand what to do. In Twitter we set up a profile, I talk about the completeness of a profile. In Linked In we do the same thing. I talk about recommendations and the power of recommendations and the power of soliciting recommendations from people that you know who can credibly recommend you, who themselves are recommended. Because remember, when people are looking at all of this, when they’re looking at you and what you’re doing and working on on the social web, they’re forming their opinion about you and about your brand, your product, service, all that kind of thing. So we sort of roll all that together through this series of one hour exercises. One quick note on the exercises themselves, I get this from a lot of people who have purchased the book, I’ll get a comment like, “Hey Dave, I was really excited. I bought your book, it showed up, I dove into it and all of a sudden I realized I’m not going to get through this in an hour.” So I want to again point out, it’s social media marketing an hour a day for three and a half months, right. It’s, there are 55 one hour exercises in the book. How fast you want to work on them is up to you, but the real point, the metaphor is a little bit each day and you will go from whatever comfort level you have with social media at this point, to being able to confidently stand in front of your peers, your colleagues and so on and present a cohesive social media marketing plan.

Susan Bratton: Well one of the great things also about the book is that you can skip around. So if you want to start with, you know, your need to know about Face Book or your need to know about Twitter or your need to know about blogging, you can do that and focus, but what’s great about it is that  by the time you’re done going through the whole book, which I did, I didn’t do all the exercises ‘cause I’ve done a lot of them before, but I read the whole book and I really enjoyed how you had the exercise created. It’s helpful because you can skip around as well. So, 432 pages, 55 exercises later, and what do I want? I want one pearl, one little gem. What’s kind of the thing that has resonated more than anything else with your readers and with your clients, because you work one on one at a strategic level with big brands for social media strategy, as well as with individuals who’ve purchased your book, so net it out.

Dave Evans: So I think the one pearl of wisdom and the thing that comes across in the book is developing within your organization a culture of operations rather than a culture of marketing. And let me explain what I mean by that. When we think about what we see on TV for example, this is driven by brand, by positioning, by marketing and so on, when we think about conversations or we use a social media monitoring platform and we look at what people are talking about, this is driven by operations, and so developing this operations culture toward marketing, creating the experiences that we want people to talk about or understanding what people are talking about, and therefore how our operations are impacting that, you know, whether it’s the customer service department, whatever, warranty service, what the store looks like when somebody walks into it, whatever it happens to be positive or negative, we’re shaping that conversation in operations. And I think people truly get that by the time they’ve completed the book. Part two really dives into that, and then part three takes that onto the social web through all the various channels, through blogging and podcasting, through the various networks, through micro blogging and so on, and really puts that in a practice. But the pearl of wisdom in the book is that, you know, number one, this is a marketers book, right. This is absolutely a marketing textbook. This is not a, you know, social, social media book. This is a marketing textbook. And then the second thing is from an operations perspective, understanding as a marketer the importance of your relationship with your chief operating officer, with the heads of customer service, with HR where they’re hiring the people that are answering the phones and so on, as a marketer you need to build those bridges because that’s where your conversations are formed and that’s how you manage those conversations on the social web.

Susan Bratton: That makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of a book that I read that was called something like Operationalizing Your Brand, which was about making sure that every touch point with your customer reflected the personality of your brand and the message of your brand and the promise of your brand. And now you’re saying that social media is another touch point in that, and that the way you communicate using the social web has to reflect all of the rest of your organization and everyone needs to be informed, so it’s really a big company perspective.

Dave Evans: Yes, absolutely, and the idea that social media is a touch point, social media is, to me is one of the sort of terminal expressions of your touch points and so on, and let me talk about that for a second. There’s a coffee bar here in Austin called Progress Coffee, one of my favorite places, and they have a French press and so for those of you that know what a French press is, it’s that little glass container, it’s got the plunger on it and so on. So, makes great coffee, but if you’ve never seen one before they can be a little bit intimidating. Somebody sets this thing down in front of you and walks away and it’s like, “Okay, now what do I do?” So what they’ve done is they have a little plastic timer that they snap onto it, they set it down in front of you and they sort of make a pushing motion and they say, “When that beeps, push.” And so they’ve sort of queued you as to how to push, right, and the beeper will tell you when to push. Now the reason that they do that is because it creates a consistent experience for the customer. They know how long that coffee should sit there so that it’s hot when you actually press it, it’s not cold and oily, and it’s sat for long enough that it’s not going to be weak. In other words, they’ve looked at their brand and said, “We know the people want to try this”, and, you know, here’s this way of enjoying coffee, and it’s really nice to order the big French press and split it with a couple people, it’s great. And then they’ve got this little process that they’ve injected into this that makes it very simple for them to insure that every single time they serve one of these things, because the experience is actually being turned over to the customer, when the customer does it the way that they suggested that they do it, the thing beeps, they’re going to get exactly the right experience and then that’s what they talk about. So it’s like these little things that we do, these touch points that create, that themselves drive the conversations.

Susan Bratton: I want to switch gears a little bit here, and thank you for that. I actually had Dunkin’ Donuts coffee this morning. I drove by a Dunkin’ Donuts. Now I grew up in Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and that’s Dunkin’ Donuts, I even say Dunkin’ Donuts backward. It’s Donut Niknud, that’s how much I love Dunkin’ Donuts. And I drove by a Dunkin’ Donuts and I bought a cup of their delicious coffee today and I was so happy. But the French press is good, but I….

Dave Evans: We spend, a little side note, we spend summers in Wingersheek, near cluster, and absolutely rabid Dunkin’ Donuts fans. We have Dunkin’ Donuts coffee every morning…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Dave Evans: Not made in a machine. Somebody actually gets up and goes and buys it and brings it back to the house and, you know, we’ve got six or eight cups and, yeah, it’s wonderful, wonderful stuff.

Susan Bratton: It’s funny, isn’t it? They do a good job with that.

Dave Evans: Yeah, they do a great job.

Susan Bratton: What, you’ve written a book on the panoply of social media. Now there are always new things coming to the fore or things that you fall in love with all over again about social media. I know that recently when C.C. Chapman just put out a White Paper on the latest updates on Face Book fan pages, and, you know, he’s with the Advanced Guard, and I downloaded that and I thought, “Oh, just, I need a day, just to go update my Dishy Mix fan page and do all this great stuff that he gave me.” You know, there’s always something that you want to do. I’ve been experimenting for good and bad with Tweet Later, most recently where people are complaining, “You’re tweeting too much. You’re repeating your tweets” or, you know, I’m just like playing with it to see what it can do and boy you get feedback fast in the social media world, you know, and there’s no hesitation about people who want to give you, you know, like what their expectations are about how you should be doing your social media. So I’m always finding these new things that I absolutely love. What are you excited about right now or what are you playing with in the social world?

Dave Evans: The thing that I’m most excited about, it’s not a piece of technology, and this’ll give you again, an insight into the book. It’s the number of people who are declaring themselves social media experts.

Susan Bratton: Which is awesome that people feel like they can embrace it so quickly.

Dave Evans: Exactly. My vision, and I spell this out in the book, is for my son and his peers to grow up in a world with less interruption, where the information they need to make smart choices is available, right. That is the social web, and so when I see a large number of people taking an interest in this, taking a personal risk and saying, “Hey, I’m going to declare myself and expert in this”, I just love that. And one of the tips for using the book, if you are a social media expert, right, if you’re, you know, half way up the ladder or all the way up the ladder,  however you’ve come to arrive at this label for yourself, share this book with your clients, right. There will be things in there that you’ll recognize and you’ll be nodding your head as your going through it and you’ll go do some of the exercises, and some of the things that I point to might even be your own site, right. There are, I picked up a lot of things from friends and colleagues on Twitter, from other professionals that I work with. Susan, you know, you’re in the book, obviously Personal Life Media’s in the book, you know, and so on. Share this with your clients because they will then understand the importance of what you do as a professional of how you can help them and why you’re telling them things like you can’t just flood a blog or flood comments into something to push a negative post down. You can’t do this without transparency. You can’t fail to disclose your stuff, ‘cause you’ll get into trouble. You know, we talk about our, we talk about this stuff with our clients, and sometimes they’re so used to traditional marketing where we don’t really have to disclose because it’s obvious that it’s a commercial, I’m watching the program, gets interrupted, I know that this is a commercial. On the social web, unless you have disclosed your relationship or your interest in whatever it is that you’re talking about, the only think that I have to go on as a consumer of that content is I’ve got your name and I have, you know, some other basic information about you, but if you fail to point out that you’re the product manager for the kayak company that you’re posting about, I’m going to figure it out and when I do all of a sudden the great information that you provided, because of your expertise in kayaking is now suspect. So share this book with clients and they will then appreciate both the difficulty, the challenge and the value that you as an expert are bringing to this. That’s the thing that I’m most excited about. The bar camps, social media clubs, all of those things that are popping up, just wonderful, wonderful organizations to help people up this ladder, so as people get involved in this I love to see this. What it means to me at the end of the day is my vision for my son may be realized in my life time after all, it’d be great.

Susan Bratton: Well thank you so much for that. And what are we doing right now? We’re going to have lunch. Where are we going?

Dave Evans: We are going to Iron Works, and if you come to Austin, and particularly if you’re at South By Southwest, Iron Works is right next door, it’s one of my favorite places, I’ve been eating there for 20 years. If you remember the Flintstones and the brontosaurus ribs, that’s where we’re going to eat. They are literally that big. Two hands to pick them up, and they are, they’re great, so…

Susan Bratton: It’s such a great old place. It’s kind of this broke down shacky looking thing. It’s an old iron works, an old iron works building, and it’s called Iron Work Barbeque. It’s painted red, it’s got all kinds of iron, metal stuff stuck to the front of it. It’s right on a little river, and so there’s like a back patio.

Dave Evans: Exactly. And actually the historical note is actually the foundery where they made all of the iron and door hinges and so on, for the Texas state capital, which is, you know, half a mile away.

Susan Bratton: It’s absolutely beautiful, that Capital Building. Austin is a gorgeous little town, absolutely. Well I’m looking forward, lets go get some barbeque.

Dave Evans: Lets go get some barbeque. Thank you Susan.

Susan Bratton: Alright. It was my pleasure Dave. This is Susan Bratton. You just got to meet Dave Evans. He’s the co-founder of Digital Video and the author of my favorite social media book, Social Media: An Hour a Day. I hope you’ll pick up a copy. Keep him in that top one hundred Amazon books and enjoy it for yourself. You don’t have to do all 55 exercises, but maybe a couple. Alright, here we go. We’re going to go have some brontosaurus barbeque. Have a great day.