The Buzz Bin

Brian Oberkirch says what he thinks on LikeItMatters, and it works. This maverick marketer has an air of success, and when you read his insights into the new media environment you’ll understand why. When talking about corporate social networking he says, “If your group is not really into open communication, responsiveness, acknowledging the real things customers are talking about, then blogging or any other social media project probably won’t seem that useful to you.” Read on for more great insights from Brian.

BB: How did LikeItMatters become one of the higher ranked marketing blogs?

Brian Oberkirch: Well, I’m not sure 1) that it’s highly ranked or 2) that it’s a marketing blog. It started off as a place for me to talk about relevance in marketing and also technologies (Tivo, etc) that allowed for filtering and better information matching. Now I seem to write mostly about developing web-based services, social media and, sometimes, unmarketing.

The way any blog becomes popular is simple: blog often, link a lot, respond in a meaningful way to what people say. Repeat. Often. Good bloggers read a ton and go out of their way to point you to good stuff. If you think it’s about standing on a soapbox telling the world what *you* think, that doesn’t bode well.

BB: How has blogging benefited your business?

Brian Oberkirch: It’s basically created my business. Five years ago I was doing traditional PR and marketing for tech companies and all my business came from people I knew personally. Today, I work primarily on Web projects and the number of people I ‘know’ is exponentially larger. New work and new colleagues happen all the time because of blogging: either someone finds my site, or I find someone I really want to work with, and we start talking. Blogs are a great way to start talking to someone or to keep on talking with someone you meet at a conference or somewhere. It’s like a running meeting that doesn’t have to stop.

BB: Your blog comments a lot of the failures in business blogging, agreeing that all senior execs “need to walk the halls� before the engage in social media. What’s the big disconnect in corporations?

Brian Oberkirch: I don’t know that there is a big disconnect in corporations, per se. We could look at great blogging coming out of Microsoft, Sun, Yahoo, Boeing, and so on. It’s more important what sort of cultural expectations the social media project comes up against. The tools themselves aren’t magic.

If your group is not really into open communication, responsiveness, acknowledging the real things customers are talking about, then blogging or any other social media project probably won’t seem that useful to you. In fact, it might feel threatening. So, it’s less the size of the company and more the attitude you have. I’d also say that most companies are not really prepared for how much work these programs entail. Lots of homework. There aren’t any shortcuts. Before jumping into anything, I’d ask: why are we doing this? Is it because blogging or social networking feels hot and therefore we ‘have to get in on it’? Or, do we have real business objectives that can be more efficiently met by utilizing social media.

BB: There seems to be a big focus on emerging media forms like Twitter and Second Life right now. Which one of these do you really like and why?

Brian Oberkirch: Personally, I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and I think they have a lot right when it comes to building a lightweight Web app that users and other developers can bend to their will. I’ve seen some ‘how to market via Twitter’ pieces here and there, and I think it’s a little early for that. A bit of the bandwagon effect.

Instead of asking ‘how can we use this tool to get our messages out’, ask ‘why is this resonating with a certain audience?’ What is the need that this fulfills? Again, all this is more about the users than it is companies who want to use these as messaging platforms. That is probably the least interesting thing.

If you just took Twitter (and there are a few tools out there) as a live focus group, and listened to what people say publicly on the spur of the moment, you’d probably learn a lot. You’d see what makes them thrilled to pieces, and when. You’d see their frustrations with certain services and processes. You’d see how small groups of people influence larger groups. It’s a great lab. But mainly, I use it to keep up with my friends. It makes me happy to know where everyone is and what they are up to. I like Plazes for the same reason.

BB: What tips would you offer other bloggers?

Brian Oberkirch: Focus on building the tribe one person at a time. Forget the Technorati 100 thinking. Being famous to 15 people is a huge advantage if they are the right 15 people. Keep in mind that blogging mostly has indirect effects: that you are building an online resume for yourself that is going to reward you in ways you really can’t predict. Honor your readers’ time. Give them great stuff to think about. Link generously. Answer anything you can.

BB: Do you see social networking as an art or a science?

Brian Oberkirch: I think it’s a natural extension of the social interactions people have always had. We like to affiliate with like-minded people. The Web extends the type of connections that are possible, so geography impedes us less than it did. Word of mouth has always been powerful. As parents, we ask other parents how they do things, what suggestions they might have, how their kids react to certain things.

Now we have the ability to tap more than just the people on our street, at work or in our PTA. The thing to understand from a marketing perspective is that now anyplace on the network can potentially feed a story to anywhere else on the network. Trends will accelerate faster. Flame out quicker. Bad news will certainly travel farther and faster and feel more real (e.g. a video of one laptop blowing up makes the battery crisis seem like something worth paying attention to). I think all the skills PR people and marketers have been cultivating are going to be really useful in this new world, but things happen much faster and response and iteration are probably more important than rendering pixel perfect creative work.

BB:Last December’s Time person of the year article really seemed to legitimize blogging and other web 2.0 technologies. How did this impact the blogosphere?

Brian Oberkirch: Big events like elections and disasters have put blogs and DIY media in the spotlight. By 2005 it was certainly commonplace to have people talking about the business applications of these tools. There is no blogosphere as much as there are hundreds of thousands of little networks that revolve around certain topics. These tools work really well in micro communities. The more niche your offering, the better suited it probably is for social media.

I guess you can do Coke stuff in Second Life, which I saw today, but that seems to me to be beside the point. As my friend John Moore says: Blogs help small businesses seem big and big businesses feel small. And that’s a huge thing to be able to pull off. But it’s not a magic bullet, and we should take a hard look at just what we’re trying to accomplish with all this.