I usually like to write an introduction for our interviewees. Shel Holtz doesn’t need one. We’re honored to have him on the Bin. Without further ado, Part I of our interview with Shel Holtz (part II coming on Thursday).

BB: Tell us about your book and what it is going to do for marketers and everyone on the Internet.

SH: It’s being published by McGraw-Hill and is part of their How to Do Everything series and it’s called How to Do Everything with Podcasting. I co-authored it with Neville Hobson who’s the co-host of the twice-weekly podcast that I do called For Immediate Release, which is actually a series of podcasts Neville and I do.

Twice a week we produce The Hobson and Holtz Report, the cornerstone of For Immediate Release, which is a look at public relations as it’s affected by social media and online communications. (For Immediate Release also includes interviews, book reviews, and recordings of speeches and panel discussions.) Neville and I were approached, and for about a year we have been working on this book that is just as the title says, how to do everything with podcasting. It’s a little longer than most of the podcasting books you’ll see because we cover things like how to use a podcast as a business tool or employee communications tool or marketing tool in addition to all the technical information that’s included; really podcasting A to Z.

It’s going on sale on the 15^th, and should be available just about everywhere. In fact, last time I was at a Barnes and Noble I saw a whole rack of How to Do Everything books in their computer section so I’m looking forward to seeing it there, as well as all the usual places like Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

BB: Where do you think social media is taking marketing in general? We all know it is the latest trend within marketing, but how is affecting the marketing discipline as a whole?

SH: I think it is affecting it greatly and it will continue to. I resist the notion that you have to put all your eggs in this basket because there still are a lot of people that are not engaging in social media. But, depending on the kind of market you’re in, and in a lot of respects, regardless of the market you’re in, people ignore it at their peril.

What’s changing is the idea of who is in control of the message. Most marketers, for a long time, have had the luxury of delivering a message one way, top down, and they knew that people were going to listen and some were going to be influenced by what they saw or what they heard. There weren’t a lot of ways you could go about vetting information that was offered to you.

For example, if you look at a typical T.V commercial for a new car it will show the vehicle driving sideways in an inch of water throwing up this beautiful spray that the light is catching just right and at the end of the commercial you get about one-tenth of a second of very small type, and a lot of it. People would say, “Wow. I want that car. That’s glorious. I want my car to look like that when I’m driving down the street.� But you didn’t know, until you got a TiVo, that if you freeze frame that legal type at the end, you can’t make your car look like this.

It’s done on a closed track with professional drivers wearing 5-point harnesses and parts of the car had been removed to make room for other things, and the disclaimer informs you that you shouldn’t try this on the street. Marketing, in a lot of regards, was slick presentations that were designed to pull the wool over the consumer’s eyes.

Today you *can* freeze frame on TiVo so you can see exactly what that legal disclaimer says. You can then capture it and put it up on the web for everyone to see and people can talk about it to each other. This is what social media is all about; people talking to each other. We have seen fewer and fewer organizations able to continue to hold the public’s trust as trust shifts to the peer space.

The reason the trust is shifting is because the original sources of information, business, mainstream media, and government have egregiously violated that trust on a number of occasions in the past several years. Who people trust is people like themselves; they are able to reach out to those kinds of people with greater ease and with a larger pool thanks to social media.

Whether that’s a blog, or a social network, or a wiki, if there’s someone like you who says “I saw this movie. It sucked.� Or “I have this car and you don’t want the maintenance troubles I’ve had. Don’t buy this car.� That’s where you are going to look for the information to help you make a decision, as opposed to being influenced by the slick TV commercials or the traditional one way, top down marketing. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for commercials or traditional marketing, but I think it does mean that it has to be balanced and integrated with social media involvement.

BB: Will consumers and buyers be less tolerant of traditional media tactics, and will traditional tactics have to evolve to incorporate the same tone? In essence, will an ad-campaign have to possess social media aspects and be conversational in tone?

SH: I think there’s going to have to be some sort of a social media dimension to a lot of the advertising that goes on out there and you’re starting to see some of this. T.V. commercials now invite you to submit content, for example, or go to a site where you are going to find a greater level of interactivity or involvement with the audience, or what Jay Rosen calls “the people formally known as the audience.�

So in essence, I definitely think that is the case. It will always depend on the nature of the advertisement. If I thought about it, I could probably pull out an advertiser or commercial where that kind of interaction isn’t needed. But by and large I think organizations are going to have to stop and think about the fact that any commercial you broadcast can be copied, uploaded to YouTube, and commented on.

In addition, people are going to make their own commercials. This has been happening over the last couple of weeks with the Apple iPhone. The writer of the Brand New Day blog for BusinessWeek said that he saw this commercial and he thought it was from the advertising agency for the iPhone, but then somebody e-mailed him and said “No, no. This is just a fan who made this commercial.� So there is this consumer generated content, and companies that are smart enough to figure out that you can get your fans to create this stuff for you.

Southwest Airlines, for example, is one of the companies that has had a contest inviting people to submit a video. They had to be 20-seconds in length, and oriented to be one of those “Want to get away?� commercials. The winner would be produced as a national advertising spot. The videos could be uploaded and commented on, and the winning entry, which is pretty funny and very well produced, is going to be one of their regular national spots. They started with social media on the front end and it ends up being a regular, old TV commercial.

It doesn’t matter which way you go, as long as you are out there engaging in that conversation at some level.

You can read Part II here.