The Buzz Bin

This begins an informal series of interviews with the people who are speaking at the Final BlogPotomac (October 23, at the State Theatre, register today!), and what better person to begin with than the emcee? Shonali Burke is the incoming  president of IABC-DC, and adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Her 13+ years of experience include a stint as the ASPCA’s award-winning Vice President for Media & Communications. In 2007, PRWeek named her to its inaugural “top 40 Under 40” list of U.S. public relations professionals.

GL: What social media application or network is really exciting you today and why?

SB: Twitter. I think we saw a sea change in attitudes earlier this year with more people moving from the "I don’t get it" bandwagon to the "I can really make this work for me/my business/my cause," though the first of those will probably still pop up for a while to come.

What I love about Twitter is the way it has opened my world to new people, ideas and relationships; and it’s also increased my engagement with folks I know "IRL" but probably didn’t get a chance to talk to all that much. As a relatively new blogger, it has done more for my blog traffic than anything else I could have conceived; since I started blogging after I was extremely comfortable on Twitter, I had a built in network to disseminate my posts among. Finally, it’s been amazing as a way to begin conversations that help build my consulting business and speaking engagements.

GL: In your mind, what’s the biggest barrier facing corporate adoption of social?

SB: Since I don’t work in a corporate setting, I can’t speak from in house experience. What I’ve noticed, heard, been told and read about, though, is that there is still some element of fear of releasing control over messaging.

Here’s a news flash (not): you may have thought you had control with carefully crafted messages in press releases, etc., but the minute they were out the door, you had no control over how that messaging was disseminated, ultimately ended up in the public eye and impacted your business objectives or perception of your brand. Seth Godin had a great post today on not controlling the conversation, but trying to organize it, and that’s what I think they need to understand.

The other thing I think is really important for corporates (or any organizations) to remember is that every single employee is potentially your biggest brand ambassador. If you try to clamp down on social media, you’re ignoring a huge opportunity to empower your employees as evangelizers.

Almost everyone is engaged in some social media network or other; instead of trying to dictate to them what they can or cannot do on a social media level, why not educate them so that if they do have an opportunity to engage in a conversation about your company, they can be your ambassadors? Certainly, you should help them understand the do’s and don’ts of personal v. professional engagement. But if you invest in it, this could potentially open up a huge new customer base for you as it humanizes your brand.

GL: What current or future technology do you see impacting social the most over the next five years?

SB: Ha, this is the second question in a row I almost started with "I don’t…" ! Speaking as a non-techie, quasi-geek (I say "quasi" because of the afore-mentioned non-techiness) I think the technology that will really take off is the kind that lets people connect more quickly, more seamlessly and in a more integrated fashion over several networks. I have no idea what that is in tech-speak.

GL: Do you think social media has positively or negatively impacted society and why?

SB: For the most part, positively. It’s broken down barriers that folks may not ever have dreamed of surmounting. It’s allowed people from different walks of life, backgrounds and time zones to meet each other and engage in dialog, and has the potential to harness and focus energies that were previously restricted.

You just have to look at any of the hugely collaborative non-profit campaigns that have used social media, such as the Pledge to End Hunger, to see how social media can have an extremely positive impact. Beth Kanter writes about these all the time.

Of course there is a danger of letting your online "life" take over your "real" life, but I think that’s more a function of a world that’s evolving minute-by-minute on a technological level, and understanding how to adjust to that. At the end of the day, we’re human, and that’s how and why we connect; stop being human, and you’ll stop connecting. Social media is a great point of connection, and humanizing it is what makes that connection rich.