Here’s part II of our Shel Holtz interview. We left off with Shel discussing consumers increasing lack of tolerance for traditional marketing and the need to incorporate more social media into traditional tactics. You can read part I here. Thanks again, Shel, for a great interview!

BB: So you really see a participation-as-marketing approach, where building community value comes first, than in the traditional forms?

SH: Absolutely. People don’t understand this, but I talk about brand, and people think you are talking about a trademark or a logo, but the brand itself is the way the consumer reacts when they hear your company name or sees your logo or a product of yours on store shelves. That is all based on their experience and the one way, top down, pushed advertising and marketing is only part of that experience.

What always amazes me is how companies spend so much time on how to cut costs in their call centers and customer service and yet the experience you have with a call center or customer service is going to shape a person’s perception of that brand tremendously. One reason I’ve always thought the call center needs to report to PR or communications and not wherever it reports now is because you want to invest in that and make that portion of your business absolutely rock so the experience people have is one where their experience was great and then they tell other people about how that experience was.

You can shape that perception of the brand through engagement in the conversation. For example, I have a blog that is dedicated to my business travel and I only really use it when I’m angry. I’m probably going to be spending half the year on the road and I experience a lot in hotels and airports with airlines and skycaps and the like. I had a bad experience with an off-airport parking service that I use and I blogged it.

The first comment that was posted was by an administrator with that company and she was saying “We really try to be a better company than that. I’m really sorry that you had this experience and I’d like to make it right, can I send you some free parking? If you send me the name of the driver we’ll deal with that.�

That is what I tell people about, not the fact that I spent an hour waiting at the curb at 1 in the morning, which was my original gripe. All I talk about now is, and pardon me for using the “e� word, but they empowered a front office employee who stumbled upon my post to take action about it. I didn’t get the usual corporate drivel from marketing services or whichever department would normally respond to something like that, if anybody responds at all.

I got a real, live human being reaching out to me and saying “We’ll fix this.� That’s terrific. That’s what organizations are going to have to start doing.

BB: How do you see the new trend impacting individual disciplines, such as public relations, as a profession?

SH: It’s already affecting public relations as a profession. If you recognize that people are being influenced by their peers, and more and more of their peers are communicating online, not necessarily on a blog, but a conversation over networks like MySpace. If you look where younger folks, 14-26, are communicating, it’s on MySpace.

It’s not with a formal blog where you are trying to wield influence; it’s just a conversation with your friends. Nevertheless, that’s where influence is taking place. It becomes necessary to engage in some outreach with people you are able to determine are influential; that means reaching out to bloggers, podcasters, or just people who have heavily trafficked social-network profiles. It’s not like reaching out to media, which is crafting a press release and making sure that your wire service hits the right markets. You have to reach out individually.

That’s a whole different ballgame and there are PR agencies, even the world’s largest in Fleishman-Hillard, looking for social media consultants. The agencies are starting to recognize, and some of them have recognized it earlier, that influence isn’t all through the media anymore; with growing regularity its taking place in the social media space. I think you’re also going to see a more rapid uptake of the social media news release-type framework.

There has been some resistance to this idea, but I think some people don’t understand that it’s not the news release that’s social; it’s the content that you want to get into the hands of bloggers, podcasters and people who write in online journalism venues. You’re looking to provide the content to them in a format that they would want to use, where they don’t have to struggle with it and sort of hammer it into the social media context that they want to put it in. Hewlett-Packard recently put out a social media news release and I thought that was remarkable.

BB: How do you see social media impacting the way brand managers do their job?

SH: I guess that depends on what a particular brand manager does within an organization. But I think people who are responsible for the brand are going to have to be aware about what is already being said about them out there in that space. In a lot of ways this is really traditional communications.

You identify where the pockets of conversation are going on, and then you can classify that communication as positive, neutral, or negative. This is just good, old-fashioned, content analysis. Then you have to figure out what you are going to do about it in terms of the existing perceptions of the brand.

You also have to address any new initiatives that you have; new product launches or campaigns. Through the initial research that you have done you’ll know who is likely to talk about that, and do it in a way that doesn’t make some people inclined to change the conversation as to how clueless you were in the approach you took to reaching out to the social media.

Right now, for example, there is a lot of chatter going on in the blogosphere about Nikon giving a whole bunch of bloggers cameras and how that was simply blogger bribery. I guarantee you that’s not the conversation Nikon wanted.

BB: A lot of what is happening can be very intimidating to a company looking at social media, seeing all this volatility. What would you tell a company that knows it has to get involved in social media, but sees this and doesn’t really have an idea as to how to approach it?

SH: I would counsel these organizations not to be taken in by a lot of the negativity they are going to read about in the media. The media thrives on uncertainty and doubt so they tend to report on all the negative items. There is a tremendous advantage to be gained through effective use of social media. I would start by listening. I would counsel the company to spend a fair amount of time listening to what’s being said before jumping in.

If you are going to start commenting on blogs, read a lot of comments and what happens in the comment stream and how people react. If you are going to blog, look at the blogs of your competitors, or ones that have a reputation for getting it right.

Just spend a lot of time absorbing how the conversation works in general especially in whatever corner of the blogosphere you are going to be operating in, I would say 90 days isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to spend really just soaking it all in. It will make things just that much more natural figuring out how you are going to play in that space if you’re up to speed on the conversation that is already out there.

BB:How much of this is really social media, versus understanding who your community is and really getting to know them better?

SH: I’m getting to the point where I believe social media is really just integrated with everything else. By getting to understand your community, you’ll understand what realm of social media they are engaged in and what space outside of social media they are engaged in. If you are thinking about creating a positive brand experience you are going to want any encounter they have with your brand to be positive.

That’s whether it’s in-store, with a customer service representative, or online, and increasingly the online space is being dominated by social media. It really is understanding your community. If your community isn’t online then you get to pay attention to this a whole lot less. In rural towns where 60% of the population or so don’t have access to computers, if the mayor simply blogs about a new parking ordinance a lot of people will be getting parking tickets.

A company needs to ask itself, if they decide their community is active in the social media environment and that they will pursue a social media program, what topics they should be chiming in on, who are the important people they need to reach, should they be initiating the conversation or jumping into existing ones, and who should be representing the company. All kinds of different answers will become evident if you know the audience that you are trying to reach.