What if you placed a call to GM and the CEO answered the phone?

You would think perhaps this company is too small to suit my needs. This is why the bigger a company gets the more faceless they become because they layer on infrastructure to foster a certain perception.

But new media changes that paradigm and enables every brand to have a voice. From the smallest of firms to the largest and from the most obscure products to the most complex services. This is something every brand manager in every company should be working on right now – opening up your brand to be more conversational!

Which is exactly why Rohit Bhargava wrote his new book entitled Personality not Included. It’s not just another book about social media – it’s a book about how to regain a brand personality.

I had a chance to catch up with Rohit and discuss questions I had after reading the book. I hope you enjoy my interview with him as much as I did.

Personality Not Included – a podcast with Rohit Bhargava

About Rohit

Rohit is a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy, a leading agency, in helping clients navigate the social media universe. He publishes the Influential Marketing blog, ranked among the top 50 marketing blogs in the world, and is often featured as an expert in media including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Fast Company.

Rohit is also the author of the newly released book, Personality Not Included, published internationally by McGraw-Hill. A guide for companies on how authenticity is the new standard that brands need live up to in the social media era, the book has received significant early praise and features a forward by bestselling author and entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki.

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and reediting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works.

Most companies see the groundswell as a threat. But you can see it as an opportunity!

That’s the reason that Charlene Li and her Forrester Research colleague Josh Bernoff wrote their new, appropriately named book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

In the book, they describe the strategies and stages every company needs to go through to listen to, talk to, energize and embrace the groundswell. I had a chance to catch up with Charlene to get some answers to questions that came to me as I read the book and compared my social strategy with their recommendations. So I hope you enjoy this podcast …

Riding the Groundswell of Social Media – a podcast with Charlene Li

About Charlene

Charlene is one of the leading voices in the area of Social Computing and Web 2.0 through her work over the past nine years with the respected technology and market research company Forrester Research. She is one of Forrester’s most quoted analysts. An accomplished and frequently requested public speaker, she often appears at industry events and delivered the keynote speech at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in 2007.

Charlene analyzes how companies can use technologies — like blogs, social networks, RSS, tagging, and widgets — to meet business objectives. She started her own analyst blog in 2004 and is regularly cited as America’s most influential analyst blogger. She shares her blog with Josh Bernoff.

Previously, Charlene led the marketing and media research team at Forrester and ran its San Francisco office. She has also been publisher of interactive media for Community Newspaper Company, a group of newspapers in Massachusetts, and served on the board of directors for the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation. Charlene has managed new-product development for the San Jose Mercury News and has also been a strategy consultant for Monitor Company. She holds an M.B.A from Harvard Business School.

Charlene lives in San Mateo, Calif., with her husband and two children, all of whom are happy, engaged members of the groundswell.

Over the past few years marketers have been working on tracking conversations about their brands on the Web (you are tracking and listening, aren’t you?). But once you have that in place, then what?

Strategies for understanding and dealing with the flow of all these conversations are the natural next step. As more and more conversations are coming online, you need to respond quickly. So knowing things like “sentiment,” who in your organization is on point to respond, and whether they have been doing so are becoming more important. It’s like being at a party and having several conversations going on that you want to participate in.

I met Michael Spataro a few weeks back as I was researching tools to help me with this exact problem. I think what I found out was important for you to hear as well. I hope you agree.

Monitor, Track and Participate in Social Media – a podcast with Michael Spataro

About Mike

Mike is vice president with Visible Technologies, a leading provider of social media analytics and online reputation management services. An early pioneer of interactive marketing and PR, Mike has been devising and implementing digital communications and social media strategies for global brands for more than 10 years, including The Walt Disney Co., General Motors, Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard, MasterCard, Eastman Kodak, Verizon, Hanes, and the renowned “Got Milk?” campaign.

Prior to joining Visible, Mike led the interactive and new media divisions for Interpublic’s two largest PR agencies, Weber Shandwick and GolinHarris. He was the strategic force that established both agencies as leaders in digital communications and consumer-generated media services. During his nearly 10 years at Interpublic, Mike created and executed a variety of award-winning campaigns that blended traditional and new media ideas that produced outstanding business results for his clients.

Is the press release dead?

Well not really. But there certainly is a new wave out there – the social media press release, or SMPR, spawned by Todd Defern and the folks at SHIFT communications.

What does this mean for you? Well, when newspapers, magazines and other media go online, they are trying to create a conversation around a given article or topic they have written about. Why shouldn’t that be the case for press releases?

So I decided to get a podcast together with Todd so he could shed some light on success stories using the SMPR. Enjoy …

The Power of Social Media meets the Press Release

About Todd

Todd Defren leads client services and business development efforts for SHIFT Communications, a $10 million agency with offices in Boston and San Francisco.

Working in high-tech public relations for approximately 15 years, Defren currently specializes in social media strategies and is widely noted for creating the first template for social media news releases in 2006. He followed up with a template for social media-optimized online newsrooms in early 2007.

Prior to SHIFT, Defren was at Sterling Hager, joining in 1994 as an account manager and reaching the level of managing director of the San Francisco office in August 2000. His earlier experience included managing the strategic and tactical corporate communications at ENTEX Information Services, a $2 billion New York-based systems integrator, now part of Siemens AG.

Defren has served as a visiting professor at Emerson College in Boston, lecturing on marketing and public relations on the Internet. In 2006, Defren was named a Research Fellow and member of the Advisory Board of the Society for New Communications Research.

Full Disclosure: I have hired SHIFT Communications to help BearingPoint with our Social Media PR

Personally I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. So it was scary to me to read the title of a recent Fast Company article, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?”

The article has prompted numerous authors and observers to weigh in on the topic in the blogosphere:

• Social Media Top 5: RIP Influencers
• Influencer Influenza?
• Book Review: Six Degrees
• Debating the Influencer model: Fast Company debates the “Un-Tipping Point”
• Stephen Denny: Tipping Points and the Psychology of Influence
• Rather Than Target “A-Listers” Talk To “The Usual Susceptibles”
• The Hyping Point
• So Who Will Spread The Word That There Aren’t Influentials?
• Influentials On The Web Are People With The Power To Link
• Forget the A-List After All
• Is The Tipping Point Wrong?
• Influencers not so influential, trends out of our control
• The Debate Continues: What Is Influence?
• Pure Viral Marketing – A Pipe Dream?

With all the buzz, I just had to see if I could get in front of Duncan Watts, the scientist who stirred things up in the Fast Company piece written by Clive Thompson. Currently on sabbatical from Columbia University and working for Yahoo, Watts does a great job explaining a very complicated and intricate research project that he and his partner Peter Dodds conducted called Challenging the Influentials Hypothesis. Pay special attention to what he says, not only about his research but about social networks in general.

Influencers Shminfluencers – a podcast with Duncan Watts

About Duncan

The general goal of my research is to better understand the structure and dynamics of social interaction. To that end I am interested in a number of related topics, including the structure and evolution of social networks, the origins and consequences of social influence, and the nature of distributed “social” search. My approach to research is problem-driven and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights and methods from sociology, psychology, and economics, as well as from physics and computer science. I am also interested in exploring the potential of electronic communications data, such as email, as well as online communities and web-based experiments, to resolve some of the measurement difficulties associated with studying human interactions and social dynamics.

Selected Publications

Books

D. J. Watts. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. (Norton, New York, 2003).

D.J. Watts. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999).

Papers

M. J. Salganik, P. S. Dodds, and D. J. Watts. Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science, 311, 854-856 (2006).

G. Kossinets and D. J. Watts. Empirical Analysis of Evolving Social Networks. Science, 311, 88-90 (2006).

D. J. Watts. The “new” science of networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 243-270 (2004).

P. S. Dodds, R. Muhamad, and D. J. Watts. An experimental study of search in global social networks. Science, 301, 827-829 (2003).

D. J. Watts, P. S. Dodds, and M. E. J. Newman. Identity and search in social networks. Science, 296, 1302-1305 (2002).

D. J. Watts. A simple model of global cascades on random networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99, 5766-5771 (2002).

D. J. Watts. Networks, dynamics and the small world phenomenon, American Journal of Sociology, 105(2):493-527 (1999).

D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz. Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks, Nature, 393:440-442 (1998).