I’ve been exploring conversational marketing lately, both for some of the talks I give and to advise clients on appropriate and effective ways to not just engage our audiences in conversation, but also persuade them. If we, as social media marketers, are not using the engagement opportunity to motivate those audiences to do something, then there’s little business purpose in having the conversations in the first place.

At Social Media Plus last week, I talked about conversational marketing and came away from the presentation thinking a lot about trust. My theory around conversational marketing is that success occurs when our genuine participation (that without marketing as motivation) earns enough trust from our audience to share information that is driven by our business. But trust is earned in a variety of ways.