social media explorer

You don’t have to be a fan of Constantin Basturea or even a friend-of-a-friend of Christin Eubanks to know Converseon hires good people. But the person that hires the good people proved to be one his own self this morning as CEO Rob Key presented at SMX Social Media in the “Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in Social Media Marketing,” session.

As brand evangelism is what my agency does, I felt it so important to pay attention and see if there were any brilliant insights in the presentation, that I blew off a chance to talk Dave McClure’s ear off enough that one of his 500 hats fell off. Fortunately, he’s a fellow Mountaineer, so he’ll forgive me.

And listening to Rob was worth the sacrifice. (No offense Dave.) He approached the topic of brand evangelism by saying social media marketers actually need to be cultural anthropologists, understanding and assimilating into the communities we target in order to gain credible standing and subsequent influence.

That brought to mind a Twitter conversation I had with Todd Defren earlier this week. He responded to my question of how to insert influence into PR’s role of creating content, monitoring and participating in the conversation with this:

“Influence stems from Participation, imho. Participate meaningfully = credibility = influence.”

Rob’s presentation not only stuck to the topic, which I can’t say for all the presentations I saw at SMX Social Media, but never strayed from the point. The best part of it, in my opinion, was his list of 8 Principles of Karmic Communication, or a step-by-step guide to assimilation, participation, conversation and influence.

8 principles of Karmic Communication

1. Participate and learn
2. Make friends with community elders
3. Understand and respect community mores
4. Lead with altruism, come bearing gifts
5. Discover a community need
6. Learn the linguistics
7. Value and cultivate relationships
8. Leverage appropriately … over time

Fortunately, this is the essence of what I’ve been telling my clients and my colleagues about social media, though certainly not in as eloquent fashion. But what it also means is that I’m now tempted to recommend those working on social media strategy and planning with Doe Anderson start taking some night classes.

SMX Social Media Day Two Live Blogging Transcripts
(Start at the linked post and navigate to each site’s “next post” features to navigate through the sessions.)

1. From Vanessa Fox and Rebecca Kelley on SearchEngineLand.com
2. From Kim Krause Berg at SEORoundtable.com
3. From my man Marty Weinberg at aimClear Blog
4. From Eric Lander at SearchEngineJournal.com
5. From Dana Larson at TopRankBlog.com
6. From Helen Overland of the NLC Internet Marketing Blog (who didn’t live blog the first session as she was a speaker)
7. From Brendan Picha at Squareoak.com

And the images from the Flickr SMXsocial tag slideshow. (New window)

IMAGE: Something I can identify with when thinking of karma from Beshreibunk on wikimedia.

[tags]karma, communication, smxsocial, smx social media, social media, marketing, smm, social media marketing[/tags]