Chris Heuer - Social Media Club (#10)

"Everything we do with each other is about conversation."

"Social media is affecting all of us."

"Marketing is about matching your products and services with the people or companies who will get the most enjoyment, satisfaction, and value from them.."

"You can’t look at any individual activity anymore for a business within a given silo; you have to understand how it integrates with all the other things you’re doing."

"The broadcast model is broken; people are tired of being talked at."

"People want someone to empathize with them and treat them with respect."

"The biggest challenge [in social media today] is the lack of authenticity."

"If the people inside companies aren’t allowed to be human…we’re always going to be miserable cogs in the machine."

"We are destined to repeat other people’s mistakes until we lean those lessons."

"Marketing is about how we serve the market, how we identify the market, how we interact with it, and how we can have conversations directly with it."

John Lawlor, host of SocialMedialogy™ Conversations, interviews social media expert Chris Heuer, founder of the Social Media Club, and partner in the Conversation Group, which is an innovative marketing firm that believes in a holistic approach to marketing rather than focusing on individual activities.  "You can’t look at any individual activity anymore for a business within a silo,” Mr. Heuer explains.  "You have to understand how it integrates with all other things you’re doing.”

The Conversation Group is, as the name implies, focused on engaging customers in conversations rather than using the older model of a 30-second advertisement.  It stresses the difference between marketing and sales.  "The broadcast model is broken,” Mr. Heuer says, and he believes that "people are tired of being talked at.”  The conversation model is about returning to the basics by understanding what your customers need and how you can help them.  Mr. Heuer believes the chief executives of many top companies are still reluctant to engage in this type of marketing, but that the market is currently demanding it. 

Mr. Lawlor asks how this conversation model might be effective with mundane, everyday objects such as consumer staples, and Mr. Heuer recounted the success story of Blendtec, a company that sells blenders and uses an innovative approach to market its products.  The company produced a series of videos entitled "Will It Blend?” that became enormously popular. "They became media objects,” Mr. Heuer explains.  In the conversation model of marketing, consumers have something to talk about and this "thing” could be a series of videos, a blog, a podcast, or virtually any media production.  In one of the company’s videos, an iPod is blended.  As a result, in a Google search for "iPod,” Blendtec is the sixth listed result. 

In addition to his work with the Conversation Group, Mr. Heuer is the founder of the Social Media Club (www.socialmediaclub.org), an interdisciplinary group that brings together various types of professionals working in social media.  "We saw an opportunity to being people together who want to learn the tools of social media,” Mr. Heuer explains, such as web designers, publicists, and writers.  The club has four main missions:  to support media literacy, promote industry standards, share best practices and lessons learned, and to discuss ethical issues.