MediaJoltz

For those looking for the interview with Joe and Mike from the salesroundup podcast, it is in an earlier post. You can either scroll down to podcast #3 post or click here: Interview with Joe and Mike.

So I had someone ask me the other day: “What do you say to a company who is scared about the negative publicity you can get by blogging or using a type of new media.” I posted this question to Linkedin and received numerous answers. I also emailed this question to some friends of mine including Greg Grimer who does the podcast Voices in Business as well as The Cold Calling Podcast with his partner in crime Mike O’Hara. Included in this email was also CC-Chapman who does everything from podcasting to running a marketing company called Crayon in second life. I couldn’t forget to get the opinions of Joe and Mike from the SalesRoundUp podcast. I also included Mitch Joel who runs the Six Pixels of Separation podcast.

And Seth Godin wrote back and so did Cord Silverstein who writes Marketing Hipster as well as Shelly Palmer of Media 3.0

And they all wrote back good answers too. Because they used email and I do not have permission to post them, I will not. But the gist of their answers was what I had told him-and I felt very satisfied to be back up by such a prestigious list of leaders in New Media! (thanks guys) This is what I said:

To avoid conversation in this day and age is going to work against you. People are already having conversations about your product or service already. New Media, like my post on starting conversations is about communication with clients, or listening to the communication they already are involved in. Starting a blog, podcast or getting involved in social media allows you to find out what people really think about you and then improve on those things people don’t like.

The more I thought about it though, I had more questions that I started to ask myself:

1. What about companies who want to play dumb in public? They know there are negative things about them and they have corporate people listening and watching to find out what those negative things are and are working to improve those problems, they just don’t want the complaints right there on their website. What do you tell them about new media?

2. The second question is: New Media is a new scary thing. So how do you talk to those people who are scared and scared of trying new things? If you start talking about blogging and podcasting and social networking they feel overwhelmed. So where do you start?

3. The third is: Why should they trust that new media is the way to go? Why should they trust me when I tell them that they need to do X now? Everyone says it is a matter of when, so why now and not later, what makes it so that their company ought to be doing this now?

So for these questions I decided to post them to the blog so that we might all benefit from the answers. So please feel free to comment with your opinion!