So the counter-intuitive thing to do in this economic downturn - engage more aggressively with your customers, prospects and detractors in social media and social networks.

And when you do, remember that the most important behavioral attribute is not transparency, but empathy and reciprocity.

What do you think? Are you using LinkedIn or Facebookmore often? Would you network more heavily on Twitter or in other communities right now?

What we helped them understand is that the first thing they need to learn is how to articulate their own story, in other words, what is it that moved them to become involved and engaged, because it’s from their own story that they’re going to be able to most effectively engage others. So when people leave, they leave equipped to do that. That’s sort of the foundational piece.

And in the initial series in California, we launched 200 teams in two weekends that, with the support of four staff people, built that operation out there to the point where it could make 100,000 phone calls a day. This is like an investment in civic assets, in local communities that no political campaign has done for years.

The right benefited from being rooted in social movements, which do this because that’s what social movements do. They translate values into action; they bring people in to work together. But on the progressive side, everybody had become marketeers. Everybody’d been marketing their cause or marketing their candidates as if it was another bar of soap, transforming people from citizens into customers.

What we did was bring the citizenship back in and put the people back in charge, and then put the tools in their hands.

For me the biggest difference is not to bring the citizenship back, it’s about realizing that the power of personal stories - what motivated you to buy into this cause - is much stronger than that of talking points about the cause.

The same is true for brands, products and services. Let people tell their own narrative about why they like it instead of trying to get them to sing from the same song sheet with canned corporate speak.

You can also see the full interview in three parts here, here and here.

Let me know your thoughts - especially as we are in the midst of updating the study which is done in partnership with Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research.

Sign up for the Symposium, and join us for drinks the night before at the Harvard Faculty Club of for the Gala Awards dinner that Friday night.

Can you overcome the perceptions?

And how do people make buying decisions when they need a product or service from an industry that is tainted like that? Sure, they can ask for recommendations…but in a lot of cases you do not need that product or service too often, and many of your friends may have never needed it either.

It’s a tough one…and one that many small businesses are facing.

Thoughts? Good case studies? Let me know…

After 9/11 and 8 years of Bush I felt like a foreigner - stuck in this country…

I now feel the same energy that drove me here in the first place - as people all over the world do.

http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/sets/72157608716313371/show/

I believe that the answer is in having communities that are tied to a transactional infrastructure. As I described in an earlier post, there are 4 forces of increasing returns in communities - members, content, member profiles and transactions. If your communities are purely member and content-driven, without a solid transactional component - like buying, or getting help - then it is much easier for members to pick up their profile and go hang out somewhere else. It is only if the transactions that I need to do become easier and more effective because of my interactions with the community - i.e., buying a book, renting a movie, getting recommendations for photographic equipment purchases - that I will have a hard time to pick up my stuff and go somewhere else.

If that is the case, then you wonder why so many communities are not directly integrated with the transactional infrastructure of the company that is hosting it. If I am a frequent buyer with a company that is now hosting a community - they should enable my buying experience to become better because of that community.

It also makes you wonder how magazines and newspapers, who typically have content-based communities, can increase their community switching costs. Maybe they could affiliate with their advertisers’ transactional infrastructure instead of selling banner ads which annoy all the members anyway.

One topic that I found especially interesting was when Paula made recommendations on what to do in the face of reduced marketing budgets in an economic downturn. Based on her experience that traditional marketing program are more capital intensive, and social media marketing programs are more labor intensive - she recommends that you move some of the people resources which are going to free up because of the budget reductions to social media marketing programs. Now that they do not need to manage as many lead generation or brand building campaigns, have them engage in the social media world.

Of course, you could take this a step further and voluntarilly move some more budgets from traditional marketing programs to social media marketing programs. Your returns may very well justify that…

Please register here (https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/808222669). The format is very much like a talk-show format, where Barry and I will start off a conversation for about 15-20 minutes, after which you will be able to raise your hand and be un-muted to join the conversation.

Again, we hope to see you then and there!