Chris Brogan How To Be Human Talk at Disney Social Media Moms

Chris Brogan was a speaker at the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration on February 12th. His talk was titled, “Social Media – How To Be Human”.  As always, he was personable with the audience made up of of mostly mom bloggers. He even warned about his rough language, but explained that he is how he speaks.

In the days prior to his talk, he spent time with the Hanes Comfort Crew. He liked the approach that Hanes was taking as a brand. They wanted to understand what Hanes means to us and what we care about. They understand the principal that we buy from people we trust, people that don’t treat us as a number. That is one of Chris’ main messages, especially in his book Trust Agents (co-authored with Julien Smith).

Next he spoke about relationships and community. Always remember there is a difference between audience and a community – “it’s which direction we point the chairs”.  Listening is a huge part of creating and maintaining your community. Find partners that are trust agents and work together. Don’t overwhelm people upon your first social media encounter. Don’t try to sell to them or get them to read your blog, engage with them. His analogy – it’s like you want to shake hands and someone sticks their tongue in my mouth.

Chris gave some more examples on maintaining your community – “Treat your community like gold and never sell out.” Use @ replies on Twitter to connect. Provide great customer service (I believe that he meant this for bloggers too).

He also spoke about the business end of blogging.  He quickly mentioned a listening station, which is how you monitor your brand, your blog and your social media profiles. We were directed to his post, Grow Bigger Ears for information on how to do this for free. Mom bloggers need to treat their blogs as businesses and this is one step in doing so. Forget about the external perception that mom bloggers are in the business for free handouts. Build a business plan, create contracts, especially for consulting and bring complete ideas to the table with a beginning, a middle and an end.

What do companies want from mom bloggers? They want your community to love you. When writing a product review, do it in your own unique voice and be honest. Remember that advertising still works so create a blog that a company wants to work with, one where they get a return from your posts. They want revenue and so do mom bloggers. Work at selling products through your blog posts and your community. Don’t sell your traffic stats to a company, show them you can create sales and new ideas.

Write better blog posts by making them tighter, using and highlighting subtitles and using bulleting. Be helpful is the number one piece of advice Chris said he would give the us. The quote from Liz Strauss rang in the hall, “Little bloggers grow up”. He also mentioned time management and pointed us to his post, No I Don’t Sleep.

I’ve heard Chris Brogan speak at Affiliate Summit East 09 and IzeaFest 09, but hearing him speak directly to mom bloggers at the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration provided me with the most important information so far.

ConnieFoggles