I don’t ever recall seeing an advisory board announcement getting any attention, but when it is one of social media’s finest and wisest joining a great new company, I guess people notice. Yesterday Utterz announced that Chris Brogan agreed to join their Board of Advisors, which is fantastic news for everyone involved (including me since they are a client of mine at The Conversation Group).

Chris pointed out on his own blog how the ease of use and wide availability of Utterz was so important and cool “I love that the barrier to entry of using a social communication
platform is pressing 2 on their cell phone. Do you have a “2″ on your
cell phone? Yes? You’re in.”

Chris has been an active user of the service since the early days of its launch, helping other people learn to get more out of the service by using Utterz to teach, as he did here with his Utter about “5 tips for Utterz Users“. In fact, Chris introduced me to Utterz and we have a photo (on Utterz) that captured the moment down at BlogWorld Expo.

Mashable also covered the news with some a bonus prize of an interview they did with Michael Bayer, CEO of Utterz a short time ago.

Once again, it is speaking season, or rather, it’s conference season and I am grateful to be speaking in a few different cities here stateside (still looking for some European opportunities so I might be able to give my wife a working honeymoon – just kidding honey, no work on the honey moon

Thanks to my good friend, and fellow “air-man� Shel Israel, I am on a panel tomorrow talking about Blogging’s impact on the corporation at Frost & Sullivan’s Sales and Marketing MindXchange. I will be in Phoenix for two days, Monday and Tuesday Jan 14 & 15 but unfortunately no time to meet any of my friends from Social Media Club Phoenix…

On Monday February 4 I will be joining my brothers in arms at the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference. During lunch I will be one of several people (including good friends Jeremiah Owyang and Deborah Schultz) leading workshops on how companies can build closer relationships with their customers. My workshop will be based on how to move beyond the transaction to satisfaction – using knowledge to empower customers and turning customer support from a cost into an investment across the customer experience lifecycle. In short, I will be walking folks through my methodology for marketing after the sale – how to better educate customers so they get the most enjoyment and satisfaction from a company’s products or services.

Two days later, on Wednesday February 6, I will be leading a short interactive exercise at the ALI Conference on the use of Social Media for Internal Communications. The folks at ALI put on a great event I had the pleasure of participating in during December in New York – very glad to be participating again. There are so few good professional education / conference companies out there, it is nice to be working with a good one. Social Media Club members get a $200 discount by mentioning Social Media Club when registering.

I am really excited to announce that I have been invited to do the keynote at SoCON08 on Saturday February 9 just north of Atlanta, GA. Thanks to Sherry Heyl, one of the organizers, for inviting me down after seeing my ‘closing keynote’ at Josh Hallet’s BlogOrlando. I plan to go deeper into some thoughts I have had over the last few months that extend on my “Business is Personal (again)� presentation. Interestingly, a Wired article I read recently mentioning The Conversation Group’s Peter Hirshberg addressed this same issue. In the Wired article, Clive Thomson wrote “corporations are getting humanized and humans are getting corporatized�. Let’s hope and work for more of the former rather than the latter…

Unfortunately I missed the speaker submission deadline for Danny Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo, but Social Media Club is proud to be a media sponsor of this great new event series. The next event is being held in Santa Clara from February 26-28, and if the prior event in New York is any indicator, this is a must attend event for any digital marketer. While I am unfortunately going to be out of town, friends of Social Media Club will receive 10% off the registration using discount code SMX10SMC. If you are in Silicon Valley or able to get there, you should make time for this event.

Whew… time for some rest so I can get some more client work done in the morning and some more writing for the book done…

Tomorrow afternoon I am flying out to a very chilly Boston, MA for a couple of days of meetings with the good folks from Utterz (our new client), so I thought it might be a good time to try to meet some other Utterz users too… Chris Brogan, Simeon Margolis and hopefully a few other friends from Boston’s great Social Media Club chapter will be there, talking about how we are using Utterz and what the outlook is for Social Media/Blogging in 2008.

It’s kind of last minute (very), so it will be a pretty low key affair for a couple of drinks and maybe an informal geek dinner afterwards somewhere nearby. We will be meeting at Vox Populi on Thursday January 3 from about 6-8pm. If you are able to join us, please rsvp on the Utterz Meetup page on Upcoming, or if you don’t have an Upcoming account, you can do so here in the comments…

It’s very important that you RSVP - if the group is large instead of small, we may need to go to another nearby venue so the RSVP will give us a way to contact you

Mobile post sent by chrisheuer using Utterz. Replies. mp3

I am very happy to announce we signed an agreement between The Conversation Group and Utterz a week or so before the holidays where we will be providing Utterz with Market Relations, Marketing, Business Development and Consulting services. This is the perfect example of the types of agency services we are providing clients in the age of conversational marketing - a mix of strategy, relationship development and communications that helps an organization grow by getting closer to the markets (or more specifically, the people) they serve. Both our organizations believe we have a great opportunity to demonstrate how smart startups can effectively engage customers in the modern world.

Talking with several friends over the last few months (the blog post is still in draft), I have stressed how important it is in the modern world to really respect any company for whom you are working. Whether it is traditional PR, Advertising, Consulting, Branding or Social Media work, a true passion for a company’s products, services, employees and values is incredibly valuable in providing great service. With Utterz, I not only respect the product and the company, I am also a raving fan.

As you know from reading my blog, I have been an active Utterz user for the past 2 months since being introduced to them at BlogWorld Expo by Chris Brogan in early November. It really is the exact sort of service I was waiting for - providing an easy to use system for mobile content creation and publishing. Better still for me personally, they are at the right place in their development where some of my ideas and insights as a “Social Media Guy” can hopefully make a difference in the product development and road map. Now that I have seen a bit of what is coming, I am even more excited because they are already working on, or soon will be working on, many of the things that I really need/want as a user of the service.

In working with the some of the members of their team (Michael Bayer, Randy Corke and Simeon Margolis) over the last few weeks, I am very glad to now think of them as friends as well as colleagues - I am also extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with them, as they truly ‘get it’, which makes our job at The Conversation Group so much easier. There are too many client opportunities out there to waste our time working with people who don’t ‘get it’. I feel truly blessed that at The Conversation Group, we have such an amazing group of clients - I am even more excited, that we get to contribute to the growth of a great company like Utterz...

BTW - this post is intended as both an announcement and a disclosure

Wow - can’t believe how long this has been in draft mode - I am all over the place over the coming months - hopefully we can catch up at some point in person and chat over some chai tea perhaps?

Today and Tomorrow, I am in San Diego on a social networking panel with Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone. We are doing a podcast from my room overlooking the ocean very shortly… the panel is tomorrow morning for the CEA Industry Forum.

Next week I am in New York City from October 22-24. On Tuesday night (October 23) I am doing a Social Media Club talk on “Business is Personal (Again)” with Howard Greenstein and on Wednesday I am doing a short interactive session at the Social Media Summit. This is going to be one heckuva trip east. I will also be heading out to New York again the following week for a little networking shindig we are doing on Monday October 29 and will be available in the afternoon/evening for some quick meetings on Tuesday October 30.

I am also going to be down in Austin on November 5 & 6. We will be hosting a Social Media Club conversation on Monday November 5 and then hosting a paid Social Media Workshop all day on Tuesday November 6 sponsored by the great folks from Dell. If you are interested in attending the workshop, use my promo code CHRIS so that I can prove to the other great workshop leaders (Shel Israel, Connie Reece and Kami Huyse) that people actually read my blog! From Austin, I need to leave a few minutes early and head to the airport for an early morning speech with Marshall Kirkpatrick at BlogWorld & New Media Expo on November 7.

I am then attending the Society for New Communications Research Annual Symposium in Boston on December 5-6… Heading into next year, thanks to a recommendation from our good friend Shel Israel, I am speaking at Frost & Sullivan’s Sales and Marketing Mind Exchange.

Chris Brogan shines bright and demonstrates why I really wanted him on The Conversation Group advisory board as much as Doc Searls and David Weinberger in this post “I am a marketer“. I try to avoid the word marketing like the plague - because of bad marketers - or more accurately, I should say badly intentioned marketers, which is the key reason the profession has been besieged for the last several years in some parts of society.

It’s time to talk once again about what I still think of as “real marketing”. For me this means the process of matching a product/service with the people who will get the most benefit/satisfaction/enjoyment from it. This is about serving the market’s interest by being a matchmaker of value between people and companies - caring about both, but more importantly caring about your own integrity.

Unfortunately, marketing has become more closely linked to selling, where oftentimes the systems and expectations of management are about producing quarter over quarter increases in numbers, without concern for the state of the product, its usability or its appropriateness for a particular use. This is where integrity breaks down and an individual’s self-esteem becomes linked to ‘hitting the numbers’ regardless of whether or not that is the right thing for the company or the people buying the product. This can also result in companies selling their product to the wrong people, creating an unnecessary negative impression in the market among people who might otherwise find value in it.

The bottomline is some marketers create a bad name for the rest of us because they are selling without concern for the buyer. Of course, everyone has some self interest, which is not in and of itself bad - it is when the interest is more focused on money than integrity where things go bad.

Chris also brings up the often talked about issue of transparency, which is still overused and misunderstood, but is getting more directly at the root of the bad marketer problem. According to Merriam Webster, being transparent means “free from pretense or deceit” - in short, it means being honest. As I have been saying a lot lately, “say what you mean and do what you say” - this is what leads to trust - being honest and continuing to demonstrate that honesty through your actions. Too many people misunderstand transparency to mean a completely open kimono, a view on everything going on - which is not feasible or completely appropriate. What it really means is don’t lie and make clear your intentions.

From my perspective, the bottom line here is a matter of intentions and authenticity. What are you trying to do and are you being true to yourself?

Chris speaks very eloquently to these ideals in action and lays out a great path for all marketers, but it is your point of origin where it all starts.

Are you working for a company you believe in? Are you working in a market you care about? Are you able to be human or must you uphold a fake ideal?

If you can answer these questions truthfully and affirmatively, you are a real marketer. I can proudly say that I am a real marketer, don’t you want to be a real marketer too?

The story of how and why we have come to form The Conversation Group is an epic - a story that is worthy of thousands of words, which I am going to share with you over the weeks ahead. There is the socioeconomic environment; the fertile cultural ground for our perspective; the advent of social media (aka participatory media, aka conversational media); the deep need for this sort of transformation in marketing communications; the disruptive technologies such as Tivo and RSS; and the changing nature of our relationships with each other as individuals, as colleagues and as community participants.

Then of course, there is the story that Ted Shelton, Giovanni Rodriguez, Stephanie Agresta and I need to tell regarding what brings us each here, at this moment in time, to work together towards this shared vision of our partnership. Of equal importance is the story our advisory board members, Chris Brogan, Deborah Schultz, Shel Holtz, Mitch Ratcliffe, David Thorpe, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger have to tell. Finally, there is the story of our kindred spirit and Board Member from the UK, Mark Adams, of Pembridge who previously co-founded Global Technology PR firm Text 100 and the genius of Peter Hirshberg, CMO and Chairman of the Executive Committee for Technorati.

Our story together as The Conversation Group, is the sum of all these parts and so much more. Everyone with their own important perspective on what is going on, everyone with a unique value to contribute to the conversation on conversations, and everyone describing a different aspect of the same proverbial elephant. For me personally, I feel it is the continuation of the Cluetrain Manifesto, those ideals being manifested, yet evolving in fascinating ways, inspired by the widespread use of enabling technologies and an open source ethos of sharing and collaboration.

Throughout each of these many facets of the story, it is very hard to define the underlying nature of the transformation that is underway now - the thing that Doc talks about regarding the ‘greater significance’ that I can talk about easily (not quickly), but struggle to articulate with written words. That which a single phrase can not describe - a story that doesn’t break down well into a 30 second clip, or tagline - a story that we (you and I) are writing together through our exploration of our social media and our connections with each other. It is a “conversation on conversations” and participatory media that is just now beginning in earnest with events like Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit that is taking place today.

The Conversation Group is but one part of this bigger story - my partners and I are striving to work together to make it an important part, but we know we don’t have all the answers. Rather, we have the experience and perspective needed to ask the right questions, that lead to better answers, discovered together, through conversations.

—more to come—

the+conversation+group conversation conversational+media participatory+media social+media web+2.0 marketing integrated+communications