Top business advice from David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, uses what he calls a tortured metaphor to explain the importance of participation in social media. See more business news television shows featuring these experts, as they give their top expert business advice at http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com.
David Meerman Scott: I use this metaphor to describe how important it is to participate in blogs, forums, and chat rooms and to be a part of the communities that are talking about what you're doing, about your company, about your products, about your services.
The tortured metaphor goes like this. The web is a city, and if you think about the web as a city you can think about everything that is on the web and assign it to something that's in a real live city. So for example, EBay is the garage sale, the boot sale of the city. You've got Amazon.com as the bookstore. All of the company websites are the high street, the main street of the city where people go to do their shopping. You've got the underworld of the city with porn and spam and stuff like that, so you assign every kind of thing that you see on the web as a virtual city.
So what are the blogs and the forums and the chat rooms of the virtual world of the web? They're the bars and the saloons and the clubs of the city. And so if you think about it that way, and you think about the ways people market offline and the ways people find out about ideas offline, you can sort of get a sense that there's a lot of information that's shared in the pubs and the saloons and the bars and the clubs of the city, of the real city. And the same things true of the online world of forums and chat rooms and blogs.
So in order to be successful with social networking sites, you have to be a participant.
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