What do I get from talking to you?

Jay Deragon of The Relationship Economy asks What Is Off Line Social Media? and comes up with some really great answers:

The essence of any good conversation, off line or online, is relevant and relative to listening, learning and applying value for the benefit of those engaged. Selling is a relational process and should be aimed at understanding a prospects need before you try and sell them something that doesn’t fulfill the need. Marketing, on the other hand, is a process of leveraging mass media to attract an audience of prospective buyers. Marketing and selling a two distinctively different processes. One focuses on building a relationship based on value while the other focuses on delivering a message to a large audience.

Deragon is completely right. If you can provide

• Relevance
• Listening
• Engagement
• Value
• and Information

then you’ll have one potentially very strong social media campaign. And by “social media campaign” what I really mean is conversation, because in today’s world the first question everyone is asking is, “What do I get from talking to you?”

The only way to answer that question is to join the conversation