By Allan Maurer

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, NC –“Social media is a cocktail party,” says Jim Tobin, founder and CEO of Ignite Social Media, an agency that helps companies get into the conversation effectively. And as the subtitle of Tobin’s new book on the subject says, you already know the rules of social media marketing. Here’s a clue: be interesting, or your cocktail party group will evaporate and find someone who is.

Doing that means engaging social media users with dynamic, interesting content, not the traditionally sanitized messages of public relations and advertising, Tobin says.

Tobin’s just published book “Social Media is a Cocktail Party,” explains some of what his young company is doing, and he will also be one of the many Internet gurus participating in TechJournal South’s upcoming Internet Summit in Chapel Hill, NC, Nov. 19 (see: http://www.internetsummitevent.com/ for more information. Fewer than 100 seats remain available for the event and a sell-out is expected.)

Tobin tells TechJournal South that the idea for ignite came about because he saw an opportunity.

Separate noise from effective tactics
“I saw all of this powerful Web 2.0 stuff that’s powerful for developing search engine traffic and connecting with brands. Looking around, I asked, ‘who is helping these brands, some of them 40 years old, separate the noise from powerful marketing tactics. No one was. I thought, this needs a new type of company.”

Tobin, a partner with Brogan & Partners, put up some money and Marcie Brogan, CEO of Brogan & Partners also invested. He launched Ignite in July 2007, incubated in the Brogan offices where it employs 11 people. The company has a couple of job openings on its Web site.

“We’re not a PR firm, advertising agency, Web development or SEO firm, although we have elements of all of those,” says Tobin. “We keep up with all the social media tools and tactics and separate out those that can be applied to solving business objectives.”

We blog every day
Tobin’s own blog on using social media for marketing for Ignite has produced the same sort of results for his own company as those Ignite sells. “We blog every day,” he says.

“We give away information on how to do this, share case studies others have done and provide a tremendous amount of information on social marketing. So we have a reputation in certain communities.” It also comes up number one if you search Google for social media agencies.

“Our content is fairly interesting, so others link to it,” Tobin says, which means it benefits from the much heralded “viral effect” of the Internet.

That leads to customers. “Intel called us,” says Tobin. An Intel exec told him, “I’ve read your blog for six months.” Tobin says,

Challenge: be interesting
“We never had a prior conversation, but he noticed us and when he needed it, called us.” So, in a sense, he actually had been having a conversation with the Intel exec, just like the book says.

One of the challenges in his business is getting traditional marketers and brands to forget about the sanitized, lawyer-vetted and dull messages they’ve been pumping out for decades and ask how they can add value to an online community’s conversation.

“The challenge is being interesting. So many of us for so many years forgot to be interesting. There is often very little interest in the messages we produce.”

How is that done? For one of Ignite’s clients, Nature Made, which sells vitamin supplements, it meant engaging social media and its own sites with health-related content that did not outright promote Nature Made brands.

“A site like Café Mom, where people are already talking about those issues is happy to have experts share information on how to eat healthy and find time to exercise. It’s fully disclosed that the person submitting the content works for Nature Made, but the content he’s sharing is not promotional. There is a big brand benefit to that.”

The company has several clients now on Facebook pages and groups, “Which is sort of obvious,” says Tobin, while others are now using blogging effectively. “That’s a great way to have a conversation with powerful search engine results,” he says.

A company that blogs effectively can load up search engine results, effectively blocking outside noise, which may be negative, he suggests, citing the example of Sun Microsystems.

Aggressively using social media
“It is a brand aggressively using social media,” Tobin says. Sun’s thousands of bloggers have posted 90,000 items to the Web with a simple guideline: you know what’s secret. Don’t talk about that.

But when someone searches for some tech issue with Sun, “You’ve got 90,000 chances that someone at Sun has provided an answer. Sun Microsystems owns the search results on Google for its name. They have it blocked out with highly indexed, relevant content.”

Ignite either creates platforms for the brand—Web sites, blogs, a widget—or does online community development—engaging users where they are, on niche and mainstream social networks such as Facebook or Café Mom.

The whole idea, says Tobin, “Is a return to a more comfortable way of interacting with people. If you’re at a cocktail party and all you’re doing is self promotion, people will just drift away. Now we have to contribute to the conversation and have something to add.”

Ignite isn’t looking for funding. Tobin says it has already landed an impressive list of clients and turns away about half the requests for proposals it gets now. Its clients include Intel, United Way, Comcast, and the United Auto Workers, among others.

Be sure to check out Tobin’s informative blog on his company’s Web site.

On the Web: www.ignitesocialmedia.com

 

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