It’s been said that content is king. If content is king, then dare I say that community is queen.

Whatever your brand, chances are you have a thriving community. So, when you think about your community, do you think primarily about clients or consumers? Brand advocates and influencers? What about the people who have yet to try your product or service, those who are still on the fence and not quite ready to commit? Do you consider them a part of your community? If you don’t, you should. Depending on your brand, your community can be made up of clients, consumers, fans and those interested in learning more about what you have to offer. Don’t just spend time focusing on your brand’s influencers. Every member of your community is important and plays a vital role in the health and prosperity of your business.

Where Does Community Live

You community doesn’t have to, and probably won’t, reside solely on your website or blog. Your community can be, and most likely is, spread far and wide across various social networks. Sure your community will be on website and blog but they can also be in social spaces like Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, forums and even your mailing list and newsletter. Your community members want to connect – not just with you but with each other. Therefore, give them a place to congregate, cooperate and communicate collectively.

Community is Powerful

Your community members are an important part of your business. They can share experiences, learn from one another, instruct and inform. It’s not unusual to see community members offering advice or assistance before a brand has an opportunity to respond. It’s also pretty exciting to see a strong community of loyal members come to the defense of a brand (Maker’s Mark ambassadors are a great example of this), but that’s what community is all about. During good times and the not-so-good times, if you take care of your community, your community will take care of you.  Your community is powerful. Chris Brogan says this about community “It’s not static. It’s not single-minded. It’s not an unending resource. It’s not self-sustaining. It’s not orderly.” You have to nurture your community. Give more than you take (free content, covering topics your community is interested in, is a great start) Ask questions, let them ask questions, listen and take the time to get to know the people in your community.

Community is Ever Evolving

Your community will change. There will be times when your community members are more active and times when they’re not. These relationships will have an ebb and flow . Your connection to the members of your community will evolve.  Just as you encouraged and cultivated the growth of your community, you must also be open enough to accept some of the changes you will experience within your community. Rachel Happe, Principal at The Community Roundtable, says “The ability to support the waning of a relationship is just as important as the ability to support the growth of one. Why? If you make it comfortable for someone to leave you behind as they move forward, you make it comfortable for them to re-engage you later.” It’s a natural part of relationships so it makes sense that it will be a natural part of your relationship with your community members as well.

Do you think community is queen? How in-tune are you with your community? Has your community changed over time? Let us know, in the comments below.

Trish Forant is a Community Manager at Radian6. She blogs about social media, sunny South Florida and her ever-growing menagerie. Connect with her on Twitter at @Dayngr.

Last night, the world learned about Steve Jobs passing. I couldn’t possibly write anything about him that hasn’t already been said by someone else more elegantly or eloquently, nor would I attempt to do that here.  Jobs and Apple changed computing and the technology world as we know it. Simply put, he was a visionary. Because of that, his passing (and the legacy he leaves behind) got me thinking about the future of business and how social media relates.

We’re All Pioneers

When it comes to social media, we’re forging our own paths. There’s no doubt we have plenty of great leaders showing us how it could be done and maybe even how it should be done. But there’s nothing to say that you can’t do it a little differently – handle social media for your business in a way that best suits your business’ personality. Think outside the box. How would you use social media for your business if there were no one to tell you that you couldn’t do it that way? When you think about which platforms your business will focus its social media efforts around, don’t forget that there’s more to social media than just Facebook and Twitter. In other words, if your consumers or clients love video, consider those outposts as well. Then, go out and make great videos that really show people why they’d want to do business with you!

Everyone Can Contribute To the Social Enterprise

In Seth Godin’s book, “Poke the Box” he asks “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” Do you remember? It doesn’t matter if you are the Founder and CEO or the new hire. You’ve got ideas and those ideas could very well help take your business to another level. Let’s say your call center is providing great customer service, how can you do the same or better, using social media? Use your imagination, brainstorm, be creative and experiment. I’m not suggesting you throw strategy out the window – just suggesting that you should expand your horizons and keep a very open mind throughout the process.

The Future

The future of your business is unwritten. Businesses are moving toward becoming more social – shifting into social enterprises. You can ignore change, embrace change or create change. Are you going to spend your future keeping up with the competition or blazing new trails? It is really up to you.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” – Steve Jobs  [The Wall Street Journal, 1993]

What wonderful things will your business do, using social media?

Trish Forant is a Community Manager at Radian6. She’s a mom, a writer and she enjoys helping people connect. You can connect with her on Twitter at @Dayngr.

There is often some hesitation that comes with the concept of becoming a Social Enterprise. For instance, when you’re working toward a one-to-one customer experience and focusing on the relationship, there is the social expectation to be available 24/7.  In this connected online world where everything moves a mile a minute, it can be overwhelming to think about the amount of opportunities you open yourself up to by being social. The expectation of being available all the time is just one of many assumptions.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In fact, social media is not the only medium with set expectations and mindsets.

Chris Brogan has written some great posts about email management. He brings up the points of effectively getting your email answered. Much of these tips can be used in the social side of things when it comes to blog posts, tweets, etc. There is, however, another side that we all have to keep in consideration as we click send: Our mindset. If companies and consumers can adjust their mindsets (even slightly in a few places) it will help everyone create and maintain stronger relationships.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when engaging and being engaged.

Human response time
We’d all love to have a speed reader to go through our inboxes every morning, but unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen. Do your best as a business to set expectations that are achievable. On the customer side of things, remember that the people behind that brand are just human! A little understanding can go along way to create a strong relationship.

Respect each others’ time
In these times when we are all constantly plugged in, it’s very easy to forget that just because someone is online at 9 pm doesn’t necessarily mean they are working at that time. In the social realm where personal and professional accounts and actions can be blurry at the best of times, keep in mind that some companies you work with have after-hour emails & phone numbers for you to contact in an emergency. On the company side, make sure to have this information available for your clients at all times.

Just be upfront
With your busy schedule, keeping up with emails & tweets could be the last thing on your plate. If it is, be upfront about it. Even a short message to say, “Let me get back to you in X amount of time” can go a long way. As a customer, you can work with businesses and give them a heads up as to the importance and details of your issue. A tweet saying, “I’m having issues” can be vague and but something like, “I need help within the next hour for a major system issue” is a lot more descriptive and sets timelines.

What ways do you deal with the social expectation? What are the roadblocks you’ve hit in dealing with companies or clients? What ways do you think you could better manage?

Genevieve Coates is a Community Manager at Radian6. She’s a data geek who loves to talk so feel free to shout to @genevievecoates.

You’ve had a long, exhausting week and as you’re getting ready to shut your computer down for the evening you notice you’ve got new mail. Try as you might to resist, you decide to check them out, only to realize that you’ve got a handful of requests to connect from the same person across several social media networks. An even closer look reveals they are from a guy you chatted with briefly during a Twitter chat. You don’t really know this person yet, but already he’s looking to take it to the next level. To make matters that much more awkward, there isn’t even a note attached as to who he is or why he wants to connect.

Just because you’ve connected with someone a few times on a social network, doesn’t mean you really know that person. That takes time and doesn’t always happen if you’re limited to screen time.

We All Do It Differently

Each of us uses our social networks in a way that is unique to us – one man’s right is another man’s wrong. Some people add anyone and everyone to their public Twitter account while keeping their Facebook profile private, connecting only with close friends and family. There are so many variations on how public or private we can be across social networks that it’s nearly impossible to know everyone’s individual comfort level. Sometimes we have clues showing us how open or closed someone may be to connecting, but most of the time it is a guessing game that requires us to take some chances.

Beating the Odds

If you are interested in connecting with people across social networks without looking like a bit of a cyber-stalker, consider asking them if it’s alright to reach out to them on those particular networks. Let them know why you’re interested in connecting and if you haven’t been chatting with them long enough for them to know you well, give them a little information about yourself when you ask. Ask for what you want and you just might get it.

How Soon Is Too Soon?

We’ve heard that social media is a cocktail party, so if you were at a cocktail party and you just met someone would you follow them home? Probably not. Though some people might be flattered at the gesture and even find it endearing, many might be creeped out. The same could hold true for social media. This is not to say that you can’t connect soon after meeting, but it’s probably a better idea to take some time to get to know people before you reach out to connect with them across social networks.

Perhaps a better way to connect with the people you would like to get to know better is to invite them to connect with you instead. A simple status update, with a link, letting friends and followers know that you’re interested in connecting with them on Google+ (or your network of choice) is usually all it takes to start connecting the dots.

What’s Your Motivation?

The reasons you’d like to connect across platforms should really be about building relationships and providing value. Are there benefits to this? Absolutely! Ask yourself why it is you’re connecting and be honest with yourself. Is it a numbers game or are you truly interested in getting to know the people you are reaching out to? Being authentic is an integral part of social etiquette so make sure that transitions over to your social media efforts as well.

Is there such a thing as connecting too soon? How comfortable are you in connecting with people you’ve just met? Do you connect with the same core group of people across multiple platforms or do you have a different community for each social network you’re on?

This month we are discussing social media etiquette, a topic you’ll want to be familiar with if you plan to engage across your social networks. We’ve shared how everything you need to know about social media etiquette you learned in preschool, the importance of tact and diplomacy along with why a simple please and thank you go quite a long way. Now, let’s think about our social circles and how we handle them.

Social Circles

Social circles are the hot topic now that Google+ has made its debut but they’ve always been an area of contention for many. Often, social media circles can be a bit like the cliques you remember in high school. Back then it was the cool kids, the geeks, the drama club, etc. In social media it’s the A-List and the influencers. If your social circle online is a large one, there is a good possibility there are people in it that you don’t know as well as others, some perhaps not at all. Yet, you are connected to these people through a follow or friend request. Who are they? What was your motivation for connecting with them? Were you merely reciprocating the follow or were you genuinely interested in getting to know that person and what they had to share with you?

Geoff Livingston has shared his thoughts on the topic in his post about the A-List conversation and Chris Brogan recently discussed reciprocal behavior in social networks and shared some of the responses he received when he asked people in his inner circle what their take was on it – both are an interesting read. As social media shifts gears from being in the new media category to being more mainstream and accepted, your social circles will grow and how you choose to handle them will be as personal a decision as who you have in them.

Don’t Be Exclusive, Be Inclusive

Everybody wants to feel included. But, the truth is, many of us jump on Twitter, Facebook or our social network of choice and just interact with that select group of friends with whom we feel the most connected. It’s natural and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, consider being more inclusive rather than exclusive. Make a point to review your friends/follower lists frequently. Set some time aside each week to manage your following/follower ratio on social sites like Twitter. It’s ok to step outside your comfort zone and broaden your horizons when it comes to connecting. Each person that took the time to connect with you was interested in you for some reason. Consider investing in that relationship, everyone has something to offer and not everyone you connect with has to be like-minded. Remember, diversity breeds inspiration.

Be sure you are reaching out to people you haven’t connected with yet. One way you can do this is to regularly invite new followers/friends to reach out to you. Make it easy for them by sharing the best ways they can connect with you. You can build that information into your bio or profile across your social networks so new friends and followers will be able to reach out to you easily. Of course, don’t forget to reach out to those whom you haven’t had a chance to communicate with for a while. When you do, you will make your new followers as well as your old friends, feel welcome and valued – and everyone likes that!

Help Connect

Connecting people together is another great way to be inclusive. Introduce like-minded individuals and help others build their networks both online and off whenever you can. An example of how you can do this online is by using email to connect two or more people together. Try leading in with something they have in common as a starting point for discussion. For example, “Bob, I’d like you to meet Joan. You both work in the nonprofit sector and have an interest in using social media for causes. I think the two of you will have plenty of ideas to share with each other.”  Naturally, you can do this directly on social networks like Hashable, Twitter and Facebook as well.

Just remember, if you are going to use email for introductions, be sure that you have permission to share the email addresses of the people you are connecting. These days, sharing an email address is like giving out a telephone number. Check to ensure both parties are on board before you share or you may find yourself committing a social media faux pas.

What steps to you take to make sure that your friend and followers feel included in your conversations?  What’s your take on reciprocal behavior in social networks? Did this article strike a chord or do you have a completely different point of view? Your thoughts and opinions on this topic are welcomed and we look forward to reading them in the comments below!

Phew! Can you believe it’s already March? Time has been flying by and we’ve been working furiously to get everything for Social 2011, our first annual user conference, wrapped up and ready for you! We won’t get too crazy with the user conference talk (more on that later), but if you’d like to get an idea of what you’re in for as an attendee, click on that link, hop on over to the event site and take a peek around — we’ve got all sorts of sessions planned to feed your social media curiosities and help you put theory into practice.

If you’ve got any questions about Social 2011 or just want to share your excitement about it, you know where to find us, but enough of that, we’ve got great reading material to share with you!

It’s been awhile since we’ve done a Fantastic Friday (Social Media) Reading post for you, but we’re back to it and feel like the five we rounded up today make up for our gap in content sharing. Today’s selection runs the gamut of topics, but all of it is useful. We stepped away from theory a bit and tried to give you some concrete tactical stuff to absorb and apply quickly. We hope you enjoy the reading, and if you’ve got any particular articles you’d like to share, please feel free to do so in the comments!

An Insider’s Guide to Social Media Etiquette, by Chris Brogan

If you’re doing the social media “thing” it’s almost impossible to do it and not have some of Chris Brogan’s sage marketing advice make its way into the mix. Mr. Brogan is well-known for his social media marketing acumen, and has shared a tiny bit of it in this post. No matter who you are or what you’re representing, online social networks have implicit behavior codes and participants have expectations for how people and brands should present themselves in these networks. In this post, Chris shares specific and easy tips for creating an inviting social media presence that your customers and community will want to pay attention to. How many of his tips are you already heeding?

The High Price of Free, by Deploying Volunteer Marketing Armies With Internal Social Media, by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund

When shaped well, the culture you create inside the walls of your company can and should reflect externally in your employees’ social media interactions. In this post by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund, authors of The NOW Revolution (Amber is also our VP of Social Strategy), give you just the method to foster an internal social media culture in which employees share their successes, questions and news on a closed, internal social network to create a living, breathing company history that will help shape external messaging.

Reaching Influencers In a New Way, by Emily Peterson of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence

Influence is a big thing in the world of social media. Finding and connecting with influential bloggers, Tweeters, YouTubers, you name it, is key to developing powerful word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. Mind you, connecting with these online influencers is not just about having an ongoing conversation with them over Twitter; sometimes you need to put a face to your name, and Emily Peterson shares how the Ogilvy 360DI team did just that, and gives you some tips for making those face-to-face moments successful.

Media Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, by Dorie Clark for Harvard Business Review

Facing the media can be a daunting task, especially nowadays, when a seemingly harmless statement can be misconstrued and spread across countless media outlets for the world to see, judge and ridicule. The stress level of media meetings spikes for executives, as they’re the backbones of their companies — all eyes are on them. While it’s impossible to predict how the media will interpret a C-Suiter’s comments, in this article Dorie Clark shares three basic mistakes many executives make when speaking with the media — and how they can be avoided.

Have more to share? Want to leave your thoughts about one of these articles? You know what to do!

Disclaimer: Some of the folks here are friends of ours and there’s a good chance we’ve worked with them in some sense or another. In light of that, we have to say we’re just sharing great writing today, with nothing else wrapped into that sharing. Enjoy!

If you’ll be in Boston for Enterprise 2.0, or if you’ll be local on the 24th for any reason, you aren’t going to want to miss our party, The Rockstars of Social CRM, hosted by Chris Brogan. The event will be held at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront on Wednesday, June 24th from 8PM to 11PM. RSVP on the Eventbrite page to reserve your spot!

But never fear if you can’t make it live – we’re live streaming the whole event as part of our new Twebinar format. Both events are free, and both are going to be an absolute blast. Sign up for the Twebinar on the Eventbrite page and we’ll email you simple login instructions next week.

Why Social CRM? You’ll hear more from us about that this week. But in short, Social CRM is the new dynamic in building long-term, fruitful relationships for your company. It’s a new way of approaching and cultivating customer relationships that’s focused on people instead of tools, collaboration instead of control, and valuable experiences instead of transactions.

During our fun and fast-paced panel discussion with some of the leading minds in this field, we’ll discuss how these new expectations in customer relationships are changing the game, and what role we as social communicators play in the evolution.
Join:

• Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs and author of ChrisBrogan.com
• Marcel Lebrun, CEO, Radian6
• Frank Eliason, Director of Digital Care, Comcast
• Paul Greenberg, Author of CRM at the Speed of Light, President of The 56 Group, LLC
• Brent Leary, Co-author of Barack 2.0 and Co-founder of CRM Essentials
• Michael Thomas, National President, CRM Association

And throughout the event, we’ll have drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and fun interviews with Chris Brogan live on the web. And after the brief discussion and some exciting announcements from Radian6, jam out and be your OWN rockstar with Rock Band 2 live on the big screen. (We’ll even take your song requests in advance. Just email us here and we’ll do our best to get your song so you can wow the crowd.)
We can’t wait to see you there, either live in Boston, or live on the web. Questions? Just let us know. See you in Boston!

I was eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation last week with some incredibly smart media makers, including Julien Smith, Chris Brogan, Hugh McGuire and Mitch Joel.

[Pause now to go and subscribe to Mitch's podcast and other brilliances over at Six Pixels of Separation. I'll wait.]

They were discussing the future of media and how, in particular, print publication and consumption of the written word is evolving in the face of social communication. Each of them was drawing on examples from their own experience about why they felt reading, writing, and publishing was changing, and how. Do listen to the episode; some amazing insights in there.

At the end of the show, Mitch put a challenge to the crew: stop talking in terms of “I” and start looking at things outside personal perspective. There’s interesting implications in that challenge.

Personal Perspective
That’s what we have to draw from. I can only make statements and observations about things from my perspective because, well, that’s the one I have.

I can *speculate* about what it might be like to look at something from a different point of view. But I’m not sure there’s a way to completely remove the personal lens. True objectivity, by the very nature of human intelligence, is impossible.

You can do everything possible to remove or downplay bias itself, but the fact is that every observation comes from a distinct and singular point of view, regardless of how well we attempt to level that difference. You can only consider what the view might look like through someone else’s eyes. You can never experience it for yourself.

The Value in Shifting Viewpoints
What I realized is that Mitch hit on something that’s been nagging at me for years in terms of the way we were taught to communicate as brands.

We characterize our brands in the terms in which we’d like others to see us. We craft a vision, or an idealized perspective of our brand, hoping that others might be influenced or intrigued by that viewpoint. Maybe see things our way. We even give them things like taglines, or brand attributes, or magic marketing terms.

But social communication and the power that companies now hold to capture the conversations around their brands changes all of that. Brands aren’t viewed from a singular viewpoint (they really never have been), and now that brand is a composite of everything. As David Alston is fond of saying, a brand is now the sum of *all* of the conversations that take place around it. Branding isn’t myopic any longer. And that multi-faceted perspective is searchable, shareable, and visible to the world at large.

So while I still think you can’t necessarily completely immerse yourself in someone else’s perspective, there are massive amounts of information out there today that allow you to at least *observe* and absorb that perspective, in the words of the people that impact and drive your brand.

Another reason listening is so important: hearing how the community is describing you, in their own unedited words, so you can learn from their perspective. As a brand, it’s the ultimate evolution from looking from the inside out, to seeing things from the outside in. Putting the illustration of your brand in the hands of the people that know it best: the people that interact with it every day. What insights that can give.

What say you?

Image credit: S.Su

First of all thanks to everyone who joined Chris Brogan and our lineup of social media experts for the first Twebinar on game changing moves – helping people establish new contacts/connections to further the conversation on social media’s use for business.  The response was, to put it mildly, overwhelming, and as many of you found out we ended up pushing the limits on the webinar platforms we were using and had to break up the event into two sessions.

As we mentioned, this was going to be an experiment in blending two technologies in order to hopefully enhance the online conference experience.  The experiment had three main objectives.

Free-for-all Networking – The primary goal was to introduce many of the registrants, especially those new to social media, to one of the most used social media networking and messaging tools, Twitter.  As part of this experiment it was our hope that the open nature of the messaging platform would facilitate connections between the speakers and the participants and amongst the participants themselves, before, during and after the event.  This was to be an improvement over the traditional webinar experience where participant connections could not happen during the event and certainly didn’t continue on afterward.  I believe this aspect of the experiment worked well.

Best-in-class Content – We also wanted to introduce people to some of the experts in the business, and to hear what they thought were some of the best case studies to reference when doing business in social media.  It was meant to be a combination of both new and better-known examples primarily for a “new to social media” audience but hopefully a good refresher for those who were more experienced.  The aim was to provide a breadth of opinions and to put faces to the Twitter handles of many of these experts.  From the feedback we received again I think this was deemed a success.

Mashing Technologies – Finally, the blending of the two technologies simultaneously.  For many, yours truly included, it was, at times, sensory overload.  As some of you pointed out, this is the essense of today’s 140 character world.  To others, it became overwhelming and with the need to switch between screens, a bit distracting when trying to take in the video presentations.

We’ve begun to review the feedback in detail now looking for ways to improve the format for the next Twebinar coming up on Tuesday, July 22, at 2pm EDT.  We’ve been analyzing the tweets as well as the various blog posts that occurred after the event.  Here is a collection of the posts if you are interested.  We also held a “plurkshop”, an impromptu session on Plurk, asking for feedback on the Twebinar from those who attended.  To see the plurkshop feedback thread please go here.

Overall, here are some of the themes pulled out of the feedback that we will try to address in the next Twebinar on July 22 at 2pm EDT.  Can we….

• put the Twitter discussion stream in the same window as the video stream?
• have a separate # tag for the technical issues questions, and one for the discussion?
• have more live elements, including Q&A, during the Twebinars?
• leave the names of the speakers up on the screen during their interviews and include their Twitter handle?
• try to not have a limit on the number of attendees (avoiding the two sessions)?
• recommend that people avoid using shared WIFI connections that may not have the bandwidth requirements for the video stream?
• have fewer speakers/go deeper with some of the speakers on the topics?
• see the discussion happening without the need for refreshing?
• have more separation/structure between the video and the discussion?
• look into other platforms to carry the discussion other than Twitter?
• not say the word “game changing” so much?
• have access to the video afterwards for reviewing the content we missed?

We’ll be looking to make tweaks to the next Twebinar using this valuable feedback.  Stay tuned for more.

And for those that happened to miss the first Twebinar we now have a link to the video available here.  This was recorded “as is” during the first broadcast so unfortunately it includes 5 minutes of dead air at the beginning (which I hear we can’t edit out) so please grab a hold of the video timeline and zip forward to about the 5 minute mark if you want to watch it from the true start.

The first experiment in mashing up Twitter and a video webinar has been completed.  And while there are certainly ways to continue to improve for the upcoming twebinars in July and August, I believe the experience was a positive one for the majority involved.

The theme of the first Twebinar was around game changing moves in social media – generally referring to various examples of how organizations used social media to help them be successful.

The twebinar tried to accomplish many things but primarily aimed to give those, new to social media, a chance to jump into the game with both feet along side veterans in the biz.  And while moving hundreds of people into the social media pool at the same time certainly had its challenges I believe most participants got used to the temperature once they were in and began to see its potential.

The experiment also proved another point – online word-of-mouth is alive and well in the various channels of social media.  Website traffic spiked dramatically yesterday (as seen below) and the Twebinar site was visited by 71 countries from across the globe.  In the end, over 1500 people registered for the twebinar – a number that totally amazed and humbled all of us.

The intensity of the discussion before, during and after the two twebinars also resonated strongly within the halls of Twitter and a number of blogs.  Below is the buzz around Twebinars  (tracked using Radian6 over a 14 day period) versus the discussion of megabrand, Starbucks, and Democratic Presidential hopeful, Obama.  A rather large spike in relative terms fueled by discussion and WOM.

And the reviews and feedback has been very helpful.  I’ve captured an ongoing list of Twebinar-related posts on our Radian6 delicio.us page.

Again, thank you to all who participated, to the speakers, to the host Chris Brogan & CrossTech Media, to all who shared the news on their blogs/post/email lists (SNCR, WOMMA, etc…) and for everyone who helped put this together behind the scenes.  It wouldn’t have been what it was without the help of all of you.

Video of the event will be posted shortly and the registration link for the next Twebinar in July will be up by the first of the week.  Have a great weekend – it’s been quite a week.

June 26 at 2pm EST kicks off the social media summer series hosted by Chris Brogan and brought to those registering FREE by Radian6.  Interviews with over 30 of social media’s leaders, this series will explore various aspects of social media as they relate to the corporation.  The first topic is called “Game Changing Moves – Doing Business with Social Media.”  Here’s a summary of what will be covered during a video interview packed 1 hour session.

“How do companies like Boeing, Comcast, Sony, Yamaha, The American Red Cross, Sea World, General Motors, and Nike use social media to change the way they’re doing business? What can they teach you about building community, marketing, product development, and customer service? Radian6 and CrossTech Media have partnered on an incredible journey into how businesses can benefit from social media, and you’re invited along for the ride…”

And we are trying something new as well.  We are introducing the Twebinar – the mashup between Twitter and a webinar. Users don’t just watch from the sidelines but join in on the conversation before, during and after each Twebinar. And they connect with not only the host but every social media leader featured in the program.

It’s going to be quite a summer.