In traditional marketing the focus is solely on results. Social Marketing is more focused on the process.

There are many, but Neville Hobson and I (Chris Heuer) discuss a few in this 18 minute conversation about Twitter following policies. This deserves a blog post, but that’s not possible now, so if the topic is of interest to you, listen in on our discussion about why it is not necessary for you to follow everyone who follows you. It is a wonderful symbolic gesture, but ultimately the equality should be in the respect we have for allowing each other to use the tools as we see fit for our own personal reasons – to presccribe how someone else MUST use Twitter is not appropriate. Ultimately, whether or not you do so is a trade off between two different priorities. You can receive signals that have greater value/meaning and thereby maximize your return on time invested in the Tweetstream; or you can follow everyone who follows you and reap the benefits of the ever expanding network effect. In that many of the people I know with exceptionally high followers have great difficulty being genuinely involved in the conversation regularly, and/or set up tools that let them privately filter it down to the inbound @username search feed and a group of people who they really are interested in listening too. Point being, use it as you see fit, just don’t hurt anyone. If you run into spammers, block them. If people are unknowingly misusing the service you might be able to help them use it more effectively – help them find their real personality and join the conversation. Or do nothing. Even though it may suck that people are out there doing things we think are inappropriate, as long as its not causing direct harm to us or others, why does it matter that I am not able to follow everyone who follows me? After all, as I have been saying, humans really don’t scale – our time and our attention and our energy are our most valuable resources.

I (Chris Heuer) had a chance to help the good folks in Salt Lake City kickoff their local group earlier today. Some great people there – wish I was there in person. Am so lucky I get to do stuff like this and share our vision with others – thank you all for listening and helping carry it forward.

In this quick overview of the history of the club and an introduction to current endeavours, we give a good overview of what the club is about, why it started and where we are headed. I also get a chance to give some advice about what is one of the most important things to focus on in launching a new chapter/group. The answer is something I have been thinking about a lot lately – back to the origins of BrainJams, the idea of bringing peple from different backgrounds together and not letting anyone ‘clique’ or industry be the sole owners of the conversation at Social Media Club.