Transcript -

JOHNA BURKE:  Hello, this is Johna Burke with BurrellesLuce, and I’m here at the Bulldog Media Relations Summit.  I’m joined by Paul.

Paul, will you please introduce yourself?

PAUL GILLIN:  Hi, I’m Paul Gillin. I am a writer, speaker and a consultant in social media.

BURKE:  And, Paul, you were just on the panel about social media and the future of social media marketing, and I think that a lot of the viewers here are probably still just getting started or maybe don’t feel like they have the traction that they need in this space.  What are some tips that they can apply tomorrow as far as making their programs better?

GILLIN:  Well, first of all, I would get–if you’re not on Facebook, which almost the entire world is at this point, be sure you’re on Facebook, be sure you’re on Twitter and you have the basic groundings in those areas.  I think the important thing is to listen.  The first thing you want to do is listen.  And for that, become familiar with Twitter search.  Start looking for your company name or the names of your clients on Google.  But also become familiar with some other search engines, such as Boardwatch.  These are—or Twitter search.  These are ways to see what people are saying about you in forums that aren’t necessarily being indexed by Google. 

Build a dashboard. And, I mean, go to–go to Google and become familiar with Google Reader and learn how to take the feeds that are coming in from search.twitter.com and from a lot of Google alerts are available through a–through a feed reader. You can also go to a site like Social Mention, which indexes strictly social market–social networking areas, and you can create feeds that you can capture in Google Reader, and you can sort of build yourself a dashboard so you can see, any time you look at your dashboard, the latest information about what people have been saying about you and your company.

So I’d say spend, you know, a couple of months really getting comfortable with listening and understanding how the back and forth works, the way people talk to each other, and some of the–some of the behavioral standards of social media, and then, you know, dive in as a participant, but only once you understand how people really like to interact with each other.

BURKE:  Thank you so much.  And where can people find you in social media?

GILLIN:  Well, thank–I’m glad you asked.  I am @pgillin, that’s P-G-I-L-L-I-N, as in Nancy, on Twitter.  And I’m at gillin.com.  And I’m also pgillin on Facebook.  So I sense a pattern there.

BURKE:  Great.  Thank you so much.

GILLIN:  Thank you, Johna.