by Christian Bayley

www.olivestudio.com

I recently sat down with Joe Reger, social media guru and founder/ceo of dNeero a social network conversation igniting toolset – to discuss the evolution of social media.

CB: Thank you Joe for taking the time to speak with us. Can you tell our readers a little bit about what you do and your background.

JR: I’ve been a technology entrepreneur for close to 15 years starting with early web development, flowing through the exciting hyper-funded dot com bubble and now growing in the social media realm.  My favorite project to date is dNeero.com which helps companies start conversations with bloggers.

CB:  What are the biggest trends happening in social media right now?

JR: The biggest trend we see right now is simply mainstreaming.  Celebrities like Lance Armstrong and Oprah have brought Twitter to the masses.  Facebook has shown enormous growth away from geeks as evidenced by many of our aunts and uncles rocking status updates.  More and more we’re seeing that being part of social media sites isn’t something done by the youngsters or by elders just to learn what it’s all about… it’s simply become a part of people’s lives. (As it should be, btw.) And this is a big shift because it lowers the hurdle for companies of all sizes to get involved.  No longer can a company that makes propeller blades claim that nobody on Twitter cares about propellers.

CB: What should a company/brand looking to participate in social media watch out for?

JR: Anything that removes the company/brand from the interaction with people.

The goal of social media is to remove layers of bureaucracy, not add them.

There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing social media work, even content creation, but they have to deeply involve people from the company on a daily basis.  And that involvement should be fun… it shouldn’t be a daily deathmarch down 355 Twitter @replies wherein everyone needs a response.

Oh, and lawyers… watch out for them… manage them as a single part of the process, not the gatekeepers to all communication.  Realize that there is risk involved and listen to what they have to say but don’t let their risk highlighting deter you from doing what you know is right… connecting with your users, customers, friends, etc.

CB:  What inspires you?

JR: When I was a kid I wrote my first computer programs and was just thrilled to see a computer doing complex things that I hadn’t 100% predicted.  That got me into physics in high school and college where I was fascinated with huge computer simulations… again, computers doing things I hadn’t predicted.

In the early days of the web I loved watching my server logs to see sites we had built get hit from all corners of the globe.  When I built a blogging platform my users inspired me by sharing more of their lives than I ever thought possible.  With dNeero widgets embedded in 1.2 million urls I’m inspired by the change that our users are making happen.  For me there’s something magical about closing my eyes and imagining the thousands of people chatting about things while making server connections back to us.

The other thing that inspires me is the modest goal of world peace.  I saw a documentary many years ago where they swapped members of Palestinian and Israeli families and then followed them as they went about their lives.

Hating each other early on, they quickly became friends.  This happened because they started to see each other as people.  First through information sharing “you like girls too!?!?”  Which bred understanding and led to tolerance for the other’s views.  Social media gets people to share… to learn about each other.  This leads to tolerance between people at the grassroots level.  Which leads to political pressure to change policy at the global level.  Social media is exponentially better at creating this force than the printing press was… and we’ve all seen what the printing press has accomplished.  It’ll still take time, likely generations… but social media has a huge role to play in world peace.

CB:  It seems like the entire space is at a bit of a tipping point right now.

. .what does the social media industry have to do over the next 18 months to solidify this as a legitimate (and ultimately monetized) channel?

JR: Monetization models are something close to our heart at dNeero.com.  For two years now we’ve been working hard, constantly tweaking, to find the right balance of money and inspiration that’ll work in social media.  Money can’t simply be dumped onto social media… it undermines credibility.  A banner ad for Honda that appears on my site in no way argues that I care about Honda.  So social media monetization models need to work with participants and companies to find ways that each can benefit.  With dNeero companies ask a set of questions which bloggers respond to, posting their answers to their blog.  Bloggers earn a small amount and everything is done with full disclosure.  We’ve also seen some very interesting models involving charity.

In the end, any model that succeeds will have to merge the interests of companies/brands with the interests of social media participants.  It’s harder than it sounds right now because we don’t have the answer.  But once the first billion is made off of a model we’ll all think it was dead obvious. (And we’ll all kick ourselves in the pants because it was some 19 year old punk that figured it out!)