Grant Leboff:    If we talk about brand equity and we talk about this idea of being influential by being connected and networked – and that’s going to be increasingly important, perhaps, for career prospects and climbing up the latter and those kind of things – what would your advice be to individuals now who, perhaps, feel a bit daunted by this technology and haven’t grown up with this?

What would you suggest they do to, perhaps, just help them along in building some of this equity? Where do they start? Because I find people are on Twitter now and on Facebook – and let’s assume for a moment that most of the people watching this probably are – but probably not utilising it in the way they should be. So what would you suggest, just as easy stepping stones?

David Taylor:    Well the thrust of the book, which you can apply equally to a company or individual is; What do you want to get out of it? So if you decide you want to do social media, what do you want to use it for? You must have some form of reason. Even if you personally wanted to use Facebook, you will have to have an understanding [of it]. You might want to use Facebook so you can look at your friends, but you don’t want to post. You may decide that Facebook is a way to tell all your friends, everyday, what you’re doing every hour. So it’s still some form of an objective.

Some people will be on LinkedIn, and they are on Linkedin because they want to grow their personal brand equity within whatever position they’ve got, whether they’re an employee or whether they’ve got their own consultancy business. So there is always this feeling that you must have an objective.

So to answer your question, if someone wants to really understand how they can best use it, the key thing is, what would they want to get out of it? So if you’ve got someone, lets says for example, you’re a small café in a town and you think I want to find out about Facebook, I want to find out about social media or Twitter etc., A good way is to listen, to be aware of what’s going on. So maybe go onto Facebook and follow some other cafés. What are they doing? How are they doing it? How does that work? How do they build it up? Then formulate a strategy round that. Say OK, it clearly works for some cafés, I’ve seen what they do. Maybe even contact those cafes and say, I’m just interested, what is this meaning to you?

It’s the plan, the list, and then analyse.

They can then decide that they want to engage. One of the interesting things we found out when writing the book, speaking to Twitter, was that 40% of people on Twitter do not tweet and they never will tweet. They’re using it as a listening device. I think for people who are a little bit uncertain, a little bit scared about being online, effectively you can stalk. It’s not a very nice word but you’re cyber stalking effectively, but it’s public. So you can look at LinkedIn, look at Facebook pages, maybe ‘like’ a few pages and see what’s going on with them, and just follow. Look at YouTube, look at some corporate videos on YouTube. You will then get some ideas and then think; that’s interesting, I would never have thought that an accountant could be using YouTube but there’s an accountant in – say, Chelmsford – which is doing brilliantly. I never knew that. So in the end, you’re building up your understanding, you’re building up that trust in it, and you think OK, I now feel ready.

So it’s the planning, the listening and the analysing which – incidentally, is what businesses never did –  they just engaged. And it’s like saying ‘I want to be on stage’ and you get on stage and you have no idea what you are going to say. You were so desperate to be on that stage and then you’re standing there in front of an audience and you don’t know what to say now. So thinking about the whole planning phase is really important.

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