In this podcast, Evans also talks about the relationship between social media and CRM, and the impact social media will have on wireless technology, known as the digital swarm.

Whether you are a chief information officer or a chief marketing officer, you need to know how to leverage technology, especially social media, to understand how customers perceive your brand both positively and negatively, and what changes you need to make to your products to get more positive responses. You have the challenge of influencing 1,000s of daily online conversations you can’t control. After all, these aren’t your conversations. Dave Evans, a social media strategist and author of Social Media Marketing – an Hour a Day, says that you need to create an external social media experience that your customers will talk about in a way that invokes others to buy your products. He adds, “This is a big change from asking your advertising agency to change the message because customers’ aren’t getting it."

Evans’s social media strategy firm, Digital Voodoo, has helped many well-known companies come to grips with the impact of social media, and to recommend changes to their brand, product, or service to position it for success using external social media. Take the work Evan’s firm did for Meredith Publishing, which produces well-known magazines such as Parents, Better Homes and Gardens, and More. His firm created a strong engagement between Meredith’s individual print and online subject subscribers via the content discussions which they engaged. He says, “We gauged success in terms of page views –the base line indicator for publishers– and the size of the community as it grew over time.”

Evan’s following as a social media marketing strategist caught the eye of John Wiley & Sons. He was asked to write a book to fit into Wiley’s An Hour a Day series. Unlike other social media marketing books, Evans’  book provides a daily plan for how you can approach social media both strategically and tactically. For example, in one exercise, he tells you to go to IBM’s blog and read about the policies for selecting bloggers. He says, “If you don’t have the right social media strategy, you’ll wander all over the place. On the other hand, having the strategy right doesn’t mean you can turn the job over to the operational side of your business and say, ‘Now go to do this.’ The book allows you to select the things you want to work on.”

Bio
As a strategy director for integrated communications for GSD&M, Dave Evans gained extensively advertising experience working with clients, such as Southwest Airlines, AARP, Wal-Mart, PGA TOUR, Dial, and Chili's. Before GSD&M, Evan worked with Progressive Insurance Company as a product manager, and a systems analyst for the Voyager deep space exploration program with Jet Propulsion Laboratories/NASA.

In 1994, he cofounded Digital Voodoo to provide strategic marketing services for clients wanting to tap the power of the social Web. In 2005, he cofounded HearThis.com, a podcasting service firm focused on social media and marketing.

He holds a BS in physics and mathematics from the State University of New York/College at Brockport. He has served on the Advisory Board with ad:tech and the Measurement and Metrics Council with WOMMA. He is a columnist for ClickZ, an e-zine about social media.

Resources
Social Media Marketing An Hour A Day: Dave Evans - Online Marketing Blog
socStardom2: Social Media Marketing with Dave Evans - SlideShare
Getting Started With Social Media - ClickZ

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

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