Hidehisa Watch

Jaffe gave several tips on how businesses can start to participate:

* Listen – make contribution to the conversation real, not just hype
* Respond – even if you are approached negatively, respond
* Join – position yourself to be invited to join the conversation
* Catalyze – empower customers to demonstrate your brand on your behalf
* Start – be a conversation conduit and start a conversation

One thing to keep in mind is that it is important that companies are transparent and honest with the communities they are interacting with. The objective of a conversation is not to trick customers into performing some task or marketing outcome, but to be actively involved with the community as a participant: listening, sharing and interacting.

In order to be effective at “joining the conversation”, Jaffe listed some things a company shouldn’t be:

* Fake – be transparent in your communications
* Manipulative – be open, don’t try to fool other participants
* Controlling – understand that you can’t control everything all of the time
* Dominating – the world doesn’t operate solely on your terms, allow others room to talk
* Avoiding – marketing is no longer a spectator sport, you must be active and participate