After BlogOn, I think I see the light -- let me shine it on your brand.

As you know, I attended the first BlogOn event last week at UC Berkeley. I like to think I'm on the leading edge of or within shouting distance of most of the cool, new stuff floating on the Internet sea. But I had very little clue what blogging was all about, let alone the bigger category of social media.

I drank the Kool-Aid, slogged through the boot camp and even launched my own blog in the Oakland airport Friday night. And after digesting what I learned and experienced, I've realized social media isn't at all what I thought it was.

Oddly enough, there's good news here for brands. So in the spirit of being a good Interactive marketing citizen, I would like to share five things you need to know about social media.

1. It's not just blogging.

Far from it, although blogs (in case you still don't know what they are, they're Web logs, online stream of consciousness diaries or journals) comprise the biggest part of this new fascination. A year ago, there were 30,000 to 40,000 blogs out there. Today there are more than 3.2 million searched daily by aggregators. And there are probably a million more that are private.

Social media also includes social networking sites like LinkedIn, Orkut, Ryze and others. In my experience, I keep getting invited to join new ones by the same people who invited me to join the old ones, and that's not terribly productive.

Oddly enough, plenty of folks are finding jobs through these connections -- although do be careful about including odd things like sexual preferences in your LinkedIn bio when you're job hunting. It happens more often than you think.

And social media includes Wiki, which is basically a collaborative blog on steroids. It differs from IM in that Wiki isn't a real-time chat.

2. Bloggers aren't just "guys who don't date."

In fact, it's a lucrative, highly attractive bunch of consumers. Bloggers are the early adopters, the top 10 to 15 percent of markets. Bloggers tend to be socially aware, politically active and have plenty to say. For proof, look no farther than the party nominating conventions.

Now granted, there are a lot of 17-year-old girls (or guys pretending to be) who are blogging, but that's not the sweet spot. It's the regular, loyal readers. Check out Henry Copeland's Blogads.com to get a taste of how many of these high-end consumers the top blogs attract -- and how little it costs to reach them when they're seriously engaged.

Bloggers are the next wave of influencers. Consumers trust other consumers -- especially friends (whether they actually know the others or simply feel they do because they follow their blogs) more than they trust anything you have to say as a brand.

3. There is a business model for social networking, but it's not what you think.

I agree with Dan Gillmor, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, who told me at lunch and later told the audience that in the end, social media will become a set of tools, not businesses.

But there are business models here. They're not ad-based models, although if I end up getting my blog to a point where it attracts enough regular readers, I can make a few hundred or a couple thousand bucks a month and I'll be very happy -- my other hobbies cost me money.

No, it's not ads. One business model is in infrastructure. Sell people the tools they need to blog, to connect or to build Wiki workspaces.

The other is in solutions. There's plenty of VC money out there for companies who have big, workable ideas for helping companies use Wiki and social networking to connect workgroups, sales forces and to do CRM.

4. Social networking can be incredibly powerful free research for your brand.

If you're not searching the blogosphere every day for mentions about your brand or your company, you're losing ground. Go to Feedster, FeedDemon, Bloglines and other aggregators and blog search tools I described in my Boot Camp piece and start getting a daily dump of everything bloggers and their readers are saying about your brand, your products, even you.

It's free. It's powerful. And it'll tell you a helluva lot more than any focus group ever will.

5. Your brand needs to be blogging. Don't believe me? Just ask Microsoft.

Microsoft has never been universally loved by its multimillion-geek developer community. But it's better loved now than it ever used to be, thanks to its Channel9.org. The name comes from the channel on airplane audio systems that lets you listen in on the cockpit conversations. It's the ultimate in corporate transparency.

A group at Microsoft -- the most infamous of whom is Robert Scoble -- blogs constantly with the developer community about issues relating to all things Microsoft. There are something like 800 blogs in-house, and many, many more outside.

Sounds risky, doesn't it -- handing control of your message over to bunch of renegade coders? But what Channel9 has done for Microsoft is put human faces on its once-impenetrable culture. And that has dramatically increased overall satisfaction with Microsoft in the developer community.

It works in politics, too. Remember Howard Dean -- before the scream? His campaign's Internet advisors realized they had to give up control of the message to spread the message.

The Internet community it talking about you -- you should have a non-threatening voice out there, too. Around here, we like to call it Consumer Generated Marketing (CGM), and more and more companies are recognizing its value as a CRM tool.

Think of it as blogging for dollars.

Quotes from BlogOn:

"Blogging has always been about ME -- monetize elsewhere."
-- Ross Mayfield, SocialText

"Social media is about an aggregated and amplified voice.”

"The Internet is no longer a straight broadcast. Now you’re linking to community. RSS is napster for ideas. There’s no control, in a good way, and something that becomes popular becomes more popular."

"Not to participate is to play defense. CNET was recently asked to be on an old media panel. How fast things change."
-- John Roberts, CNET

"eBay was the first. This is the biggest thing that has ever happened. Just as media was getting to its worst, playing to the lowest common denominator, bloggers came along and said, 'Wait a minute, and we have something to say here.' And like eBay, they were inviting others into individual arenas."

"People are not going to trust brands they can’t respond to. People spend an average of 11 minutes on AlwaysOn vs. three minutes on Red Herring. What advertisers want is for people to come in and do more things under their brand -- and they're willing to pay for that. Being able to show who is commenting on a brand is a sales tool. Big media that don’t open up to the OS media concept are going to get voted out."
-- Tony Perkins, AlwaysOn

"Users are telling by what they read and subscribe to what to pay attention to. It's the ultimate Web search. Look at how people are interconnected, not at how pages are interconnected."

"[Channel9] was started to put a face on Microsoft, but the most interesting thing to me is that it put a face on our customers. That's better than most Web logs efforts. Include the customers in the conversation."
-- Robert Scoble, Microsoft

“The next step for business is tapping into the collective IQ of the firm."

"We envision a day where you pull out your cell phone, wave it around the crowd, and info about everybody comes up right there on your screen."

“The future is already here, it’s just not well-distributed.”
-- Jim Spohrer, PhD, IBM Almaden Research Center

"There are seven million people who write Microsoft applications. How do you communicate with them? So we invest in social media as a way to scale that."
-- Len Pryor, Microsoft

"Mass market consumers will start moving this direction and won’t see it as technology, just a way to share their lives."
-- Michael Skillian, The Lycos Networks

"It's about a culture of trust."
-- Craig Newmark, Craigslist.org

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