I came to social media relatively late.  I’m not under 30 and I didn’t grow up compulsively texting a network of friends.  I still think digital watches, cell phones and e-mails are pretty neat.  I’m basically a middle-aged guy who has spent the bulk of his career learning how to master traditional marketing tactics, mediums and strategies.

But then a few years ago I started to learn about social media. (the Brand Farm and Michael Moore have both been an important part of that education.) Interestingly, I discovered that platforms such asFacebook, blogging, YouTube and Twitterseem to work by the same principals that communicators have always used. Traditional media, though incredibly powerful in its ability to communicate to people across the world and across time, is necessarily constrained by costs and resources to a limited number of publishers, producers and commercial networks.  Social media, however, is so easy to learn and so inexpensive to implement that it reduces the barriers of entry to the point where everyone can participate.    Everyone is a broadcaster, everyone is a publisher and everyone is a critic. Thanks to social media, everyone now has a live microphone to the world.

Most of the discussion about social media has centered primarily on the mechanics of that “live mic”. There are experts in the various platforms, people who can reveal all the secrets of viral distribution, or perform the near miraculous scaling of your network from a few hundred to thousands, if not millions of followers. There is amazing stuff that can be done, if you know how.  But no matter how expert you may become with one platform or the other, you will ultimately arrive at the same problem.  Ultimately, you have to say something that is interesting enough to get people to pay attention.  Just as a complete understanding of the inner workings of an internal combustion engine won’t make someone a brilliant driver, a facility with the various features of LinkedIn can’t guarantee that anyone will listen to you.

As more and more people actively participate in social media, it will become more and more difficult to be heard.  Already, there are more than over 100 million active blogs, over 190 million users Twitter accounts and over half a billion people use Facebook.  That’s a lot of voices.  If anyone can write a blog or put together a reasonable video, the quality of the content becomes not just important, but essential to getting heard.

Everyone has a live microphone, but we don’t quite know yet what to say or how to say it.  Those who figure it out will connect to and gather an audience of listeners, readers and watchers.  Those who don’t may just have a good looking web site.

I’ll never forget the first time I had a live microphone in front of me.  In the early 1980’s, I managed to talk my way into a job as a midnight shift disk jockey for a small town popular radio station.  With no real experience as a broadcaster, but a decent voice and a collection of adolescent opinions about music, I spent hours preparing for my first night “on the air”.  I prepared a fantastic play list, pre-recorded a few identity segments, went over the controls with the station engineer and finally made my way to the chair in front of the microphone.

As the song “Abracadabra” by the Steve Miller Band worked through its last 45 seconds, I scanned the control panel in front of me.  There were multiple channel controls, marked by analogue meters that jumped with the music. A digital clock and timer flashed the seconds in bright red LED bars.  “Hotel California” by the Eagles was cued up and ready to go.

A single microphone was suspended in front of my face.  I adjusted it to the height of my mouth.  Then I put on my headphones and plugged them in. The music ended, I flipped the microphone switch to “on”, opened my mouth and…nothing.

Three endless seconds passed as my panicked brain searched for even a single sentence.  Nothing came to me.  Thousands of radios in cars and homes all over town were silent as I realized that I had nothing to say.

Finally, I flipped the switched to the Eagles.  They had something to sing about at least.  I turned off the microphone and finally exhaled.   Fortunately, “Hotel California” is twice as long as most pop songs at 6 minutes, giving me enough time to collect myself, regroup, and figure out what to say the next time I turned on the microphone.

Somehow, I managed to say something the next time the music stopped. Over time I learned how to more naturally speak on the radio between songs and commercials, how to use stock phrases, patter and bits of news or insight to easily introduce songs, and detail the time and weather just like any other disk jockey.  I loved listening to my own voice in the headphones and learned to make it sound just like most other announcers on the radio in the early 1980′s– low, fake, and enthusiastic about everything.

Over time, however, I began to experiment.  What would happen if I just talked like a regular person?  What if I spoke honestly about why I liked a certain song – even if it wasn’t cool? What would happen if instead of having all the answers, I asked a question or two?  Since I was broadcasting at 3 in the morning, it seemed relatively safe to try things, so I asked a few questions, spoke in a normal voice, and chattered a bit about why I liked Supertramp.

And whenever I did, someone would usually call me.  They didn’t call when I made myself sound like an announcer – but they did when I just talked.

My clients have often had the same kind of “live microphone” experience.  They might have built terrific web sites in the 1990’s, created a presence onFacebook, YouTube or LinkedIn, or even started a blog…but once everything was built, they had nothing to say.  They might post a few press releases, commercials and white papers, but after a while, they stop.  Those kinds of mass market communication tools are not unlike the self-conscious patter of a disk jockey – they might be polished, they might look good, they certainly cover “dead air”, but they rarely pull a potential customer into a conversation.

Just as a great radio personality has to learn to engage honestly in an extended conversation with his audience – not just repeat canned phrases and formats or push a value proposition, features and benefits – social media participants have to start a genuine discussion.  It doesn’t have to be the equivalent of Tolstoy, but it does have to draw people in.  It has to be intriguing, thoughtful, addictive and provocative.  It has to be honest.  It has to be worth listening to.

And when it is interesting, people will listen.  They will write back to you, they will call you, they will get involved in a conversation, and most likely they will be open to buying your product, service or idea.

You now have a live microphone at your disposal. Are you ready to get people interested?