Here’s a summary of the points I covered at the latest CIPR Social Summer meeting last Thursday. Phil Sheldrake asked me to talk about social networking in the real world. That’s pretty easy I thought, I could just bang on about what I talk about down the pub. But I then realised people have to pay to attend and I wouldn’t want to inflict that on anyone anyway.

So, what is social networking anyway? Social networking is one of those social media things that lots of clever people drone on about, but typically they’re trying to overcomplicate things. Put another way, social networking is really just talking to people. Just like in the real world. But just doing it via means of typing as well as by use of the tongue and voicebox.

If you’re just looking at how you influence reputation through a keyboard, in the absence of all of the other influences that surround us – in particular good old word-of-mouth – you are some way off the mark. Most of us network socially in the real world about the things that matter to us as well as doing so online. And only by understanding how conversations and influence develop both online and offline can we really understand how reputation develops.

Anyway, a copy of the presentation I ran through is here, giving a couple of examples and some food for thought.

Main points I covered:
- People talk: media digitisation means you can harness it and track it in order to influence reputation, but in doing so we have to understand how conversations develop online and offline – and often flit between one and the other

- Don’t get confused by all the bollocks some self-proclaimed social media experts are touting about social networks, they’re typically guffing on to make themselves look clever and charging money for doing so. The power of talk lies in compelling people to act upon it, and changing media gives PRs greater scope for doing that, albeit that planning must be far more sophisticated to what we’ve typically done in the past

- But you must really understand the audience in order to develop the content, and be agile enough to accommodate change. That can mean more in-depth research, more precise segmentation, lots of things. It varies. Overall, online you must know who you’re talking to and why they’re interested, just like in the real world

The social summer series continued this Thursday, when the scouse in the house will be the excellent Ged Carroll.