You don’t build communities – you join them.

Maggie Fox, January 9 2007

That’s a quote from Jeremiah Owyang (also a fellow Social Media Collective member) on Sunday’s edition of the Marketing Voices podcast.

This quote hits home because it reminds me of waaay back when I worked as a website producer for another company. One of my bigger clients was ZoogDisney (we did a number of microsites and games for them – they were wonderful to work with). Whenever we would pitch a new project, Disney had specific elements they always wanted included, and one of them was “community”, i.e. polls, forums or other ways of getting users to interact with what were largely static sites. In those days, we had to build the community because nothing similar existed online. Of course, today things have changed, but the awareness of the importance of getting people to interact with your brand has not – which is what “putting the power of social media to work for business” is all about.

The podcast is absolutely worth a listen – Jeremiah knows his stuff! Here’s a summary:

Talking with Jennifer Jones about his strategies for media implementation, Owyang explains how listening to the blogosphere, participating in the conversations, and building a community are instrumental to success. Jones and Owyang also answer questions from bloggers on the importance of establishing credibility using social media, news aggregation sites and whether blogs will ever become as ubiquitous as Google.