Social media and French 101

As I'm struggling to come up with a two-second benefit statement for blogging and social media in general, I ran across this excellent blog entry from Evelyn Rodriquez' blog. She quotes some excellent and insightful sources on blogging, including these:

"Social engagement is the next big thing for the entire marketplace. In this age of consumer resistance, people are avoiding brands while seeking one another. Brands must shift away from the single-minded focus on engaging consumers and instead become adept at enabling people to engage with each other. - "Productivity: Meet, Greet, Then Market", MediaPost, February 2006

Now, I agree that people are definitely seeking connections, whether that be in the blogosphere, the podosphere or just at the local Chamber of Commerce networking meeting. But are folks really avoiding branding? Are people no longer relating to tags like "Just do it" in favor of engaging in online conversations with people who, well, are doing it? In this instance, I'm not sure what "avoiding brands" means exactly.

However, the idea of businesses as facilitators allowing people to talk freely to each other is one of the most insightful comments I've read about blogging in a long while. And this is why I'm against blogs that, for example, don't allow comments (why would any blogger not want to further the conversation?).

It reminds me of a shift in pedagogical thinking that was popular when I was teaching French--instead of viewing the professor as the "sage on the stage," we saw ourselves as the "guide on the side." That is, our job as professors was to get the students talking to each other (preferably in French) rather than dispensing information and hoping it was somehow magically absorbed through grammar drills. That is, my speaking French wasn't half so useful to students as their speaking French. Every word that they said, every thought that they expressed on their own was ten times more valuable than anything the professor had to say. We call it "active learning" (the students learn by doing things themselves) rather than "passive learning" (the students listen or read and absorb).

And I quickly discovered that students were infinitely more reponsive to a chance to express their own opinions than to repeat some grammatical concept that they were being taught. Case in point: when teaching adjectives and superlatives, I ran through a few drills to a sleepy and only-half-cooperative classroom. However, when I sat down and threw out the question (in French, of course), Which are better--cats or dogs? Why?, suddenly, the classroom came alive. One student insisted that cats were lazy (great use of a new vocab word) and selfish, which set off another student who never volunteered to speak. Sputtering with indignation, she spat out a whole sentence in French, Mais non! Les chats sont beaucoup plus intelligents que les chiens!

And this also goes back to something that my buddy and networking guru Bob Burg says frequently: that people are always more interested in what they have to say than in what you have to say. Blogging provides a forum in which people can say what they have to say instead of listening to some "sage on the stage." Personally, I'd much rather join in a discussion than listen to a lecture. What about you?