[MUSIC] Today we're joined by Professor Randy Hlavac. Randy's a professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill here at Northwestern. And a recognized expert in social and mobile media optimization. Welcome, Randy. >> Thank you, John. >> When you think about social and mobile media in every organization, for profit, not for profit, government, everywhere, people understand all the new ways that one way media has left, or faded, or is only a player, and now it's social. But let's start out because you really have context for all of this. What is social? >> Well there are a number of characteristics that makes social very unique. The first is that it's real time. That means that not only are people conversing in real time, but as we're going to show you, you can monitor that. And actually engage and come into the conversation as a result. The second is, it's very content focused. And what that means is that, people are looking for content that relates to their lives and the challenges they're facing, both as an individual and professionally. The third is multimedia, which means a lot of times we think in business in terms of putting out white papers and articles, but also video's playing a bigger and bigger role. For example, in the United States, YouTube is the second largest search engine, only under Google. Also, it has a very diverse delivery. There's multiple levels of social that will really help us get the content to the right people. The other thing is, it's very customer controlled. Actually, it's people creating sites to link up with other people. It's really a hallmark. And it's people who are seeking expertise on a worldwide basis, is what really makes it unique. If you want proof, take a look at a site that I really like to use. It's called wefeelfine.org. So, if that's the upside, what's the biggest misconception about all of that activity? >> Well a lot of people, when they think of social, they think of the social networks. In the United States it's like Facebook and there's other ones across the world. The key is, social networks are basically built by companies to link up people in a social conversation. But those conversations are very wide and not really very deep. In other words, there are people talking to each other but they're also talking to other communities. There's another side of social that's very, very important from a business, as well as a content perspective. And that is the virtual community. Virtual communities are formed by people linking together by themselves to deeply discuss a topic or a subject of interest to them. In other words, this is where the real deep conversations are going on, both with text and video, and audio, about topics that both professionals and consumers find very, very important. >> So if communities are that important, tell us why people seek them out and what does that mean for the content creator? >> A great question. Actually there's two reasons that communities form. Virtual communities form first off based on our passions. In other words, there are things that we're deeply, deeply passionate about, and very motivated to talk to other people about. And so passions becomes a thing that create communities on multiple levels. The second thing, the reason that they happen, is based on trigger events. Now a trigger event can be something in our lives, like I'm going to retire, I'm getting a new job, I have to move. But it can also be external events, like there was just a hurricane, or a tornado, or something that people feel passionate about, an event that happens. Those are reasons why virtual communities come together, both in the terms of passions as well as trigger events. [MUSIC]