Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com, and I’m here with bob Lieber, who is CEO of Original Thought, LLC, one of the great thought leaders in our industry. 

Bob Lieber:  Thank you. 

Cary Sherburne:  And you know, one of the things we talk about, you  know today with social media and you know, now it’s not just send out a postcard or put an ad in a magazine and there’s so many different ways to communicate with people, the hard part is really getting that conver – that two-way conversation going.  What are your thoughts about that?  How can we do that better? 

Bob Lieber:  It’s always interesting because you know the marketer always sits in the position of wanting to talk about the things they have to sell and the promotions that they have that they’re hoping to hook people into, and again, it’s sort of about flipping the perspective a little bit to say, if I were the consumer, what is it I’d want to hear about, what would I like to know about in order to actually feel better about doing business with this company.  And there’s a lot of statistics today about how people are using Facebook and what people value when they “like” a certain company.  And one of the areas is, “Make me a promotional deal that’s relevant to me.”  So again, how do you merge the data you have about your customers with the vehicles that are out there like Facebook and Twitter to deliver more personalized kinds of promotional messages and offerings that are targeted to specific groups of people that you know they’ll respond to because it’s of high value to them. 

Cary Sherburne:  And again, you know, with the, as we talked about in the past, with the toolsets that are available today, that becomes a lot easier to manage. 

Bob Lieber:  And again, it’s a matter of the data that you have.  Maybe asking a couple more questions that give you insight that you couldn’t get in any kind of transactional data and merging those two things that actually have a much more relevant conversation with people.  And as soon as you hook into a mindset that people already have about you, it’s amazing.  People’s guard drops down and they allow you in, in a much more influential way than they might otherwise. 

Cary Sherburne:  And also I think that younger people are less concerned about the “invasion of privacy” kind of thing.  They’re willing to give you more information. 

Bob Lieber:  And it’s funny, I just ran this report on the average age of social media users. 

Cary Sherburne:  I probably brought that average way up. 

Bob Lieber:  Well, you would be surprised, but the average age of a Facebook user is 35.

Cary Sherburne:  Wow! 

Bob Lieber:  And there isn’t any social media platform where the average age is above – is below 29. 

Cary Sherburne:  Wow! 

Bob Lieber:  So, there’s this concept that social media is all about young people, but the fact of the matter is, it’s people in their 30’s and 40’s and 50’s who are really super active and those are the biggest – highest growing categories.  So, that notion of I only have to appeal to young people when I’m doing Facebook or Twitter is actually a fallacy. 

Cary Sherburne:  Yeah, you know what else is interesting though, when you think about the whole digital native concept and so on, since the internet really went – became public, which  you could kind of measure from the IPO of Netscape in 1995, there have been 60 Million people born in the U.S.  So, there’s 60 million people in the U.S. who never lived in a world without the internet. 

Bob Lieber:  Yep. 

Cary Sherburne:  That’s amazing. 

Cary Sherburne:  And you know, this whole idea of how do you actually connect with people.  When you’re in the environment where it’s all about personal connections, you just have to find a way to be a part of that conversation and be relevant to the things that people are talking about with their friends and their colleagues and their relatives.  And you know, they’re talking about having babies and they’re talking about college reunions.  And again, you just have to find as a marketer a way to enter into that conversation in a relevant way.  And it’s amazing how responsive people will become. 

Cary Sherburne:  That’s great.  Thank you. 

Bob Lieber:  Sure.