Another great interview from Dr. Wilson. In this one social media expert Dave Evans explains how online businesses can benefit from and interact with the conversation in the social web that relate to their product or service – or businesses like theirs.

“We really don’t manage the conversation,” says Evans. “Rather, we manage our participation in the conversation and the experiences we create.” Through the social media marketers and small businesses can begin to understand what they do as a product or service to drive the conversation in the first place. It is a place to listen and understand.

This conversation is new in the sense that (a) more people are now connected to it in digital media, and (b) marketers can go back to the conversations to research them and learn from them. Consumers are talking to each other, says Evans. Marketers can now join the conversation and have a voice with the customers. Even if your business is rather small, you can learn from conversations about your business as well as from other businesses like it, so that you can get insight into how things work. If we’re truly listening to what is actually being said, concludes Evans, our businesses, products, and services can improve.

Dave Evans is the Consulting Director of 2020 Social and the author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Sybex, 2008). This interview was taped in August 2009 at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, California.