See a photo of Steve, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Steve Krizman, Question 3:

Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues are storytelling media?

A: I am an early and enthusiastic adopter of social media. I have written several blogs (currently Tropes), I Tweet (@Dialogdog), I am active on LinkedIn, Facebook and Vimeo, I check-in on Foursquare, I follow several blogs via feeds to my iGoogle page, and I have contributed to Wikipedia. I love this stuff precisely because I consider them storytelling — bits of stories that I weave together and watch others weave together into a grand narrative of our times, our selves and our beliefs. It’s real-time anthropology.

I don’t see how anyone can be successful in organizational communication and PR without participating in social media. I can’t see how anyone can be in this business and not want to. Just as I enjoyed getting phone calls after a newspaper story, I love seeing the immediate impact of my organization’s storytelling. How many people watched the video in which our sports medicine doctor talked about preparing for the upcoming marathon? What are employees saying in response to the healthy lifestyles challenge? How many prospective customers have scoped out our physician bio pages? How many people have shared our latest TV commercial? What are the comments like in that online Denver Post article?

I think a lot of people in my field have held back because they wonder whether social media will stick or because they worry about liability. It’s a safe bet that people will be talking about your company long into the future, whether that is at the beauty parlor, on Facebook or in some other venue yet to be invented. The sooner you get into the conversation, the greater influence you will have on the conversation in the future. As for liability — let’s look at the flip side, the good you and your company can do by impacting more people at the time and in the place when they are ready for your product or service.