We discovered, when looking around, that there are lots of great blogs about social media. As there should be. Blogs are a social medium and blogging about blogs has been around since, well, as long as I've been blogging (and that was in the year 2000).

By "social media," we mean the various ways individuals and organizations (which are, in reality, merely a collection of individuals) now have with which they can express themselves in ways that initiate or continue conversations.

Even before blogging, I was fascinated (some might argue, obsessed) with the nature of online conversation and community. Since the early 1990s, I've stepped on some toes of my friends at traditional media companies when I've said that publishers and producers of traditional media have an astute understanding of how to talk to, and even with, the individual members or their audience. Their problem has always been, I would say, they would never acknowledge the reality that a conversation was taking place among their audience.

Well, that debate is over. The audience (call them members, customers, donors, alumni, followers) is a conversation (or as my friend, Doc Searls said famously, "markets are conversations."

Today, at Hammock, we view our role as helping marketers get beyond the notion of "conversational marketing" and to start understanding what they can do to join in the conversation.

Despite this being 2009 (or will be within a few weeks), the "hows" of social media are still a mystery to many marketers.

That's what we hope to simplify on this blog. We plan to do so by, you guessed it, using a wide array of social media. Some you've heard of. Others are news. And we anticipate even more will emerge well after this blog is well established.

That's how it happens when people join in the conversation.