Chris Brogan in Detroit

Yesterday marked a happy occasion for social media enthusiasts in the city of Detroit — Chris Brogan was here to talk social media before an audience at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Maverick Marketing Mondays series.

A few takeways:

1.) Think of social media as “outposts” to your “home base” — which could be your blog, your website, etc….something you own. However, this should be a home base with fresh content, and should act as a gateway to your company itself.

2.) You also need external “passports” that work in tandem with outposts to bring the right kinds of traffic back to your home base. These passports are things like WordPress accounts, Google accounts, Blogger accounts — account IDs that allow you to comment on blogs and content communities and allow you to be recognized in association with your home base and company/product/service.

3.) A healthy mix of social media engagement is three parts listening, two parts creating content (or “media,” as he put it), and one part engaging (commenting, etc.).

4.) If you’re not listening (or even if you are), you need to “Grow Bigger Ears.”

5.) It’s smart to set up a listening dashboard, so you can not only listen, but analyze and make judgments regarding actionable buzz. Chris mentioned Google Reader, but we also like NetVibes. There are also pay services that are hyper-robust, such as Radian6 and others.

6.) All media is social media these days, a point we made here.

7.) If you haven’t changed the way you interact with your audiences, you will.

8.) Most buying decisions are influenced by peers. Peers interact in social media. You can figure out the rest.

9.) Mobile Internet use is changing the game. Think about that, and what it means to your company.

10.) Social media is neither telling nor selling. It’s discussion, collaboration, awareness management, serving as a resource in some way.

11.) The playing field and audiences might vary for b2b marketers as opposed to b2c, but the basic laws of social media physics still apply. Social media is NOT just for business-to-consumer brands.

12.) Trust Agents should be required reading for brands looking to earn trust and gain market share in today’s online reality. (That’s me talking, not Chris.)

13.) It’s inappropriate to joke about stealing a giraffe from a zoo.

I know there are more. Perhaps those who attended can add to this list in the comments section. (For example, here’s a freebie: LinkedIn is not THE business social network…it’s A business social network.) What’d I miss?