Rory Sutherland’s very sensible thinking:

“Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important, and most of all, expensive solutions attached to them. And yet, what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there’s a very, very strong disproportionality at work. That actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed, or the degree of force that’s applied. But everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality. So what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very, very large budget. And once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on.”

The crowd is wild and unpredictable. It always has been. People have always been unpredictable. Some will love you and become customers. Some will despise you.

But you can’t control them.

And now thanks to social media they have a voice, a voice you can’t control like an ad, direct mail or PR.

And as is argued here in the Harvard Business Review your brand isn’t yours anymore. It’s the customers and you may not like what they do with it.

“Every large organization I’m aware of is highly sensitive about its brand, and few are happy about losing or even sharing control over it. They react to the reality of Web 2.0 era in many ways, but most of them amount to some form of trying to exert or reestablish control. Some move their mass media campaigns online to counteract the outside conversation,” says Andrew McCaffe.

I maintain that large companies, especially here in Australia, aren’t ready yet to let go of control as they should. But for smaller and medium companies, where there are a small number of key players who have a voice, there is an unprecedented opportunity to engage with the crowd.

Already I’m seeing this with chefs, winemaker, brewers and small producers.

There is a few years of opportunity to dive in a surf it, engage in conversations and win new customers and fans.

All you need to know are a few simple rules, the same rules that you may apply if you were socializing at a cocktail party.

1. Don’t hard sell

2. Don’t create social spam

3. Be polite

4. Bite your lip rather than become angry about criticisms

5. Reply to people who engage you in conversation

6. Don’t be static. For instance, on Twitter follow as well as be followed.

7. Link to people

8. Comment on their blogs

9. Don’t do anything anonymous

These rules evolve the whole time and there is no one answer. But these nine points are a start.

The problem for most small and medium businesses is that they are too busy doing what they are good at to have time to become experts on the internet.

This leaves them vulnerable to being sucked in to commissioning expensive but potentially useless or annoying websites featuring flash animation, graphics and little information that is useful to a visitor other than brochure copy.

Here are some tips on where to start:

1. Content Management System (CMS). You need one and learning how to use it is an essentially as knowing your way around Microsoft Word or Excel. A CMS publishes to the web without needing to know any html whatsoever.

2. Which CMS? The Obama administration symbolically just moved from the specially designed CMS used by the Bush babies to the open source Drupal. If open source is good enough for the White House it is good enough for you. The three key ones to consider are Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress (which is my choice and is so much more than just a blog platform). These don’t cost money to use.

3. Design. The design is a skin that fits over the structure of the website. These CMSs are very easy to set up but more difficult to design. However, you can download predesigned templates and pay a developer from a few hundred to perhaps a thousand dollars to tailor the design. The key is to keep it simple and content focused.

A simple site for a small business using these platforms can cost from under $1,000 up to $10,000. It all depends on how much graphic design work your require.

But this isn’t the end of it because you want people to visit your site which means being found by Google and other search engines. Initially, Google will drive most traffic to you. But if you work out a plan to have other quality sites and blogs to link to you (and its rude to ask for links and frowned upon by Google to pay for links), they will bring visitors that will stay longer on your site and look at more pages.

These visitors may even want to engage in an online conversation with you.

Really good useful content also helps draw visitors, and this is the realm of a blog. Each time a blog – or call it newsletter – is updated Google will recognise it and visitors will come.

Simple isn’t it? Or is it?