Social technologies force us to take the spotlight off ourselves and place it where it belongs â€" on the people we are serving. That's a key point to remember in any social engagement. Even if your brand is boring.

I recently read a report by Forrester analyst, Josh Bernoff, about using social technologies to energize "boring" brands. And his findings come as no surprise, given a recent conversation I had with several key bloggers in a very active community.

One of the overarching points Bernoff makes is that every brand can be interesting. And he gives us three points to guide our social engagement:

1. Find out what your customers want to talk about.
2. Create â€" or connect with â€" a place where they want to talk about that.
3. Associate your brand with that relevant discussion.

In a presentation I gave at the Ragan Corporate Communications Conference last May, I spoke about personal branding and codified several take-away points that are also appropos to using social technology and branding as a whole, if you want my opinion.

We are faced with several hard questions about how we do business, which are questions you must answer too:

1. Do you want to make a lot of money?
2. Do you want to build relationships and community?
3. What are the organizing principles of your business?

Chief among these is the last question: What are the organizing principles of your business? If you want social technologies to work for you, I suggest several key take-away points:

• Listen and understand your customer's problems and gain insight into broader issues affecting your customers.
• Talk about their problems, or better get others to talk about them, such as high-profile bloggers. Which means you'll want to do some research and blogger relations.
• Get your costumers motivated about an idea. Bernoff suggests Liberty Mutual's Responsibility Project.  I also recommend Help the Honey Bees, a Haagen-Daz campaign to preserve the North American honeybee population.
• Support the people you're helping. That means give back to them. Use your resources to empower them.
• Embrace your community and customers. In other words, find ways of getting them involved. For example, if you want to do some advertising, create a user-generated content contest and award the most creative creation from you community. Then use it.

At the end of the day, using social technology won't energize your community or costumers unless you put some creativity behind the engagement activities. And all that starts with listening.