Then there is the common misconception that social media means telling people your most intimate/dull details. “Do you really think people care what I had for breakfast?!” people will ask me. The answer is “no”, unless you can somehow make breakfast interesting.

But for businesses especially, social media should not be all about you. It should be about your customer. You should be looking to provide information they are looking for. Yes, you do want to make things a little more personal and candid from time to time. People like to know they are dealing with a human being–someone they may have something in common with. People do business with people they know and like.

But most importantly, people do business with people they believe to be credible. There is no amount of social media that can make you sound credible if you are not. Credibility is built through two steps:

1. Provide solid, useful content.
2. Repeat regularly.

That doesn’t sound very magical, does it. In fact, it sounds downright boring. What is worse is that it’s not easy. It would be much easier to post about your breakfast, frankly. It takes much less thought and preparation. It takes much less discipline.

Though journalists like to look down on social media generally and bloggers specifically, popular bloggers have more in common with journalists than they care to admit. The people who get read are those who post something new regularly, whether they feel like it or not, whether they have time or not. Or rather, they make time.

Not every post needs to be a masterpiece, and your audience will probably forgive you a few lapses. But to really make social media work requires regular, disciplined, focused effort. You need to take time to think about what your audience needs to hear. You need to write it as best you can, and then post it. And then you need to do it again tomorrow, or next week, or however often you’ve committed to posting (I recommend no less than weekly).

No, there’s no magic to social media. It’s like everything else in life and in business: it takes work. Those who show up regularly and do the work are the ones who get the benefits. Those who stumble in expecting to find magic overnight will be sadly disappointed.

For the record, I had oatmeal for breakfast this morning. I sprinkle sliced almonds on top, drizzle real maple syrup over it, and then surround it with a moat of vanilla soy milk. Any leftovers we give to the dog, who prowls around the table throughout breakfast, snorting in anticipation of the pending treat. When she finally gets it she gobbles it down so quickly she can’t possibly know what it tastes like.

- 4,911% one month traffic increase
- 144,843 video views with 162 comments
- 1,500 tweets
- 120 blog posts in one month
- Tweets from Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Rose, and Jason Calacanis
- 7 national TV mentions

What was the company that accomplished this? Grasshopper, a company selling 800-number services for small businesses. How did they do this? They created an inspirational video with nearly no self-promotion, and they sent out a package of chocolate-covered grasshoppers, along with a link to the video, to 5000 people they felt were influential.

The idea was so unusual and so counter-intuitive (snail-mail packages in the era of instant Internet communciation?!) that it got attention. Lots of attention. There’s no indication of how it impacted revenues, but it’s hard to imagine it not making a difference.

Social media can be powerful, but it can never compare to sheer creativity. Put them together, however, and interesting things can happen.

(Information via Mashable)

The first is a 2009 social media campaign launched by Starbucks wherein content participants vied to be the first to locate, photograph, and post new Starbucks posters to Twitter with appropriate hashtags. Great idea, except at the same time a producer of an anti-Starbucks video was releasing his video. He found out about Starbuck’s campaign and was able to hijack it to get people to instead submit protest pictures. Though Starbucks pulled the plug on the contest, the damage was done–and continued on for some time.

The second is an experience I had yesterday at a networking event. FourSquare is still fairly new, and I haven’t seen much evidence of it being used in Boise yet. One person in my Facebook network, however, regularly uses it to check in at the gym where she works out.

At the networking event I met the couple that owns the gym. Since I’m constantly on the lookout for new opportunities for my clients I thought I’d ask them how FourSquare is working for them. They had no idea what I was talking about. They didn’t know what FourSquare was, let alone that someone was giving them free publicity through it. Their response was correct: they vowed to find out more, and also find out who their customer giving them the publicity was and reward her (that’s what FourSquare is about, really).

This was a positive example, but of the same concept: people will talk about you whether you know it or not. Ignorance is understandable, but not helpful. Your best bet is to start listening and make sure you are a part of the conversation.

Reputation management is one of the services we offer. Even if you can manage your social media effectively, we can help you monitor the Internet to detect conversations about your company.

If that person has come to one of the company’s social media outposts, like Facebook or Twitter, to make that comment, that the retailer should respond to that and should try to respond to really most comments that are posted directly on the Facebook fan page or directed at their Twitter account, because it’s clear that that person is making their statement or their stance known and presumably wants a response. But there are conversations happening everywhere.

…

It’s all how you provide context, how you measure the influence. If it’s an issue where you historically have shown volatility, you may want to dial up. Sometimes there’s a real cost of not engaging and responding. Sometimes the response is just how you make sure that your Website has content that might thoughtfully deal with their issue.

Executives rely on market research to support and substantiate any designated course of action, and devour facts, stats, and data-points like shrimp at a wedding reception.  Summarized below are a few statistics buttressing the explosion of this social media trend, and detailing how Corporate America is leveraging it to realize significant revenue and market share growth going forward.

• In the last 7 years, Internet usage has increased 70% PER YEAR. Spending for digital advertising this year will be more than $25 billion and surpass print advertising spending (forever)
• Lenovo has experienced a 20% reduction in activity to their call center since they launched their community website for customers
• Blendtec quintupled sales with its “Will it Blend” series on YouTube
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• Naked Pizza set a one-day sales record using social media: 68% of their sales came via twitter and 85% of their new customers
• Software company Genius.com reports 24% of social media leads convert to sales opportunities
• Dell has already made over $7 million in sales via Twitter
• 37% of Generation Y heard about the Ford Fiesta via social media BEFORE its launch in the US and currently 25% of Ford’s marketing budget is spent on digital/social media
• 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40%
• A recent Wetpaint/Altimeter Group study found companies that widely engage in social media surpass their peers in both revenue and profit

(Sources for Statistics: meyersreport.com lenovosocial.com George Wright Blendtec Mashable.com econsultancy.com businessweek.com )

Obviously we’re not hearing about the “also-ran’s” and the flops, but this offers a clear indication that, when done right, social media can play a key role in a company’s marketing. But these figures also suggest a few important caveats:

1. It takes money to make money: If Ford devotes 25% of their budget to social media they’re not using it to leverage the “free” aspect or get by more cheaply.
2. You have to have a goal: Lenovo set out to decrease their customer support calls specifically, not just “Let’s do social media and see what happens”.
3. If you don’t measure, you don’t know if it works: I doubt any companies could quote such statistics if they weren’t measuring the results of their campaigns.
4. Be wary of statistics: All of this looks nice. But this list of statistics was compiled and published by a social media company. While these statistics show there is a good reason to look at social media more closely, it’s best to remember they didn’t post anything that suggests that social media is anything less than wonderful.

Can you expect results from social media? Yes. Is it a guaranteed fix-all for your business? No. It should never replace your over-all business or marketing strategies, only support and enhance them. You should know what you are doing and why before engaging in any social media campaign or effort.

That said, and lest one get the idea that I don’t believe in social media, a consistent, focused social media plan, well-executed and given sufficient time, will produce results. Just make sure you’ve got all your ducks in a row first.

But even that many services may seem daunting. Businesses looking at getting into social media may be asking themselves which is right for them. The answer is usually: Yes.

The trick, if there is one, to social media is only partly picking the right one. More important than the service you use is the content you make available. Just being on Facebook will not guarantee that any of it’s 500 million users will even look at your page. Using Twitter could be like the proverbial tree falling in the forest–if no one hears you, you won’t make a sound.

Ultimately the real question of which service is right for you comes down to this: Which one do you most enjoy using? It’s as simple as that. While you can be successful on multiple services at once, you’re likely going to be the most successful on the one you use most.

If you understand Twitter and enjoy conversing in small, concise bursts, then by all means, focus on Twitter–at least until you get a good following built up and want to try some other services. If you like the various features of Facebook and can spend hours in there posting and talking to people, then use Facebook.

You will invariably perform your best in the places where you’re the most comfortable. It’s true in business, and it’s true in social media. Experiment with the various services and find out which one you’re most drawn to. Then dive in, use it, and start engaging with your audience.

Doing one social media service well will always be more beneficial to doing a half dozen of them poorly.

Marketing is a bit more hazy. Yes, you can measure the number of leads collected in a particular month compared to the amount of money spent on advertising. And if you have exceptionally strategic-minded salesmen you may even get them to regularly ask their contacts how they heard about you to further narrow down your marketing effectiveness.

But it can be more difficult to measure customer loyalty (ie. who thought about switching and didn’t) or determine whether an increase in repeat sales is due to your marketing or due to som other factor. Customer buying habits are complicated, and usually the best you can prove is correlation, not causation (ie. “when we increase marketing spending 20% our sales increase  between 8-14%” vs. “we can make sales increase 1% by spending $10,000 on marketing”).

That said, there are certain relationships that can and should be tracked. Any marketing executive who claims you can’t measure the effects of marketing should be watched closely. The same goes for social media. There are certain results that can be measured if you are willing to make the effort.

The problem is that many businesses are not always collecting good data to begin with. Regardless of whether you use Social Media, can you say what the cost of acquiring a new customer is for your business? Can you say what a customer is worth to your business?

For example, it could cost you $500 to attract a single customer. That customer on average may spend $200 per year with your business. At that rate it will take 2.5 years to realize a profit on that customer. If the average customer only stays with your business for three years you’re not going to have a very good return – only about $100, or about 6.6% per year.

However, knowing that information, you are now in a position to measure the benefits of any specific marketing effort. Suppose you decide to implement social media marketing in your business. After a period of measurement you determine that customers gained through social media cost only $400 to obtain. Assuming the other factors are equal, you now break even within two years, for a $200 profit on that customer over three years, or 16.5% per year ROI.

Or imagine that it still costs $500 to gain a customer, but you can increase their yearly purchase rate to $220. Your three-year profits on that customer rise to $160, or 10.6% yearly ROI. That’s a significant increase over the original 6.6% ROI.

Or let’s say through a change in your marketing you are able to retain a customer for an average of four years instead of three. You now make a net gain of $300 over those four years, or a yearly ROI of 15%.

Now these results are for demonstration purposes, and not indicative of expected results. They are to make the point that there are several ways that any marketing initiative can impact your bottom line. But you won’t be able to know you are getting those results if you aren’t already measuring some very basic factors in your business.

Make sure you have metrics in place in your business. Without them you will never be able to be sure if your marketing is working, or whether you just have a very good salesman running your marketing–good at selling you on fronting the money for their experiments.

1. Recommendations – Client, customer, or co-worker recommendations are Internet gold, regardless of the platform. Savvy businesses and consumers are learning to include LinkedIn when vetting contractors or other businesses. Always invite your customers to give you a recommendation on LinkedIn.
2. Q&A – With a site full of over 20 million experts, one quick way to stand out is to be a regular in answering questions. It builds your reputation for being a “giver” and heightens your credibility. Don’t forget that asking good questions can also make you look good–and get you good, quality answers!
3. Groups – Joining LinkedIn groups both helps define your online personality and can put you in touch with potential customers. Being an active, helpful participant can lead to business contacts, even if the group is completely unrelated to what you do. For example, if you contribute regularly in the Charlotte Bronte discussion group, people in that group will come to like and trust you. They will also see what it is you do for a living. If they happen to be looking for what you offer, chances are they’ll come to you first.
4. Social Media Aggregation – Integration with several of the top social media sites are already in place on LinkedIn, and you can set up live feeds one your profile page. You can update your LinkedIn status from other platforms. You can keep your LinkedIn profile fresh with constantly changing content–with very little effort!
5. Research – It’s easy to look in on what your competition is doing with LinkedIn, and you can find a lot of information that way. You can also look up potential clients, employees, or collaborators. The power of LinkedIn as a business directory, though not directly social in nature, should not be underestimated.

It takes very little effort to set up and maintain a LinkedIn profile, and provides one more line in the water to catch clients. Why not add LinkedIn to your social media mix?

None of this makes Facebook any less a viable option for businesses seeking to engage through Social Media. If anything, Facebook has been bending over backward to make itself more accessible for business. Here are five reasons I believe Facebook is good for business.

1. Facebook does “local” better than most. While some people treat Facebook like “Twitter-with-longer-posts” and try to rack up as many friends as they can, for most people their Facebook networks mirror fairly closely their real-life networks. People friend people they know, which gives Facebook the ability to focus more locally. A car wash may push for followers on Twitter, but unless they live close enough to bring their cars in, it won’t do much good. The same car wash on Facebook has a much higher chance of its network living within their business area.
2. Facebook is highly customizable. Between the myriad of plug-ins and the ability to use FBML to create pages and apps, Facebook is flexible enough to replace a company’s website. It is even possible to install an entire e-commerce suite on your Facebook page now.
3. Facebook has reach and depth. Facebook has more users than most countries have population. Odds are at least one person in every connected household has a Facebook account. That provides a pretty wide reach for companies doing business inter-state or international. Businesses limiting themselves geographically can still access saturation better than most newpapers or television stations.
4. Facebook is designed for interaction. Facebook posts can be three times longer than Tweets, and there is no limit on length for private messages. This is a lot of breathing room for businesses whose message doesn’t always fit in 140 characters. This allows for more branding and personality to come through, as well as more in-depth exchange of information. You can have full, rich conversations on Facebook as opposed to the truncated, abbreviated spurts that result from Twitter’s self-imposed limitations.
5. Facebook, for now at least, is not seeking to milk (or bilk) business users. Certainly there are features Facebook would like you to pay for, but you can accomplish most of what you need to do on Facebook without paying them a dime. For now, too, they seem content to leave it that way. While many of their changes and new features are obviously aimed at attracting businesses, they’re being careful not to chase them away again by hitting them up for money.

There are several other reasons I could think of, but I believe these to be some of the most important. By accident or by design, Facebook has become the go-to platform for business social media. They hit the sweet-spot between ubiquity, brevity and substance in a way that Twitter has been unable to do, while providing the integration that almost ensures other platforms will need to “make nice” with them for years to come.

Certainly they have their weaknesses and foibles. Privacy issues have been the bane of their existence for some time, though most of these are more of concern to individuals, not businesses. And as time goes on and more exotic social media platforms appear they may have a difficult time being all things to all people.

But for all that, so far Facebook has played an amazingly canny game in positioning themselves, not just to become one of the top players in the field, but to potentially becomes the default infrastructure that supports most mainstream social media services and could potentially replace websites.

The next few years will be key for Facebook as they decide how to handle their success. It’s a question Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies have had to face through the years. How they choose to answer it will largely determine whether Facebook stays on top or gets knocked off by the next one to do it better. It’s their game to lose.

1. Writing and posting Social Media content is not your business. Your business is your business. If you are a small business owner you have enough to do already. To do Social Media well requires regular, consistent attention. As a business owner that will be hard. There will be new fires to fight, new opportunities to pursue, and new plans to make. You need to stay flexible and able to devote your attention to where it is most needed.

Working with a social media manager allows you to devote time and effort when you can, while letting the manager establish the consistency that makes Social Media efforts successful. You can focus your primary attention where it should be: developing your business.

2. Social Media changes, and changes quickly. Social Media is a relatively new field, and major players appear practically overnight–and disappear just as quickly. New services and approaches are coming out all the time. Some are worth your time and some are at best flashes in the pan. Constant research is needed to stay on top of it all.

Chances are your business changes just as rapidly. New developments in your field appear constantly. It can be a full time job just to stay current in your area of expertise. Hiring a social media manager allows you to stay focused on your own core competencies. Let someone else keep up on Social Media. That specialization and division of labor will create powerful efficiencies in your efforts.

3. Social media managers keep you focused. Even if you are still contributing at least some of the content for your Social Media efforts, it can be difficult to stay on task. You’re the boss, after all. You answer to no one but yourself. That could be one of the reasons you went into business to begin with.

But with no one holding you to specific tasks and goals, however, it can be easy to let it slide. One of the ironies of Social Media is that since most of the services are free, you are under no pressure to protect an investment. No money is wasted if you don’t update your Twitter profile today.

But having a social media manager changes things. A good social media manager can keep you on task and make sure you come up with the needed content. And since there is at least some fee involved for their services, you will likely feel more of a drive to make sure that investment is not wasted. Not providing your manager with this week’s blog post in time costs you money. While lost opportunity can be hard to measure, someone sitting on their hands when they could be doing something for your business is easier to detect.

4. The devil is in the details. The difference between adequate Social Media and great Social Media is often small. It could be as simple as not updating a Twitter feed to let that audience know about a new blog post you just published. If could be the difference between only creating a Facebook campaign rather than also reworking that same content into a blog, a slideshow, a video, and a podcast.

A good social media manager covers the details. It’s their job to make sure every bit of content you create gets maximum exposure on your various channels. Because Social Media is their focus, they can get more results out of every bit of content than you can.

5. A lot of Social Media interaction is noise, and hides the real opportunities. When Social Media gets cranked up and running well you can spend a lot of time just keeping up on every customer interaction–and still you will likely miss the critical interactions: the dissatisfied customer, the customer with the million-dollar idea they give you for free, the unsolicited testimonial, or even the inquiry that leads to a big sale. You can’t afford to read every single interaction–but you also can’t afford not to!

But you don’t have to handle it all. A social media manager can sift through the chatter, tackle (or delegate to others) the softballs and low-hanging fruit, and redirect to you only to the important messages that need your personal attention. You save a lot of time that should be applied elsewhere, and you are less likely to miss something truly important.

6. Social Media is a significant source of information. Besides providing customers a venue to bring information to you, Social Media provides the means to proactively gather information that could help guide your business. But again, as the owner you don’t have the time to spend on proactive information gathering.

Your social media manager does. He knows the tools and knows how to pull the data out that you need. He knows how to actively search the web for information about your company, your products, or your people–or about your competitors. The Internet is a sea of free information that far too often goes underutilized because there simply isn’t the time for business owners to go get it. Let your social media manager get it.

7. Well-run Social Media gives you more for your marketing buck. Radio ads can easily run over a thousand dollars a month.  A single newspaper ad can cost several hundred dollars. Yellow pages ads can run into tens of thousands of dollars a year. A good social media manager can cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month, and can give you almost 24 x 7 x365 interaction with your audience. They can give your business a unique voice and build your reputation in ways no other marketing medium can.

Not only can they reduce the cost of finding a new customer, they can increase customer loyalty to help you keep the ones you already have. They can also increase the frequency and size of purchases. Perhaps most importantly, they can leverage the endorsements and recommendations of your satisfied customers in ways that no other medium can.

Just as I’ve said that businesses can do just fine without Social Media, businesses can do just fine without a social media manager. But if you are going to use Social Media in your business, chances are you won’t be able to run your business and your social media at the same time and give both the attention they deserve. I’m biased, but I would highly recommend you consider hiring a social media manager.