The most popular social media question is: “Where do I start with social media if I want to use it for my business?”

The post goes on to show an image illustrating 15 categories into which you could logically sort types of social media into. I think her categories are great and can really help people understand the social media landscape. However, after a very lively #sm72 tweetup today on The Lifespan of a Social Community, my belief that Mirna’s opening statement is a false assumption holds. Or, if businesses are asking that question (to Mirna or others) they should be educated to understand what social media can and can’t do in relation to their business goals.

Social media isn’t a magic box. Just like any other marketing communications or business tool or process, social media, before even looking into which type of social media you might be interested in, is an option available to a business to achieve goals and objectives. Businesses should never ask a consultant “where do I start if I WANT to use social media?” They should be talking to their consultants or internal departments about the goals they need to reach and inquiring whether types of social media can help them achieve those goals.

All businesses need to find the optimal mix of Listening, Speaking, Caring, Sharing and Building Relationships so they can connect, participate and engage with their customers, prospects, investors, employees and other business stakeholders. Chances are, there is a lot of room for social media in there, but just because social media is available, doesn’t mean every company should do it. Social media isn’t free–it may not cost anything to put up a blog or set up a Twitter or Facebook account, but planning and execution take time and resources, especially if you want to do it right AND get people to come.

Social media is incredible and many companies are missing out by not utilizing it, but be sure you know what you’re using it for and why.

“Conversation: the informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy.”

But notice that the dictionary hasn’t caught up with the times. It’s 2010, Dictionary People! This definition specifically says “spoken” and “oral” and leaves out all other forms of communication available for the 2010s and beyond. With all the killer Web2.0 and social media networks, apps and tools, the “interchange of thoughts, information, etc.” can now be done via typed discussions (Twitter and forums for example), imagery (Flickr comes to mind) and multi-media (such as videos on YouTube with spoken and written words paired with music, graphics and other imagery.)

What is poignant in this definition is “the information interchange of thoughts, information, etc. … between persons.” A blogger and Tweeter I regularly follow, John Cass, wrote a post today titled Is Content Taking Marketers Down The Wrong Rabbit Hole? This struck a chord with me because I’d planned on writing about Making Conversation 2010 Style today. As John points out, companies need to consider the “social element” of social media rather than using it as just another outlet for their self-serving content.

Their are practically endless options now for where to converse with your target audiences, but the point is to have a two-way conversation that helps you build relationships with those individuals. Social media platforms, networks and tools are brilliant for this. They give your company the ability to listen (and then internalize) what people are saying not only about your products, but about their wants and needs. And you can respond to those individuals in a public forum so that others can read and benefit from the conversation (most people are Listeners–they don’t participate in the conversation but they listen and hear what others say.)

Also, these social media tools currently out, and coming soon, can help you be more efficient in conversing so that you aren’t trying to talk to all 1 million (or more) of your target audience by phone or in person. 2010 conversation style allows you to be much more efficient while reaching many more people. Sure, use these tools to tell people about your great content you’ve created, but also use the tools to get to know people and listen to what they want and need. We all know that the point of business is to sell your products, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be pals with your customers too. You listen to them, you help them fulfill their wants and needs with free, helpful advice, as well as with your products, and they’ll be more likely to buy from you and influence others to buy from you too.

Happy New Year and happy conversing!

5 Suggestions to Help You Be Successful with Social Media (with little money and/or few resources)

1. You don’t need to boil the ocean–it’s not necessary to have an account or fan page or profile on every single social network. Figure out where your customers and potential customers are. Often the best place for you to engage in the online conversation is in smaller niche networks/communities. This site might help you research. http://sites.google.com/site/socialmedialistproject/networks
2. You don’t need to spend a lot, but you’ll want to spend some money to create a plan on how to participate. Social networks and online communities are usually free to sign up, but you don’t want to waste a lot of time figuring out which network or community to get involved with if you aren’t familiar with them and once you’re set up, you need a plan for what to say, when to say it, who to listen to, how to respond to questions and mentions, etc. so that it actually benefits your business. I recommend hiring a consultant to help you do this.
3. You don’t need to spend a fortune on social media applications or tools. There are many free social media management, engagement and research tools available. Check out my Delicious bookmarks for Free SM Monitoring tools, SM research tools, and see the Social Media Project wiki for other 3rd party tools and social media locations.
4. Be sure to keep the 5 keys to conversation participation in mind:
   • Listen to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalize what you hear to improve your business.
   • Speak to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
   • Care about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs.
   • Share your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
   • Build relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.
5. Spread the work out among more than one person. As a small company or non-profit, you don’t need a full-time person to make social media efforts work. Many of the social media management tools, even free ones, will allow you to create logins for multiple people and assign tasks to different people. Encourage your staff to help spread your word. Talk about guidelines for speaking out so that you’re all on the same page. I’ve set up CoTweet for a couple of small companies and non-profits. It works great for them to manage their Twitter stream.

A recent research report put out by Knowledge Networks last week seems to miss the point of using social media for business. “Social Media Fails To Manifest As Marketing Medium, Report Likens Twitter To TiVo: More Hype Than Reality,” an article posted at MediaPost News Online Media Daily summarizes the findings.

From the article:

“Social media has reached critical mass, with 83% of the Internet population now using it – and more than half doing so on a regular basis – according to new research being released today by Knowledge Networks. But for all the media industry’s hype and buzz surrounding social networks, microblogs, and other social networking platforms, the genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks’ analysts, likely never will. The report, “How People Use Social Media,” finds that social media is having a profound impact on the way people connect with each other, but that it’s not becoming a very meaningful way for people to connect with brands, or advertising promoting brands.”

Read the rest of the article, it just really seems like they’re missing the point of social media technologies and how people actual think and behave regarding purchase processes.

Social media technologies and sites are brilliant for engaging in the market conversation. The problem is, too many companies are just creating noise in social media spaces because they’re trying to use it to “advertise.” People want to connect, they don’t want to be talked at–that’s why the Do Not Call, spam filters, and junk mail delisting services emerged.

Asking people if they turn to social media when making purchase decisions seems a rather ridiculous question. We already know that very, very often, especially the larger the ticket price item, people turn to other people for purchase advice (as mentioned in the article word of mouth is #1.)

How would you answer this question: “Do you turn to social media when making a purchase decision?”
My answer: “No. I turn to people and communities I know and trust to give me purchase advice. Oh, but wait, I ‘talk’ with those people and communities often using social media, but the medium is not what I turn to, I turn to the people and communities and I just need to use the “tools”/mediums by which those people and communities converse.”

1. People are interested in their wants and needs and how to fulfill those. They don’t care about products.
2. People are using social media to connect with other people and a lot of the time that means they are talking about fulfilling wants and needs.
3. Sometimes people use social media as the “tool” to convey “word of mouth” (I wonder why Mr. Tice thinks WOM is a totally separate thing from social media? WOM means one person shares thoughts with another or group–the means by which they share thoughts could be face to face conversation, blog post, review on a website, Twitter, etc.)

Conversation marketing is working very well for many companies and it just so happens that many of the tools used in engaging in the market conversation are social media technologies

1) Conversation Marketing is Comprehensive, Social Media Marketing is Not

If you’re new to the blog you’re probably wondering why the quotes appear around “social media marketing.” It’s because we (my partners and I at Idiom Strategies and more marketing thought leaders every day) consider social media technologies/sites/outlets to be tools and/or conversation locations. Noise is noise no matter where you have it. The main goal of conversation marketing is to stop creating noise and start interacting in the market conversation with quality content. Here’s a BtoB Magazine article with some great advice for Conversation Marketing (not just social media as the article title suggests): 5 tips for b-to-b social media marketing.

2) Not Every Company Needs Every Conversation Tool or Location

Just because it is there does not mean your company needs to do it. Another BtoB Magazine article that caught my attention is B-to-B followers flock to Twitter. This article is one of the better pieces I’ve seen about using social media tools/locations, and it’s helpful whether your are BtoB or BtoC. The article mentions how some companies are using the social media tool Twitter to converse with current customers AND watch what is being said about them in the market conversation (or at least in the Twitter feeds.)

“Twitter is just another tool we have in our marketing toolbox to create another way for us to communicate with our customers,” said Scott Townsend, United Linen’s marketing director. “I am careful to use the word “with’ because social media is fantastic for giving us the opportunity to not only send information but, more important, receive information from our customers and employees.”
“Businesses need to be careful when using social media outlets such as Twitter because they tend to want to start selling stuff now,” Townsend said.
“But Twitter is more about creating and furthering a relationship with a customer, becoming a resource to them and showing yourself [to be] available to provide solutions.”

This guy get’s it. Interacting with the market conversation means actually having a conversation with them that is mutually beneficial. Don’t market AT people, talk with them and they’ll be far more likely to listen to you and be interested in what you offer.

The thing this article is missing is that companies should look beyond just searching Twitter and the entire Internet for mentions of their company or products. If you define your market conversation space well enough, you’ll be able to extract conversation content that can be used as vendor-neutral proof points for your sales team to use. Also, your R&D department can get a big boost by understanding what is at the heart of the market conversation ecosystems needs and wants–valuable insight into further product developments.

3) Identifying the Right Influencers to Interact with is Key

The idea of targeting certain demographics groups was revolutionary in it’s time and with it came the flood of ways to identify your perfect audience and serve them your marketing bullet points. But with so much noise out there, even if you hit a location that attracts your perfect audience, they’re ignoring your marketing fluff. As technologies move forward and people weed through the noise, the better approach is to identify the Influencers who are driving your market conversation. In the article Making Social Networks Pay Part 1, writer Ned Madden discusses the challenges of social media networks and tools developing “sustainable and scalable business model that can satisfactorily monetize the vast ecosystem of the social networks.”

Madden mentions profile data extraction and mapping services, brand monitoring and network analysis tools and marketing automation options. Companies offering these things are popping up like mad, right now, and many of them are really terrific for gathering info, but simple demographics don’t work anymore. People don’t care about products, they care about their wants and needs–that is what they want addressed regardless of where they go to listen to the market conversation. So the prudent thing is for companies to spend the effort to Identify the Influencers who are driving the market conversation around fulfilling ecosystems wants and needs. Interact with those individuals in the conversation locations they use and build a relationship with them through the conversation tools they choose to use. By doing this, companies will be seen by the other conversation Participants and the vast number of Listeners who look to those influencers for purchase advice.

Why Social Media Fails–and How to Fix It was a panel that included Peter Kim of the Dachis Corporation, Charlene Li of The Altimeter Group and Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research. The audio from the session can be heard here. They covered issues that most marketers are trying to determine how to address when it comes to instituting social media programs:

1. How can I get my culture to adapt?
2. How can I make my campaigns work?
3. What am I supposed to measure?
4. Does social media even matter?

The comments by the panel and comments and questions from the audience were interesting. I agreed with some and didn’t agree with others. I urge you to listen and decide for yourself. In my humble opinion (ok, I’m not actually that humble), the answers to these questions are:

1. Business cultures probably don’t need too much adoption so long as you don’t approach the Head Hancho with a plan for “social media marketing.” Executives have always been open to “how to achieve the company goals.” Your plug for funding your programs would be better received if you highlight how “participating the market conversation” and “interacting with Influencers, Participants and Listeners” of the market conversation will achieve increased sales win ratios, more qualified direct leads, shorter sales cycles and reduced costs in consumer research.
2. You can’t make your social media campaigns work. As Charlene commented during the session, you need to stop considering these tactics as campaigns. What you can do to get quantitative results is to continually practice, as a company, active interaction with the market conversation ecosystem, whether through social media technologies or at a face-to-face meeting. Don’t forget, though, that ecosystem will turn you off if you come at them with the same old marketing bullet points and sales pitches. Don’t talk at people, have a conversation with them.
3. First and foremost, you need to measure what prompted a sale. No matter what, marketing can only be measured successfully if you know why your customers actually purchased. Brand building is very important, but not that measurable in statistics. What finally prompted a sale to happen is something you can easily ask your customer. Other than that, you want to measure the amount of interaction your company has with current and potential customers, the quality of the market conversation content (do they mention your company/product? Are your product offerings in line with what the market conversation says it wants/needs? Are you listening to the conversation to make sure your roadmap is going in the right direction? Are you addressing the market conversation with how to help fulfill their wants and needs or just with why your product should be what fulfills those wants/needs?
4. Absolutely. People are social. We build vast and complex networks of family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, community members, etc. With the new technologies now available these networks have become even larger and more complex. People want to know. They want to share. They’re looking for advice. No one is an expert on everything, and no matter who you are, there will be a time when you have a want or need to fulfill but you don’t want to make a decision without the knowledge of experts. You’ll hope to find someone who can share their experience on fulfilling the same need or want.

The Conversation is what businesses need to focus on and social media technologies are the crowning jewel of tools to achieve that.

Next on the agenda is a Web2Open unconference session to talk about engaging with the market conversation ecosystem to achieve business goal. And later, Tara Hunt’s session: The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities which will cover these five key points from her soon to be released new book The Whuffie Factor.