It’s very common for me to have a conversation with a potential client that starts something like this:

“I know I should be on social media; I keep hearing that. But I don’t get it. What can I use it for?”

Let’s start with how you do business already– there’s no need to totally reinvent the wheel.

1. Host a town meeting or focus group– via UStream, Twitter or another chat service.
2. Host an educational seminar (in this case, a webinar)– use UStream, GoToMeeting, or another service.
3. Publish educational content– via a blog (WordPress, Blogger, Facebook or another platform) or as multimedia (on YouTube, SlideShare, etc.)
4. Provide top-notch customer service through Twitter, Facebook, or any number of forum or chat platforms.
5. Send a newsletter– use ConstantContact, Emma, or the bevy of other products available. (By permission only, please!)
6. Distribute informative literature by posting it on your website, Facebook fan page, or other platform.
7. Send invitations or spread the word about events– store openings, special sales, educational seminars, campaign rallies, whatever! Use MeetUp, Facebook, Evite, or a range of other options.
8. Distribute coupons, discount codes, or event tickets individually via email or generally to online fans/followers.
9. Organize volunteers to political events, community service opportunities, or other causes (MeetUp, Facebook, Evite, etc.).
10. Make announcements or distribute press releases. You can do this through regular communications on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, on a section of your website, or officially either through direct communication with reporters or by using a service like PitchEngine.)

(PS – This video on the social media revolution is worth seeing.)

Ted’s Montana Grill is Ted Turner’s eco-friendly restaurant chain most famous for their bison burgers. They currently have a solid online presence and a very vocal raving fanbase. Here’s how they’ve done it:

1. They knew raving fans existed and they wanted to leverage them to build more raving fans.
2. They started email marketing, gathering email addresses from an easy-to-use signup box on their homepage. Emails are generally about specials or special events, not at set intervals. 
3. They started a Facebook Fan page, and began offering a few special deals just for Facebook fans.
4. Later they did a month-long trivia contest using the Fan Page Updates and the Wall where the first person to post the correct answers to three trivia questions each Friday won a gift certificate.
5. Finally they launched a huge contest where fans had to create content (art, sound or video) about what made them the biggest fan of Ted’s bison burgers. The winner would get a new Prius and free food at Ted’s for a year.
   After a submission period (marketed by a few emails, but mostly on their Facebook page) Ted’s picked the top three submissions for the final round of the contest, and asked their fans to pick the fourth (out of ten selected entries). They have a YouTube channel for this purpose, as well as having the options easily accessible on their website (with voting highlighted on their homepage). Just a few hours after announcing this turn of events the contest had well over 6,000 votes.

The fans in these videos talk of flying to Ted’s locations (currently the chain is only in a few states) just to have a burger, taking their four burger-loving toddlers, going faithfully every week after church, knowing the names of every waiter at their local restaurant, the health benefits of bison over beef and the huge variety of burger toppings, among other things. Let me tell you, these fans are evangelists–and there are thousands of them.

Ted’s online marketing strategy is pretty simple. They started with a solid, easy-to-navigate website; added email, then Facebook. It is not an inordinately expensive campaign, nor do the Ted’s staff have much direct interaction with fans (such as Twitter or back-and-forth on Facebook). They’ve just set up a forum for people to share good things, and given away a few (in the long run, also fairly inexpensive) incentives along the way to get more people involved.

How can your business replicate their success? Where are you raving fans, and how can you reach them so they can reach others for you?

[Edit: Alexa Scordato shared this great SlideShare presentation in the comments: The Fan Economy.)

This morning, thousands of people in Florida and Georgia awoke to “SOS Only” service on their AT&T cell phones. While only a minor annoyance for some, for others (like me) who use the phones to run their businesses and/or have gotten rid of their land lines, this constitutes a major problem.

I called AT&T and sat on hold for fifteen minutes. A customer service representative told me they were aware of the outage and it would be fixed within 24 hours. 24 hours?! That is a long time to be without cell service. I asked if this service interruption would be eflected in my bill.  I was put on hold again, and then was told I would be given a 48-hour credit ($4.79). That’s good, but doesn’t really address the larger business problem I’m encountering by being without cell service!

I began searching Twitter to see whether others were having this problem. Many were. Soon local station Central Florida News 13 was talking about it on Twitter, getting lots of responses and starting a hashtag for the event: #attfail. The Orlando Sentinel picked up on the story too, and began live blogging the updates they received from AT&T’s spokeswoman.

Facebook isn’t searchable in the same way, but news about it has definitely been going around my newsfeed.

AT&T was nowhere to be found. As far as I can tell there was no acknowledgement of the problem on their website (although the system was so clogged I couldn’t log in to my account online), and no use was made of their Twitter account to respond to the growing number of people making this problem very public.

Etan Horowitz, an Orlando Sentinel technology journalist, wrote a blog that the outage had been confirmed by AT&T and began actively updating the blog entry and Twitter (even @-replying to each complainant he found via a Twitter search) to keep people informed of AT&T’s official response. In short, he was doing precisely what AT&T ought to have been doing!

If your company ever has a service crisis like this, how are you equipped to respond? Will you rely on a local newspaper reporter to assure your customers that something is being done? (Are you willing to trust the media to communicate as well as Etan did with your customers?)

If you are not active in social media (especially Twitter), you are not set up to control your own message through a crisis. That’s a dangerous place to be.

One of my early clients said he wanted to get involved in marketing his business through social media… but he wanted to know if there was a way he could update just one place and have it hit every platform on which he had a presence. Well, sure (Ping.fm and others), but if broadcasting is what you want to do on social media, you won’t get far.

Social media has the word social in it for a reason. It’s about building real relationships with real people; but even more boiled down it’s about communicating. Be careful, though, because as the lovely Amber Naslund pointed out, “to some, communication is talking, not conversing”. Social media is all about conversing.

If you’re still unclear about how to converse on Twitter, go to Twitter Search and click on one of the “trending topics”, preferably one with a hashtag (#). You will see a multi-person conversation taking place, many of them beginning with @ replies that signify essentially an instant-message conversation. Check out the Twitterstreams of the people you follow and see how many of their tweets begin with @. This means they are conversing with that one particular person. For the millionth time, Twitter is not about “I just had a sandwich.”

This brings me to Facebook. The “new Facebook” is a platform with a lot more opportunity to communicate and see how others are communicating. The new front page basically just makes this information easier to see – we already had features like commenting on items/statuses, “Like”ing things, etc. on the “old new Facebook”. A lot of people (including me) say Facebook is becoming more like Twitter. It is. This does not mean it is actually Twitter. You should not have your Twitter status updates become Facebook status updates.

If you are using Twitter correctly (with @ replies and hashtags and retweets), it will be completely out of context on Facebook. Part of the reason is that Facebook doesn’t allow the @ replies and hashtags to be links, so you can’t follow up on an item. The other reason is most people on Twitter have their settings where they can’t see @ replies unless they are following both users. (This encourages conversation and cuts down on total information overload; I recommend it.) Your Facebook status updates, however, will include all those @ replies no one—especially those on Facebook who aren’t on Twitter—needs to see.

If you have to show people on Facebook your Twitterstream, I suggest you do it subtly through a FriendFeed tab on  your profile. Depending on what you’ve connected to your FriendFeed profile, that tab can show your activity on all the social media platforms. Essentially, give interested people the chance to opt-in to the information but let the poor uninterested people be.

This is a good concept to apply to all your marketing: interruptive selling can put a bad taste in the mouths of potential customers, but if you make information easy to find (through SEO, a good website, and a social media presence), people who are ready to buy will come right to you.