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In 2010, if you asked a small business owner about social media, you’d get one of these three responses:

1. I don’t understand it
2. I connect with people but I don’t understand the value
3. I generate business from social media

The answers were what you expected. Some people didn’t understand social media, either because they viewed it as a fad, or were too busy to learn about it, while others experimented with social media for a little bit, but never figured out its value for a small business. Early adopters have experienced success in social media.

In 2011, the rules have changed. I’d argue that it would be very difficult to find a small business owner who doesn’t understand social media. Every networking event or conference has some type of agenda / panel / info session involving social media. Almost every owner has experiment with social media. Small business owners build Facebook pages, Twitter pages, Linkedin profiles. They update with new content. People begin to “like” Facebook pages, follow Twitter accounts and view Linkedin profiles. And then after a month or two, social media is mainly forgotten.

And that’s the problem that small business owners face – they begin to understand of the value of social media. They see their customers and new leads begin to connect with their brand/business on social platforms. But after two weeks, a month or two months, the owner experiences “social media fatigue” and doesn’t update or monitor their accounts. Leads ask sales questions that go unanswered on Facebook page. Customers follow Twitter accounts hoping to get news regarding promotions, new products and corporate announcements – but instead receive no communication. Prospective customers look to a Linkedin profile to gain information about a new business – but instead receive no information that would sway them to make a purchase decision.

And that attitude – that type of “social media fatigue” will need to change in 2011 if a small business owner wants to be successful in social media. Need proof? Just look to anyone who said 3) “I generate business from social media”. The small business owners who say that phrase are the ones who have an active and regularly update social media presence. They may have experienced “social media fatigue”, but they figured out how to adopt their schedule and strategy to utilize social media and because of that, their business is thriving.

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2010 was a banner year for social media. Many companies fully embraced social media and created award winning, roi increasing campaigns. Many other companies began to dip their toes into social media with promising results. And for the companies that haven’t started in social media, well, 2011 is when the market place will force their participation.

1. 2011 will be the year of "attempting" social media
   Many companies that have been on the cusp of starting a social media campaign will finally "go for it". View it the same as when websites became popular. You had the early adopters (who got the best .com names!), the laggards who built websites a few years later and then the people who realized they needed a website on their business card. The same will happen in social media. Companies will soon need to add a social media profile to their business card.
2. More companies will attempt to calculate a true ROI in social media, and will fail.
   Higher ups will demand to see an ROI – and will continue to under value the value of every social interaction on the web. There’s no way to say "every like is worth 50 cents to our company – therefore our social campaign’s budget of 100 dollars must generate X number of likes to be worthwhile". That type of thinking will simply fail to "wow" numbers oriented marketers. The social web isn’t numbers oriented. Its about the relationships you forge with your customers
3. Facebook will become the preferred social marketing platform
   Facebook’s growth is astronomical. They are continuously rolling out new tools to help measure/make analytics easier for marketing professionals. Companies such as Buddy Media will make it even easier for bigger brands to be fully engaged on facebook. It’s already the preferred platform – but this will further grow.
4. Twitter will continue to be more of a niche service
   More consumers will try twitter, and then abandon it after a few attempts. For those who "get" twitter, it will continue to serve as a viable information resource and allow them to interact with brands easier. For the rest of the social consuming public, they will be looking to Facebook and it’s user friendly UI/tools to interact with their favorite brands. (Shameless plug: Try InstantDash – it is free!)
5. Social media policies will be the norm
   Signing a social media policy will become almost as standard as any other pre-employment form. Companies will be taking an increased focus on how their employees use social media both at the office and outside of the office. New concerns about liability and a firm’s image will restrict certain types of behavior on employee’s social media practices, even outside of the office. For example – financial firms that are regulated will restrict how an employee can talk about certain securities or stock activity on personal social media accounts.

   "Social media style guides" will also gain traction as companies try to streamline their content postings on the social web.

6. "Social Media Manager" will be much more common on job listings
   Companies that are at least somewhat engaged in social media will eventually learn that managing a social media campaign is a full time commitment. With increased budgets from what was a generally good 2010 fiscal year and an increased paranoia for companies to "stay ahead of the curve" means this will be a great year for professionals in the social media field.

1. Drive traffic
2. Drive brand awareness
3. Further SEO efforts

Many people will argue over which goal is more important than the others but ultimately the success or progress of each goal will help you succeed with the others.

With proper social media optimization, your website can get an almost immediate traffic boost by connecting your content to social media outlets. There are many easy methods to get started without being spammy. For example, start by adding social media share buttons and bookmarking tools to your pages.

Make sure to involve brand and promotions in social streams. As a brand, participate in the social world around you by participating in blogging, discussion groups and forums. It is important to stay consistent and current with your brand message without coming across pushy or blatantly spammy.

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Yesterday, Google announced that they have been working on a technology (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html) to allow cars to drive themselves. The claim is that their cars have driven over 140,000 miles on public road ways (with a human driver and software monitor in the front seat, just in case). Coming from the tech side of the world, I immediately dreamt of a world where my car drives me from sea to shining sea while I surf the internet and read Reddit and Digg for hours. Oh how glorious life would be. My laziness would turn into a whole new level.

But would it be a better place? I’m a dreamer – I like to believe that every idea is fostered out of good will and a true intention of benefiting society. I blindly turn away from any notion of this being a for profit venture. But what scares me is this: what could Google do with the new information harnessed from your “autocar”? We know they already know what we search for and they know what and where we buy stuff on the internet, but this would give the “IRL” (in real life) information on what we are doing outside of the internet. Suddenly, the cost of this technology becomes AdDetours instead of AdWords. Our trips to work are suddenly all routed around our favorite coffee stores. I drive by the same Google owned billboard 5x a day.

How will this information impact our social networks? Will our “autocars” route by the location with the most fans, friends or followers or will we have a new standard of measuring popularity called “physical visits?” Will @replies on Twitter determine where I go next? Will facebook events determine my new social destination?

With every new amazing technology from Google, we seem to lose a little more of our privacy. But we always had the ability to turn off the computer and escape Google’s far reaching technology (provided we didn’t hop on our smart phones and start using gmail or google maps). Now, google enters a previously unknown world, our cars, and slowly but surely, Google gains even more information about me.

And is that really worth it in the end?

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I’ve touched on this subject before, but defining your social media goals is an important part in the process of establishing a social media campaign. When you define your social media goals, you can begin deciding on which types of social media your brand should be focusing on. Here are some tips on how to begin defining your social media goals. This will be the first part in an on-going series.

Customer service or customer acquisition
Are you planning to use social media to help acquire new customers or service existing customers? You can definitely do both, but you need a central focus. This will help in defining the initial content on the page as well as the design scheme and structure – as well as what platform to focus on and how to utilize internal staff for your social media endeavors.

If you plan to use social media as a customer service tool, your page needs to clearly display the customer service phone number and email address.

If you are planning to provide long, detailed answers and step by step troubleshooting, you should focus on facebook. Facebook helps to facilitate detailed conversations. More than one person can see the question and answer. It allows for one on one troubleshooting and allows more conversation than simply a question and an answer format. It also enables other customers to jump in to a conversation and ask their own questions or provide their own thoughts. It also enables customers to answer questions before you get a chance to – which, depending on your brand and objectives, can either be a good thing or a bad thing. Over at Lightspeed, we do not mind other customers jumping in on technical support questions – users enjoy sharing their knowledge to other customers.

If you are planning to provide short responses, or mainly links (IE, “To learn how to service your item, please view this link in our technical support site), Twitter is the platform to use. If you also want to answer questions specific to a user and do not want to create a group conversation based on an individual user’s question, Twitter is the platform you should be focusing on.

For content, your brand should be posting articles relevant to the industry, “quick tips”, links to specific items in your technical support or knowledge centers and other content centered around your product and sharing knowledge.

If you plan to use social media as a customer acquisition tool, you should be have a design that clearly shows your brand’s website address and pictures of the product and/or the brand’s logo.

In terms of a platform – that is specific to your brand. You need to know your customers – are they more engaged on Twitter or facebook? While you should contribute equally to each platform, having a better sense of what your customers want will help shape the content you post and the efforts dedicated to each platform.

If you realize that your customers are more engaged on facebook, you should focus more on monitoring the fan page and providing a response to questions within 24 hours and focusing on creating a custom fan page. The fan page should provide something exclusive – something that customers can’t find elsewhere. Could be a promotion. Could be an exclusive video or article. And you should have a promotion (could be a sale – could be a “sneak peak”) centered around this exclusive content. Regular content should be created with the purpose of creating a conversation and informing/exciting potential customers. The last thing you want to do is have someone “unlike” your facebook fan page and you lose access to their social inbox because they found your content annoying/irrelevant/useless.

If you realize your customers are more engaged on Twitter, your efforts should be focused on creating an eye catching custom Twitter background and responding to @ replies within a 24 hour period. Content should be created that informs and encourages the user to visit the brand’s website for more information. You want to create exclusive content that will lead to retweets. Random @ replies to new followers should occur. You have a chance to add a “personal” touch to your brand – embrace it!

When you determine the goals of your social media plan, you should focus on metrics. If you are focused on customer service – your metrics would be defined by the number of questions asked and responded to. If you are focusing on customer acquisition, metrics include: how much traffic your website receives from twitter/facebook, total number of followers/fans, total number of retweets and the number of promotional messages sent.

Happy tweeting!

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It sometimes boggles my mind seeing some of the social media campaigns out there. While many brands do it great (Starbucks, Jetblue, Dell, Pepsi all come to mind), there are also many campaigns that just simply are bad. Blank facebook pages. No twitter entries for two months. Customer service and sales questions left unanswered. No blog entries for 5 months – yet – the front page of the company’s website proudly displays buttons for “Facebook, Twitter and our Blog”.

Disaster. So here are some tips and reasons as to why your social media campaign is failing:

You haven’t updated the content in months
So you spent weeks/months “planning” the social side of a campaign. You decided to focus on Facebook and Twitter. You planned the first two weeks of content – even sprung for an agency to create a custom facebook page and a slick twitter background. And what happened? Everything looked great those first two weeks – the page was active – fans were liking the comments – followers were retweeting content. Then you lost momentum (the person in charge focused on other business activities). You lost your creativity – and now your social media profiles look more like a ghost town (giving off the image of “no one’s been here for months!”) and your campaign produces minimal results in the long run.

You have the wrong people managing your social media profiles
Maybe it was the intern from the summer. Maybe it was an AE for your agency. Maybe it was the online marketing consultant you hired. Either way, the people who manage your social media profiles are either 1. Busy focusing on non marketing items or 2. No longer with the company (your intern) or 3. not directly involved with your brand (the AE for the agency). Irregardless, if someone in your organization is not actually held accountable for monitoring your profiles (not just posting content), then you will one day come to your social media profiles and see months old unanswered questions on your profiles.

Do you really want to log onto your Facebook page and see a question from a prospective customer asking for someone from sales to contact them… and then you look into your CRM tool and notice that person never heard anything from your organization.. or that the person wasn’t even added as a potential lead? Treat monitoring your social media profiles as part of the sales process.

Your content is boring
So you decided that you don’t want your social media profiles to be full of outdated content. You decide updating 2-3x a week is important. Great! And now you’re wondering why nobody is retweeting or liking your content (which is one of the ways one can figure out a social media roi). It could be that the content simply isn’t interesting. Using your facebook/twitter pages just to reproduce press releases and company headlines from the “Corporate News” section of your website is boring. Same with sending out content that is not relevant to your audience (if you are a baseball bat company, are you really going to be sending our news stories about presidential elections in Argentina??)

Just because you posted content on a social media profile doesn’t mean the human audience is going to click on it. No one is going to say “oh wow, this is completely off topic and irrelevant to my interests, but since my favorite brand posted it on facebook I’m totally clicking it!”

There’s no incentive for a customer to connect with you
You splash the links to your social media profiles around all your homepage. Then when the website visitor clicks on one of your profiles, they wonder “why?” “Why should I allow this brand access to my social inbox?” “Why should I add an extra feed to my twitter account” “Why should I add this twitter handle to my twitter list”. Offer a reason for the visitor to do this. Run a contest. Offer a free item for customers. Select “customers of the month”. Do something that can’t be found on the website…. because otherwise – why are your customers connecting with you on social media?

In the bottom of your heart, you truly believe social media is a fad
Despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you still feel social media is a fad. Because of this, you look for every reason to cut resources. You look for a reason to not go to the page and monitor it. You want customer service agents to not be scanning your profiles for potential customer questions. Social media works by the amount of effort you put in – minimal effort will lead to minimal results.

You aren’t connected with your SEO strategy
You spend tens of thousands a month determing specific keywords, content and landing pages for specific phrase. Yet, when one comes to your facebook page, none of these keywords or content is there. Why do you feature different content/direction for your google visitors than your facebook visitors?

You haven’t determined a metric and a way to improve it
Pick a metric. Something. It could be number of fans on facebook. Number of followers on twitter. Number of retweets a week. Just pick something relevant to your business. Then start tracking it (something as simple as an excel spreadsheet with the data). Then each week make a report and send it out to the members of the social media team. Figure out ways to improve that number each week. If your metric is the amount of followers on twitter, start determining the average number who join each week – then figure out how to improve that number.

You don’t pay attention to your competitor’s social media profiles
They are providing you free advice on what your customers want on social media – you can see how they interact with their customers, what types of questions/comments are being asked, what type of content is being re-tweeted and what type of comment receives a “like” on Facebook. Spend 15-20 minutes a week reviewing your competitor’s profiles. Chart the average number of new fans/followers. Then figure out how you can increase your averages compared to your competitors.