By Elana Scherr
Senior Account Executive, Kahn Media Inc.

It’s 2011, you’ve got the Social media covered for your company, right? Between Twitter, Facebook and Videos and… what’s that? You’re confused and concerned that it’s all so complicated and possibly not really useful to your business after all?

Have no fear. We will break down the common myths and misconceptions about using social media for business, and we will do it all without confusing overcomplicated language and techno-babble.

Myth 1 – Social media is for kids, not business.

Social media is a broad term, but it covers most of the ways people share information over the internet. If you want people to talk about your company or product, you have to make it easy for them to do it online.

The various social media outlets, including YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Forums and Blogging, all make it possible for a business owner to answer tech questions, perform market research, promote sales or new products, support dealers and distributors and even become a daily part of their customer’s lives. The result is incredible ROI – for very little cost beyond time/labor, you can communicate directly with consumers, without a filter, and increase both the bottom line and long-term brand awareness.

Each aspect of social media has interesting features and all have their own benefits and pitfalls, which leads me to our second misconception.

Myth 2 – A business needs to be equally active in all forms of social media or it isn’t worth doing anything.

The great thing about the various social media outlets is that they can be coordinated into a single cohesive campaign – or you can treat each as a separate media channel. A new video can be shared on Facebook or a blog post promoted on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean that you must do everything at once. If you only have time for one forum, or you just want to tweet once a month about clearance items, then start there. It’s still an additional audience, and it’s still one more place for search engines to find your company or product. That’s the secret of social media marketing – they key isn’t communicating with the people who follow your channel, it’s caching all that content you create for people to read and absorb in the coming days, weeks and months as search engines index what you wrote and bring it up as a search result for people seeking answers and content.

Myth 3 – Participating in forums means posting constantly, many times each day. Who has time for that?

We could (and will) do a whole article devoted to the use of forums, but basically, sponsoring a few popular forums in your market gives you the ability to search and post answers to questions, as well as share blog posts or videos about your company. Posting frequency depends on your resources and interest, but the most important people who see your post are not the forum members; they are people stumbling into the forum thread via search engine.

Think about it; when you search for something new (say, you just got a new mobile phone and are curious about features) many of the results that come up will be forum posts where someone asked a similar question. You’ll scroll through the answers, and if there’s a satisfactory one, you’ll leave with the information you needed. Therefore, it is not the frequency of your company’s forum posts, but rather the completeness and quality which will endear you to members and searchers alike.

Myth 4 – My company offers high-end products to an exclusive audience. Won’t all this tweeting, blogging and facebooking take away from our mystique?

Here’s the thing about all use of social media, both for personal and business use: nobody is forcing you to post photos of messy workshops or proprietary schematics. You control the content and the message. Social media may be friendly, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used in a classy manner, just as a cocktail party is different from a frat party.

If you want to maintain a high-end feel, keep your posts formal. Make sure grammar and punctuation are accurate. Post high resolution photographs from your catalogs, or link to well respected publications featuring your products.

Being accessible doesn’t make you common, and more importantly, if you aren’t on the web, your fans will make unofficial profiles to represent you and then you’ll have no control of your company image.

Myth 5 – We have a blog on our website. Why would we start a Facebook page to compete with our own site?

No matter how exciting your company website is, it probably isn’t the homepage for hundreds of thousands of people across the world. When you have a Facebook fan page devoted to your company, there’s a good chance that your post will be in their newsfeed at least once a week or more and you can use it to push traffic to your blog.

Now you might be saying, “Once a week? But I post more than that, people must see my posts every day!” and that brings us to a very common mistake regarding Facebook.

Myth 6 – If you post every day on Facebook, you’ll be annoying and people won’t like your company.

We’ve heard from many companies that are afraid of over-posting and becoming like “Farmville” or “Mafia Wars” (By the way, you can block those apps while still maintaining a relationship with the person who plays them, just hover the cursor on the right side of the post, hit the “x” when it appears and click “hide …Farm Wars…”. You’re welcome.)

At this point, most regular Facebook users have more friends and interests than will fit on their screen in a single visit, and Facebook sets the newsfeed to a default called “Top News” which is actually a sort of “favorites”, meaning it’s the people or companies most clicked by that user. If you aren’t in the Top news, the Facebook user won’t see your post that day unless he or she switches over to “Most Recent” and even then, your posts will move down the viewer’s wall during the day as new posts are made by their other contacts.

This is good, because it means you can post every day without alienating your fans, (although we don’t recommend more than once a day unless you are offering live updates from an event or contest). The quick turn over of posts also means you can repeat posts, or post similar information. It will be new to much of your audience!

While daily posts aren’t annoying, daily Facebook messages are. Since Facebook messages go straight to people’s email, sending sales notices or product updates as a message is basically spamming. That’s a quick way to get your page or profile blocked.

Myth 7 – We have to post about our products every day.

So now you’ve been won over to the idea of updating blogs, forums and Facebook pages often, but with what? Daily repetition of the product line is bound to get boring, both for the reader and the company making the posts. So what do you post about?

Use your social media outlets to post detail shots, behind the scenes tours, history, employee bios, helpful tech, entertaining events, relevant trivia, and vintage videos, or to ask questions for your market research. Find out what products your fans would like to see, or encourage them to ask tech questions or post their own stories and photos.

People love to feel like they have inside information, so if you post a quick bio of your lead technician or video of an R&D session, it gives your fans a real feeling of connecting with your company. As mentioned earlier, only post what you are comfortable sharing. Maybe that’s just macro shots of fasteners or details of the fine stitching on a product. If it is something that isn’t available anywhere else, your audience will view it as worthwhile content.

It’s important to post product links occasionally, but if you make gardening tools, your posts needn’t be solely sales links to hedge trimmers. You can post links to videos about flowering vines, or articles detailing the proper winter cutting of roses. As long as the links you post don’t mention your competitors, your readers will associate the helpful or interesting information with your company.

Myth 8 – Flickr is just for people sharing wedding photos.

Going back to the main reason for using social media (increased web presence), Flickr is one of the easiest ways to use social media. Simply upload the same images you use for web catalogs and label them with product info, keywords and weblinks and you have one more place which will show up for customers when they make searches. As an added bonus, bloggers searching for images to illustrate their own stories may grab yours from Flickr. Make sure they have watermarks!

Myth 9 – We don’t make enough videos to have a YouTube Channel.

YouTube allows you to make playlists and add videos posted by other users to your channel. If you notice your company or product in customer’s videos, add them to your channel and you’ll have one more place where customers can see you and reach your company on the web.

Along with adding customer videos to your playlists, make sure you tag your own videos as you upload them. Tags are the words at the bottom of photos, blog posts and videos and they are a useful way to help search functions find your posts and videos. On YouTube, tags are especially important as they greatly affect the frequency and position of your video in search results.

The best results come from including a detailed description of the video, and including tags that you see on videos with a similar theme. Don’t be afraid of tags like “awesome”. A huge amount of people spend their free time searching general terms like “awesome video” .

Myth 10 – Once it is set up, we can just leave our profiles and fan pages alone except for when we post links.

Nothing is sadder than a Facebook fan page full of spam or a Twitter mailbox with 600 unanswered direct messages. A social media site is very much like a real party. A good host interacts with all the guests, cleans up messes and sends rowdy guests outside.

The reason social media has the word “Social” in it is because it is based off interaction. It is important to make sure that whoever is monitoring your company’s online activities will be able to answer tech questions, reply to friend requests, link to dealers and diffuse tense situations or customer squabbles.
Don’t start up a giant social media campaign and attend it half-heartedly. It’s better to participate in only one outlet and do it well, than to set up profiles everywhere and leave them neglected like digital ghost towns.

There are many great tools available to help make managing your social media easier and more effective, and if you don’t have the time or personnel to run a full social media campaign, there are several good marketing and PR firms with Social media experts who are happy to discuss and maintain your company’s social media presence.

Hopefully this has inspired you to log on and get to know your customers and fans. Social media is like a free ad in a magazine, or a booth in a world-wide trade show. It takes a little effort, coordination and manpower to get things rolling and keep it staffed and active, but it’s good for your company.

A little over a week ago I attended a marketing and technology conference, hoping to  A) see what the competition is up to and B) maybe learn a few things. As it turns out, I got to do both. We work very hard to stay current on social media marketing, and as a rabid iPhone user I’m already quite familiar with the mobile data hog trend that’s sweeping the tech world (as is my wife, she pays the AT&T bill). What did open my eyes were some numbers presented by Famous Rhodes, Director of eBay Motors.

Some facts Famous bright to light:

• Mobile phone internet commerce is fastest growing commerce sector
  • Smart phones went from 0% to 20% of mobile market in 8 years
  • Over 100 MILLION iPhones have been sold worldwide
  • 160,000 Google phones are activated every DAY
  • By 2013, 40% of internet traffic will be mobile
  • Apple sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 models in the first weekend it went on sale
  • iTunes already has over 225,000 apps
  • Google’s Android has over 70,000 apps in less than one year

Those are BIG numbers. As a communications professional, my goal is to make sure as many qualified eyeballs as possible see my client’s message. The tough part is keeping a finger in a LOT of pies, from Facebook fan pages and YouTube video channels to forums, print PR, TV, newspapers, Twitter and more. The key to conglomerating all this info into a single channel isn’t the computer or TV like everyone predicted 20 years ago – it’s the phone. As it stands I check my email, twitter, facebook and website on my phone constantly. I think most consumers under 40 do the same.

That said, the key moving forward is to obtain an M-Commerce leadership position now, while the field is still young and growing. The video game and fashion industries have already taken a foothold, automotive is lagging behind. We have several new projects in development that will help clients put all data into a single channel available on any phone, and that’s the key to streamlining all the communication strategies into a single stream of information. Of course the info has to be fun and entertaining, otherwise what’s the point?

I’ll have more exciting news regarding these programs soon, in the meantime enjoy Pete, Roger and Keith doing their thing.

The last six months have been really interesting from a crisis PR standpoint. The combination of the public’s insatiable demand for information, the online media world’s never ending quest for clicks, and some unforeseeable circumstances have created some really interesting case studies on how a crisis can unfold and how companies should deal with them in the current new media landscape.

I know this topic has been done to death, but a month later now that the dust has settled, it’s interesting to see how things unfolded. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, the public had been clamoring for more info on the upcoming iPhone 4G, which Apple wouldn’t even acknowledge existed. Then, in late April, the news broke: Gizomodo, a tech blog owned by Gawker Media (which also owns two of our favorite sites, Jalopnik and io9), had possession of a top secret iPhone 4G prototype, dissected it, and they were telling all. Sounds like a hollywood gossip column piece.

As it turns out, an Apple engineer went drinking, forgot the prototype on his stool and an observant (but unscrupulous) passerby picked it up, figured out what it was, called a different tech blog, and when they passed called Gizmodo – who paid for it. They photographed the phone, posted the story, and it got so much buzz is promptly crashed the Gawker comment server. That same night, a lawyer from Apple swung by Giz editor Jason Chen’s house and picked up the phone. Then, the police raided Chen’s home, seized his property, and Apple made rumblings about theft and lawsuits. As it turns out all pretty much settled back down to normal, and Chen ended up scoring huge traffic for his site without anything more than a verbal slap on the wrists. Then the buzz began that Apple leaked the phone on purpose to generate buzz, a silly notion to anyone who has witnessed one of Steve Job’s well-orchestrated summer unveils at Macworld. This is a company that likes to control every minute detail of its message, so leaking a story to a snarky tech blog isn’t its style. Even Gizmodo says so.

At this point, the good news is the world is snapping up iPads like crazy and people are clamoring for the new 4th Gen iPhone. On the other hand, the company’s handling of the situation (denial, then a theft complaint resulting in a raid) makes the normally friendly feeling Apply seem pretty Orwellian. So… less than a week later when Ellen DeGeneres makes a cutesy little farse commercial for her talk show about how hard texting on the iPhone can be (she’s right… especially if you have fat thumbs), you’d think the Cupertino company would just roll with it. Nope… they made a stink with the network and demanded Ellen apologize. You can see the commercial and the apology here:

So… now the company has two killer products, one that’s selling like mad and another coming soon, and Jobs looks like Darth Vader piloting the Death Star. Not good. What could they have done differently? I’m sure the company has a few agencies on 7-figure budgets to tell them, but in my humble opinion they should have done the following:

1. Stick with “no comment” until the phone was confirmed missing

2. Once confirmed, own the mistake, admit it was a prototype phone, thank Gizmodo for finding it and returning it (even before they did so… put the pressure on) then make a statement explaining that every once in a while these things happen, they’re glad reaction has been positive, and thanks to Gizmodo for treating the phone with respect. Other changes are imminent, so this isn’t the final model, but everyone got a sneak peek.

Once the cat is out of the bag, ride the positive PR and buzz and move up the release date. Oh… and don’t put the smack down on the friendly dancing TV host. She makes a living being snarky and poking fun at things… why make the target on your back even bigger?

The last six months have been really interesting from a crisis PR standpoint. The combination of the public’s insatiable demand for information, the online media world’s never ending quest for clicks, and some unforeseeable circumstances have created some really interesting case studies on how a crisis can unfold and how companies should deal with them in the current new media landscape.

I know this topic has been done to death, but a month later now that the dust has settled, it’s interesting to see how things unfolded. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, the public had been clamoring for more info on the upcoming iPhone 4G, which Apple wouldn’t even acknowledge existed. Then, in late April, the news broke: Gizomodo, a tech blog owned by Gawker Media (which also owns two of our favorite sites, Jalopnik and io9), had possession of a top secret iPhone 4G prototype, dissected it, and they were telling all. Sounds like a hollywood gossip column piece.

As it turns out, an Apple engineer went drinking, forgot the prototype on his stool and an observant (but unscrupulous) passerby picked it up, figured out what it was, called a different tech blog, and when they passed called Gizmodo – who paid for it. They photographed the phone, posted the story, and it got so much buzz is promptly crashed the Gawker comment server. That same night, a lawyer from Apple swung by Giz editor Jason Chen’s house and picked up the phone. Then, the police raided Chen’s home, seized his property, and Apple made rumblings about theft and lawsuits. As it turns out all pretty much settled back down to normal, and Chen ended up scoring huge traffic for his site without anything more than a verbal slap on the wrists. Then the buzz began that Apple leaked the phone on purpose to generate buzz, a silly notion to anyone who has witnessed one of Steve Job’s well-orchestrated summer unveils at Macworld. This is a company that likes to control every minute detail of its message, so leaking a story to a snarky tech blog isn’t its style. Even Gizmodo says so.

At this point, the good news is the world is snapping up iPads like crazy and people are clamoring for the new 4th Gen iPhone. On the other hand, the company’s handling of the situation (denial, then a theft complaint resulting in a raid) makes the normally friendly feeling Apply seem pretty Orwellian. So… less than a week later when Ellen DeGeneres makes a cutesy little farse commercial for her talk show about how hard texting on the iPhone can be (she’s right… especially if you have fat thumbs), you’d think the Cupertino company would just roll with it. Nope… they made a stink with the network and demanded Ellen apologize. You can see the commercial and the apology here:

So… now the company has two killer products, one that’s selling like mad and another coming soon, and Jobs looks like Darth Vader piloting the Death Star. Not good. What could they have done differently? I’m sure the company has a few agencies on 7-figure budgets to tell them, but in my humble opinion they should have done the following:

1. Stick with “no comment” until the phone was confirmed missing

2. Once confirmed, own the mistake, admit it was a prototype phone, thank Gizmodo for finding it and returning it (even before they did so… put the pressure on) then make a statement explaining that every once in a while these things happen, they’re glad reaction has been positive, and thanks to Gizmodo for treating the phone with respect. Other changes are imminent, so this isn’t the final model, but everyone got a sneak peek.

Once the cat is out of the bag, ride the positive PR and buzz and move up the release date. Oh… and don’t put the smack down on the friendly dancing TV host. She makes a living being snarky and poking fun at things… why make the target on your back even bigger?

First and foremost: I know there are companies out there that develop and make money with those cutesy little social networking games like Farmville. Strictly speaking, I’m not a fan. I don’t care how many pigs you bought or chickens you traded, and don’t really want it cluttering up my news feed. However, there are a few companies out there doing an excellent job using Facebook to help further their business. They key here is that they don’t push a specific product or try to tell you anything – they use Facebook the way it was originally intended when it was a social tool developed by a few Harvard students – as a fun, entertaining branding tool. The best corporate Facebook pages I’ve seen weren’t even profiles, they were fan pages.

A company with an active fan page that gets updated regularly, has an energetic fan base that posts and replies to content daily and grows constantly is a powerful thing. Again – not to sell X number of widgets through SALE SALE SALE! type tactics, but by developing a relationship with an audience so they look forward to and enjoy your content – and by extension, your brand. We do that through on-the-scene video clips, guessing games, behind-the-scenes photos and more. Comp Cams does an excellent job with their fan page, and I have to give a big tip o’ the hat to Chris Douglas and his crew for the work they do – if you haven’t seen it, log into Facebook and search Comp Cams, it’s worth it.

Now for my rant – having recently been inundated with a few hundred resumes before hiring a few new staffers, let me float this out into the ether: to all of you under the age of 30 hoping to one day gain work in the real world: over-sharing on the internet is not a good idea. I have friends, family and even some business associates that insist on sharing totally inappropriate stuff on Facebook on a regular basis. No, I don’t care when you’re eating chicken. I don’t want to hear your racist political statements, and I don’t want to see a picture of you hammered in the bathroom. Please keep in mind this content lives forever on the web and can one day bite you in the ass. A status update is not a note passed in homeroom, it can’t be thrown away. Same goes for your business fan page: have fun, make it entertaining, but be weary – it will live forever.

To wrap things up, I’ve got a link to a fantastic story about how to best utilize Facebook for business written by Ayelet Noff at at TheNextWeb.com. From tips on increasing exposure to making the most of your content, her story – 10 Steps to Create The Ultimate Facebook Fan Page for your Brand – is a great read. Enjoy.

Until Next Time,

Dan

It’s a column at Forbes.com written by Joshua-Michele Ross, called The Rise of the Social Nervous System.

In the column, Ross argues that since more than half of the earth’s population is now connected in one way or another to the internet (1.6 billion by computer, another 4 billion on mobile devices), social media has transformed the web from an information source into a “hive mind” where common knowledge and information is shared by billions across the globe.

Ross tries to make the point that this rapidly expanding global social media network will eventually help end war and disease and better all mankind.

“The social nervous system makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity. My immediate relationships–with my family, my city and state–begin to span the globe. We can leverage the ubiquity of communications to coordinate real world activity–and just about anyone can do it. Even a kid with a mobile phone can capture a revolution.”

A noble and lofty idea, but one I doubt will come to fruition. While I’m sure the social media wave (blogs, facebook, etc) will create major change in our world, from the end of the newspaper business as we know it, to a radical departure in how government and businesses relate to the people, I think that in the end, left to their own devices, people will use this new technology to catch up on gossip, learn about their neighbors and find out about the coolest new stuff to buy.

It’s human nature. In the end, everyone wants to hang out in their living room and shoot the breeze with their friends. That living room is now an online web app, and their friends might be 1,000 miles away, but we still want to catch up, read about the topics that interest us, and buy cool toys. And that’s not a bad thing. What do you think?