My study has concluded that it kills brain cells–and that’s a bad thing. I thought I heard a few years ago that brain cells grow back but I wasn’t able to find any search results that helped:

Social media acts as a stimulant. Only it stimulates the wrong thing. It stimulates a waste of time. Sure it connects you to your friends and family and yes it can help you land business… but for most professionals it isn’t the highest best use of your time.

Yes we are adding to the madness as we talk quite a bit about social media, both here at You Brand, Inc. and also on my podcast at DefiningNewMedia.com. Why do we do this? Simply because it’s what the market wants… it’s a shiny object and that shiny object is what brings us traffic and leads. I follow the marketing rule that says sell what the market wants but deliver what the market needs. But here’s the truth…

Social media is typically the 4^th or 5^th strategy/tactic we help our clients with. Typically there are things within the realm of branding, marketing, lead gen, sales, and business development that take precedence. I’m willing to guess that most likely this is the case for you and your business as well.

What About Your Business?

I’m willing to bet that in your business there are greater marketing opportunities than social media. This is mainly because social media lacks one main thing that makes it a killer marketing opportunity. Intent to purchase or more specifically the immediate need or want to purchase your product or service.

Immediate intent isn’t the only problem. We are entering a time of mass social distraction.

For instance, I logged into Facebook yesterday and a few of my friends shared pictures of their dinner. It made me think… before social media did people take pictures of their dinner and then when you came over they said… “you got to see this, here’s what I ate last night… do you like it?”

It’s not just pictures of dinner or mundane updates, this isn’t a new complaint for the social space. The larger noise problem is the massive increase in spam and business participation. The social media space is becoming more saturated each and every day.

For instance, Direct Marketing News reported that Wal-Mart has launched 3,500 Facebook pages so they can distribute local offers. I’m sure other big box stores can’t be far behind with this strategy.

Social Has Lost the Novelty

Not just the novelty for standing out but also as a novelty in connecting with your target market. It’s not unique or even a competitive advantage to connecting in social. Sure, if you stack up a company that excels in social against one that doesn’t they might have a slight edge (although this depends on industry), in the end it has very little measurable effect on the bottom line.

Increase in noise in social media (image by mariosundar)

But I’m still beating around a larger point. There are greater marketing opportunities in your business than social. Even more important are foundational issues like the definition and dedication to your brand promise and your big idea. A dedication to focus and put effort into these will give you a better measurable result.

Direct Response Marketing

I also believe that this focus on social media clouds what should be the focus of most marketing efforts—direct response. This type of marketing is orientated on creating a sale today. Not spending time, effort, and resources on building a relationship for a sale down the road, and this is the promise of social interaction.

I’m not knocking permission marketing (which is what social ultimately is), I’m saying that if you haven’t locked in your direct response marketing channels before you enter social then you’ve have your the priorities reversed.

Direct response done properly creates predictable results—I’ve never seen a social campaign that has predictable results. Also, direct response can typically be scaled—social can scale but the scalability is exposure and has no bearing on actions you take.

That’s why it’s important to get your direct channel machine effective then add the layer of social media engagement.

The Allure of Social Media

But you say social media is free and you can connect directly with your target market… Yes those are valid arguments to participate. But here are a few problems…

First, social media isn’t free—it’s taking a valuable resource, usually your time (or someone’s time) and there is an opportunity cost inherint in that. Second, sure you can connect with your target market and maybe find “brand evangelists”, ultimately it’s still not something you can scale effectively with predictable results.

That’s what you need your marketing to deliver for you. Your marketing should be your best salesperson. It should be something that you can rely upon to deliver sales, leads, or prospects—that’s its sole goal.

Predictable Results in Your Marketing

I’ve never participated in, heard of or seen a social marketing campaign that produced predictable results. I’ve participated in and seen plenty of direct marketing campaigns that have—for this alone I believe direct marketing efforts should be the primary focus of your marketing efforts. If these have not been dialed in then I believe you have zero business participating in social more than a customer support channel.

That’s step 1, focus on building a strong direct response marketing channels then add social. What are your thoughts… is social such a change in tradiational marketing that I’m off base here?

When marketing for someone to buy your product or service you are always looking for ways to find or move a buyer’s intent. Intent to learn more about your product or more important the intent to purchase.

Here lies the problem with social engagement– lack of intent.

Social media provides the best opportunity for ongoing touch points. Reinforcement of trust and consistency. Also it’s ability to create greater awareness and emotional interaction points. These are some of the most powerful benefits of properly engaging the social space.

Also understanding that social media is all about the soft sell is important but let’s get beyond that for this post.

Why Marketers Love the Web

One of the reasons why the web hit critical mass was that for the first time you could measure the intent of a purchaser. You could then direct ad spend dollars towards what can be deemed transactional searches. To go deeper on this I suggest you check out the post that from AimClear on Query Intent.

So the web gave the ability for intent to be determined based on transactional and clarification keywords. This is a good thing. Now enter social media.

Why Are People On Social Media?

At its core people are on social media to connect with friends and family. They are there to have fun, to escape. It’s key to keep in mind that people haven’t joined Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or YouTube to connect with a brand or company. This point can’t be stressed enough.

When someone goes to Facebook or is on Twitter seldom if at ever are they there to purchase something. Usually this is the last thing on their to mind.

Social media works great for an additional touch point. Another opportunity to create trust and to reinforce consistency from your company or your brand. It’s also great for awareness.

Friends and Family and Your Business

Another powerful element of social engagement for business or an entrepreneur are your interactions happen with someone in a stream amongst their friends and families. So done correctly your messages will be tolerated with the interactions, the pictures, videos, and sharing they are having with people they truly care about.

This is a huge element of social interactions that I believe are important. While this is important it still does not drive to intent to purchase. So when engaging in the social space your interactions have in alignment with what we have spoke about thus far.

Why all this talk with intent? If you keep what I’ve discussed here in mind when you do interactions within the social space you will be ultimately more effective. Your messages and interactions will fit into the expectations of the core users of each social platform you are engaging.

What to do with This?

Before you do an update in social media ask yourself if this message plays towards intent. For instance, if you send out an update about a coupon you are running ask yourself a quick questions. Are doing this because it is easy for you or are you doing it because you believe you can move your audience (followers) towards intent to purchase?

Does this fall into their expectations from you or your company? How does this update play within the other updates they will see at that time? Ask yourself so what? Get into the mind of your audience and ask why should I care?

I know I bounced around a bit in this post I discussed this a little more in my podcast Social Media Intent and Emotional Selling.

To view the report visit this link here.

Facebook rules them all. American’s spend more time on Facebook than any other site. Even with competition from Google+ I see this trend continuing. It’s where your friends, family, and connections are online. The audience still trends towards female’s as they make up 62% of the page views.

A stat that might be surprising to some is that internet users over the age 55 are driving growth of social networking through the mobile internet. I’ve mentioned on the podcast that one of the largest use and growth groups for tablets is the 55+ market. New data from Nielsen says that people over the age of 45 now account for 37% of the tablet market (iPad, market).

Tumblr is growing in strength and engagement. It has nearly tripled its audience from a year ago a 183% change. Audience leans towards female at 53% and 18-49 year olds make up 70% of the audience.

Other Notable Info

• In terms of video it seems women view video more but men tend to watch longer.  I’m not sure what this tells us in terms of video engagement other than men and women might prefer different video types.
• Social networking app usage is up 30% from 3Q 2010. I believe this will continue into Q4 and well into 2012.
• 53% of active social networkers follow a brand and 32% follow a celebrity.
• 75% more likely to be heavy spenders on music
• 47% more likely to be heavy spenders on clothing, shores, accessories

Essentially a very robust comment stream with multiple contributors. These interests help to group your personal interests and also allow you to connect with other Twiners that share your interests as well.

A Twine can include: Bookmarks, Pictures, Videos, and soon more. Also other Twiners then can leave comments on your Twines and the links to the content giving praise or criticism to those links. The power of Twine is where you can create Twines and share insights, links, posts, and other content within the twine. Others who are interested in the same topic can add comments, additional links, posts, blogs, videos, the list is endless.

Twine Moving in the Direction of the  New Semantic Web [you tube video].

To begin Twining go to Squidoo-HowtoTwine.

You can also get a quick overview of the most current Twine news from Marketing Direct Candice Noble as well as you can visit their Quick start Twine at Twine Get Started

Check out some of my and You Brand Twines:

The InternetGuru’s Favorite stuff Twine

YouBrandInc Twine

Niche Branding Twine

President Lincoln was an early adopter of technology in his day.

When Abraham Lincoln was faced with keeping the United States together during the civil war he was fortunate to have a new technology– the Telegraph. For history buffs this historical record gives us amazing insight into the war as a whole and the mind of President Lincoln himself. Lincoln never kept a diary but the telegraph record gives us a peek at his thoughts and shows us that he was comfortable with new technology.

I recently watched a great program on C-Span (Mr. Lincolns T-Mails) from Tom Wheeler where he speaks about his book, “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War.”

No national leader had ever had this technology. Never before was it possible to get a full view of the battlefield all possible with telegram dispatches from every theater of engagement, thoughts of generals, and reports from spy’s. Add to this the speed of communication now available to a commander in chief you could argue it tipped the balance of power for the President and his cause to re-unify the nation.

What About Social Media?

The telegraph was a new technology. This technology was being used in the finance and banking industry but was a little known tool to the national leadership. As an early adopter President Lincoln had to learn how to use it and he had to build a leadership model around it– all while in the middle of the civil war.

The Telegraph (image by cpitcher@verizon.net)

So what is the telegraph? Like social media the telegraph is an electronic form of communication. The telegraph increased the speed at which information and communication could happen, it changed the world, it changed war, and it changed daily life.

Enter social media in today’s modern era– another electronic means of communication. It has increased the speed at which communication happens, it has changed the world, and it has changed daily life.

The Aha Moment

Like all technology advances sometimes it takes a while for people to truly get it. For Lincoln and the Telegraph it took him asking one of his general’s aids if there was anything new on the front. The aid responded “that there was nothing new in the file Sir.”

While this was technically true what Lincoln discovered when he walked into the generals office was a copy of a telegraph with news of the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. This discovery made it apparent that the President was not getting a true look at the war as it was happening. This quickly changed as President Lincoln and congress created a new department that was virtually housed next to the president himself. Now came a real time look at the war before him.

Your Aha Moment

I hope for each business owner or person in business today you have had this aha moment with social media. Never before has it been possible to see the thoughts, emotions, and conversations of so many people. Never before has it been possible to learn what your target market likes, dislikes, and talks about. This power is now in your hand and within your reach.

Something As Simple As Hiking

If your target market liked Hiking, what could you learn? (photo by Rick McCharles)

Let’s say your target market has an affinity for hiking. Good thing to know right? Well let’s go deeper with social media and see how this allows you to learn about your target market.

Here is the amount of people I could find on Twitter who list hiking in their bio: 3,965. Now try reading the bio’s from Twitter on people who list hiking. Would this allow you to learn more about your target market? How about learning more about what interests them and what is important to them?

Use social media to get information from Comments, updates and photos on Collecta.com. Or use SocialMention.com to get strength, sentiment, passion, reach, plus top keywords and users.

Listen and join conversations on Facebook on the Hiking pages here, here, and here. Better yet do a public search on Posts by Everyone on Hiking. Visit some off the profiles… can you learn a little more about your hypothetical hiking target market?

Lincoln Was an Early Adopter and So Are You

Just as President Lincoln used a new technology called the telegraph to get a full picture of a nation at war you can use social media to get a full picture of your market place. No filter, no clerk telling you that there is “nothing new in the file,” just raw actionable intelligence that will help you connect and engage with your target market.

Now think about your target market. How can you use these tools to find more information about them? Can you find more buying trigger points? Are there more ways to emotionally connect your product or service? Can listening in on people’s conversations in real time give you insight you wouldn’t ordinarily have? This new technology– this new form of communication is open for you to explore.

Leave a comment below… tell me what do you think, is there power here?

SWIX is like Google Analytics for social media. You wouldn’t run an important web-site without tracking your traffic patterns, nor should you invest in social media without understanding how it’s working for you.

Here is what I like about Swix:

• It allows you to have a dashboard of all your important numbers, such as total visits to your website, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Facebook friends, Youtube subscribers, page rank, RSS subscribers, and much more.

Finally a social media dashboard

• It’s easy to use and set up, you essentially add a new pod (network) and it’s then part of your dashboard.

Swix allows you to set up Pods (accounts and networks) to track your social media activities.

• Ability to track ROI on a rudimentary level. (this isn’t a limitation on SWix it’s more of a limitation on how you need to track ROI and social media.)

Track ROI and social media. Also track campaigns and events.

• It allows you to run campaigns, such as messaging, or track traffic spikes around a particular event.
• Team setup, so if you have a team you can give access to reports and tracking.

These are the main features that I like but overall the ease of use and the ability to see all relevant information is what I like most about this analytic tool.

What I Wish It Had

• Tracking of interactions across social networks. Yes I know this is almost the holy grail of social tracking.
• Tracking of twitter mentions, this wouldn’t be that hard and is actually in a few applications I’m testing now.
• Ability to add your own manual updated tracking metric. For instance, I do a podcast, I’d like to be able to track subscriber numbers in this application, even it I have to enter it manually once a week.

Check It Out

This is a great application and if your looking for a good way to track progress of your social media outreach I would suggest you check out Swix, I can only seeing it getting better.

4 Tips to reaching the finish line in social engagement. (image by Rykerstribe)

We had a social media marketing presentation yesterday to a group of entrepreneurs, business owners, and people responsible for marketing. I had a good time and when we give these presentations we hand out a feedback sheet. I appreciate every piece of feedback good or bad as it gives me an tremendous insight about what people feel and think about social media.

One of the most common questions was something along the lines of:

…Now I understand social media now but how do I get all this done?

Here are my brief thoughts on this…

Just as everything else in business if it is something that is worthwhile and something that you believe will bring you benefit you will find the time. If for instance a few of your accounts are 30 days late in paying you might take the time to put in a few phone calls to see what the issue is. Social media engagement is the same way.

I do want to give an in-depth post on this here in the near future so now I’ll just list out my thoughts:

1. Schedule

Put it in your schedule. Even if it’s 30 minutes a day. For most people if something is in thier schedule they make it happen. Treat this appointment like a very important meeting in your business– because it is. Also schedule in time weekly to do a analysis on your efforts. This is one of the biggest things you can do to start implementing a social engagement plan.

2. Focus

Focus on learning one to two networks first. Facebook and Twitter probably are the first ones I would suggest. Then move onto others that are relevant or niche networks inside your industry. Also don’t sign up for every tool under the sun. For Twitter I would suggest either Tweetdeck or Hootsuite and for Facebook I would suggest SocialOomph. Although all those tools allow you to manage both so it’s not as big as a choice as it used to be. As you get more comfortable start adding tools to your tool belt that make sense for you and your business.

3. Analyze

Do a self analysis. This concept was crystallized for me when I spoke to Tiffany Odutoye in our latest interview. Analyze yourself or your team to see if your way of working or your personality will fit well within social engagement. Some people are not overtly social, if this is the case for you it might take a little more work and effort.

4. Retain

Retain and put into practice what you learn. Today there are tons of resources for learning how to engage social media. You could spend the next few hours going from post to post just on Facebook fanpages. Here is the key. Yes do your research but take key items that make sense to you and put them into practice right away. At a minimum create a action item list of things to do based on your research. I see this happen many times– someone does tons of research, they understand what they should be doing but they are either overwhelmed or unsure because of way too much information. You really do learn more by doing.

Getting it Done

Oftentimes I find that the technology and the tools create a barrier of understanding. Start with what makes the most sense to you and move on as you get more exposure and experience. That really is the key even with a space like social media that tends to change every few months.

FollowWonk allows you to easily and quickly find your target market by searching Twitter user bio’s.  I like this tool better than others because it allows you sort your search, search by location, friend/follower counts, and displays the results in a very easy to use list.

I put togehter a quick video:

Mentioned in this video:

• http://www.FollowerWonk.com
• http://www.Twellow.com
• http://www.locafollow.com

Main Point: Twitter is and has been working itself into the mainstream fabric of media but also into the backbone of the internet. At a minimum get you or your company positioned for the future. Read further or watch video below.

I have a love hate relationship with Twitter. On one hand I have met a lot of great people with the service. On the other hand it kind of annoys me on a daily basis. I won’t go into that here because I want to focus on why it is essential for you or your company to start to use Twitter.

You might have heard that Google, Bing, and Yahoo have now signed agreements with Twitter to allow data sharing to what is called the Firehose data. Although it’s tough to see how this matters for Yahoo because Yahoo is in an agreement now for Bing to take over its search infrastructure.

All these search engines are starting to integrate twitter into what is called real time search. You might have seen some of it already if you do a lot of searching. The key point is this is not slowing down and it’s picking up as the Twitter team searches to justify their valuation.

Also the other day Twitter released the Firehose access to a few more start ups. These range from single person operations to well known properties like Colleta.com (which is a great service).

Behind the scenes Twitter is working itself into the fabric of the web. So don’t ignore this move but set yourself up to be there as the connection becomes deeper and more meaningful.

What to Do Now

If you haven’t already now is the time to get started with Twitter. Create a personal account and a business account. Use these accounts as much as you can. The key to being able to leverage these accounts in the future is having a seasoned and trusted account. One of the ways trust is accomplished is by time. So the sooner you get started the better off you will be in the future.

Use Search.Twitter.com to find people who you would like to connect with. Follow them and start conversations. Right now it’s just important that you have a well seasoned and no spam account.

Unsure of Where to Start? (Shameless Plug)

Twitter Mastery

We do have Twitter training called our Twitter Mastery Course.

This course is perfect for anybody that wants a step by step path to success with Twitter. You can find more information on that at Twitter Mastery Course.

“People do business with people that they like,” Vetstein said in a recentABAJournal.com blog post. “Facebook enables you to get to know people in a way that strengthens the overall relationship.”

view the Vetstein Law Group page here

This article and the way Richard Vetstein has promoted and utilized facebook is a prime example of one of the best ways any business or professional person can utilize facebook but any form of social media.