Day 3 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business was an intro to using Facebook for marketing your business.  Since our surveys told us that most of the class already had accounts, we decided to skip the really elementary material and jump right into something really helpful: how you can separate your personal and professional life on Facebook.

Like all the other days of this seminar, we talked a great deal about strategy.  If someone doesn’t claim the saying “in all things, have strategy” then I’m going to!  Here are the slides from our class today:

Tomorrow we’re going to cover:

• Fan pages vs Groups
• Advertising
• How to grow your Page and add Fans
• Best practices for B-to-B organizations

Awesome first class in our Social Media Crash Course for Business series that we’re hosting with Howell Marketing Strategies! We covered the basics of social media:  why it’s important and why you should evaluate these tools and see if they are a fit for you organization.

The top 2 reasons were:

1. 3 out of 4 Americans are using Social technology
2. Social media marketing is like word of mouth…. on steroids

Here’s a copy of the slides that we presented to our 11/30 class:

Today I attended a great conversation about Social Media, hosted by Howell Marketing and the Memphis Daily News, that was aptly titled “Joining the Conversation.”

There was a great keynote from Dave Chase of Altus Alliance (and formerly of Microsoft), and the panel was comprised of notable names from FedEx and Pinnacle Airlines, among others.

I was struck by something that Doug Shockey, COO of Pinnacle, mentioned when answering a question from the audience about how to plan a successful social media strategy. His comment echoed one that I’ve heard often from people in business who are trying to wrap their head around this new channel: you have to create a sustainable platform for using social media.

I couldn’t help but think about how the opposite is true. Social media is changing so quickly that finding a sustainable model for using some of these channels would be an exercise in futility. This whole online conversation is accelerating and spiraling upward, so I would almost advocate that a truly sustainable model for marketing on the social web should not be your goal at all. At least, not in the sense of using one particular service or network.

The cost of getting involved with social media is so low (free in most cases, with the only cost being your labor, or the cost of your agency) that you don’t have to worry about a long term commitment to one platform or another.

So what if Twitter isn’t sustainable as a marketing platform? It’s a powerful platform now, but what about if they start charging $9.95 per month? “How many people do you think will continue to use it then?” as Ken Woody from Innova, a Memphis VC company that invests in medical and life sciences start-ups, said today.

My Take-away from the panel

At first, what I took away from this conversation about the online conversation made me feel like I got stuck with a crappy gift from a dirty Santa party. I should have learned something valuable from these smart guys in marketing and business, right? Well maybe I did- I just didn’t realize it at first. The realization that planning your social media strategy to death can be fatal is pretty interesting, once I started thinking through it.

Don’t get me wrong here- before we even think about launching a social media campaign for one of our clients, we always define the goals and objectives. But beyond that- you just have to dive in and watch the conversation unfold. Why? Because it is conversational. You don’t script every personal conversation you have, so why would you try to do so for the online conversation?

I spoke with a long-time friend at the event who works for a Fortune 1000 organization in their PR/Communications department. She’s been urging them to get a social media strategy in place and at least join the conversation. But that idea gets mired in the corporate red tape, so nothing happens since they can’t iron out a corporate-wide communications plan for all their brands. Meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder what that organization’s competitors are doing. Are they being just as cautious, or has my friend’s company missed the boat?

Social Media represents a new marketing channel, so the first one out of the gate will likely reap the lion’s share of the reward. Marketing 101 says to be where your customers are, and your competitors aren’t. There is an opportunity now that hasn’t existed for decades, simply because mass media has always held all the keys and guarded all the doors.

Don’t over-think your social media strategy;  define your objectives, and jump into the conversation. Be transparent, produce good content, and follow the 12:1 rule of putting in more than you get out, and you’ll be just fine. Trust me- I’m on Twitter, so that means I’m a social media guru!

If you think about it, when the chips are down and things aren’t going well, most people/companies/organizations return to what has worked well in the past. That is just how we’re wired; most of us will pull back and hunker-down with our tried-and-true methods until things start to look up.

There are some things that you need to consider about this approach if you plan to continue to grow your business through online marketing during this difficult time, because online marketing isn’t the same as the marketing you may have done in the past. You cannot take the strategies and tactics of traditional marketing and apply it to how you participate on the Internet and expect to see solid results.

Old media was designed to sell ads. That’s how you and I got access to TV programming and cheaper newspapers- because advertisers paid the freight. That is how the Internet started out and, in many ways, advertisers still pay part of the note for sites/services/features that we enjoy for free. The difference is that, in the online world, the Internet doesn’t care because marketers no longer get to interrupt and try to command our attention, insisting that we see their message. Similarly, advertisers have lost the ability to carefully control what we know about their brand and what it stands for – we have such proliferation of information available that we can quickly and easily find out about a brand’s stance on issues of importance to us.

This is one of the main concepts that we try to talk to people about with regard to Social Media Marketing: brands need to fundamentally change their posture in order to succeed in this new marketing environment. It’s no longer about pushing a one-way message; instead, it is about providing relevant content and creating a natural draw for that information with your targets. It’s about listening to your customers’ interests and sending them information they’ll value and care about. It’s no longer about your brand and what you do, it is about what you can do for your prospects and customers.

There has to be a wake up call for marketers because the online world is becoming the primary media for reaching our target markets. According to a study released today by Pew Research, the Internet has overtaken newspapers as the primary source for news, but you must remember that the same rules do not apply to online marketing. As a marketer, you need to give up on the idea of pushing what you sell as a one-way message and embrace more direct communication with your targets, and focus on creating relationships and joining in the conversations that are already taking place online- conversations that involved you and your brand. You need to be a part of those conversations, so the time to engage is now.

I’m not an economic or financial expert, but I do know that they are doing an amazing amount of artificial manipulation of our economy, and all of that is going to eventually turn things around for this country. The U.S. is the biggest business in the world, it is not going to tank; we’re just going to have to ride it out for a little while until things start to turn back around. That being said, why would you sit and wait to start securing your place within this new marketing space? With such a small window to secure your position on the forefront as an communicator with your prospects and customers, can you afford to wait until this official recession is over?