The one social media platform that I think has uses far beyond what any of us have thought of is Twitter. The general concept will creep into our lives in some innovative ways in the coming years. But, I’m probably preaching to the choir as many of you are more heavily involved in Twitter than I am.

I’m consuming more and more information from the medium and would love to interact with more of you there. So, check out the Lonely Marketer’s tweets at Twitter.com/PatSchaber and let me know you’re out there so I can follow you as well.

As a social media fan examples like this are so much fun to see, but imagine if you’d never ventured into Facebook or LinkedIn? How would you feel about seeing it creep in everywhere? Would you feel anxiety that you’re missing the boat or would you look at it as a fad that will soon die out?

I’ve long subscribed to a newsletter called the Pragmatic Marketing Update which focuses on information geared towards the technology product manager and marketer. Until recently I wouldn’t have considered the newsletter innovative in any way. It simply provided some good information that is relative to my career. Then, I saw this recently in the corner of the newsletter:

Obviously, this caught my eye. Pragmatic Marketing jumped into the realm of social media with a prominent LinkedIn and Facebook profile. I’d guess that most people that read this blog or other similar blogs are familiar with these social media sites and probably aren’t that surprised to see it. At last check, their Facebook site had close to 400 members. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like their using it for much more than allowing members to post job openings.

But, what about the Pragmatic Marketing subscriber that doesn’t engage in social media? What do they think of that? They’re seeing sites like these creep into their everyday life more and more.

A recent article on the MediaWeek website also highlighted a similar trend in their article Is Social Media Killing the Campaign Microsite? The article focused on the new method of companies not waiting for customers to come to their campaign landing page or microsite but rather jumping out and engaging the customers where they’re hanging out. From the article:

The growth of social media is causing marketers to realize they cannot expect consumers to always seek them out. Web widgets and video-sharing tools make it easy for any user to take content that formerly might have lived only on a brand site with them wherever they go. And social media sites help them share that content with friends.

Sprite Sips is an example of a Facebook campaign that is aimed at taking the Sprite marketing message to a popular social media site. It looks like the marketing campaign got off to a great start, but has since tailed off. Regardless, kudos to them for realizing that people probably weren’t going to seek out the Sprite website to see their latest campaign.

My belief is that social media campaigns such as the ones I’ve listed above are creeping further and further into people’s lives. I believe the more touchpoints people have with these types of marketing, the more likely they’ll be to jump in and figure out what this is all about.

The small business marketer should be looking at social media marketing tactics for 2008!

What are your thoughts? Do you think people not currently involved in social media will start to get into the action or will they think this is all one big fad?

Valeria Maltoni over at Conversation Agent has invited me to contribute to a string of posts dedicated to businesses measuring the ROI and success from social media efforts. If you haven’t already you should check out Valeria’s site – I think much of my audience would find her content very useful and engaging!

I’ve been asked my thoughts on companies measuring social media efforts many times. In fact, I’ve gone through the process of justifying the effort and definitely have a strong opinion. If you’re a marketing manager wanting to jump into social media, but your superiors are hesitant to give budget for the effort, you really need to think out how to position the medium.

I don’t think you can put a dollar figure on social media to prove ROI. You’ll have a hard time showing what the revenue increases were from your blogging or other social media efforts. The medium has not advanced far enough for that. I also don’t think that the medium is wide-spread enough that you can justify ROI with only subscriber count and number of comments. Many senior executives wouldn’t know what an RSS subscriber even means.

With that said, I think this is a very viable form of corporate marketing and there are a number of ways the medium can be sold up the chain and measured throughout the year:

• Don’t Isolate Social Media: Position social media as a component of your overall marketing plan. If you engage in print advertising, you’re used to making the case that print advertising is a branding component that is used to support your overall marketing messaging. Like social media, the ROI from print advertising is very hard to measure. Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers.

• Sales Tool: When is the last time you created a brochure and were asked to measure the ROI from that effort? You created the brochure to support the overall success of a product or service. The brochure helped to position and describe your product development effort. Blogging as a social media medium could be considered along the same lines. With every piece of content we create for our company blog, we make sure our sales people are aware they can share that content with interested customers. It essentially becomes a unique and innovative tool they can use to spread the word. As long as you’re providing useful content for your audience, they’ll appreciate your effort and most likely visit again.

• Feedback: We’re also finding success in using blogging as a method for gathering customer feedback through surveys, new product ideas and product feedback forms. Social media is supposed to be a conversation, correct? Well, treat it as such and allow your audience to participate in the future of your products. We’ve already received valuable feedback that rivals that of an individual order placed.

• Promote Realistic Expectations: I think many marketers who are into social media and blogging are a bit misguided as to the affect blogging will have on marketing efforts. In the marketing blog community, you can start a blog, link out to 50 other bloggers in your first week and pick up traffic and subscribers that are fun to measure. Not all niches have that opportunity. Many communities lack a large enough niche in which to socialize. What then? I encourage people in less sociable niches not to pump the benefits of thousands of subscribers, millions of page views, or hundreds of comments. It could take years to develop that following in some online communities as the medium matures. Focus less on expected statistics and more on how social media will be integrated with the rest of your product marketing efforts.

• Multipurpose Content: As a small business marketing manager, it’s always music to my ears when someone says that we can use content we’ve created for multiple purposes. If you’re blogging, you should be creating valuable content. Have you thought about using portions of that content for an eNewsletter creation or the beginning of a white paper? Make sure you have a plan to have multiple purposes for your efforts.

• Go Find Your Customer: One easy case I was able to make for blogging was the ability for our company to more easily go meet our audience where they begin most online searches that lead to our website – Google. Most of our website traffic originates on Google so it only makes sense for us to continue our efforts to get in their search results. Blogging platforms are very solid ways to optimize content for search engines – especially if you’re updating often and using the right methods.

• Stats: I know, I know – stats are important. I just didn’t want them to be the focus of this post because not all social media efforts should be measured with analytics. Believe me, I do follow our stats, but I pay more attention to subscribers, comments, and from where the visits originate. These are important statistics to gauge how well your audience is receiving your content.

In two years, I’ll guarantee that there will be measurements in place that prove ROI from businesses engaging in social media. This method of conversing with your audience is growing by the day. But right now we need to focus on social media as a tool in our marketing toolbox that supports all the other tools we’re using in our marketing plans.

I’m supposed to tag some people to also contribute to this conversation, but there are so many people I’d like to hear from that I don’t know where I’d begin. For starters I’d like to see what Marty, Matt, Pat and Stoney have to say. But, if you have opinions and want to chime in, please do – and send me the link to your post and I’ll add it this one.

Reader Responses:

• Measuring ROI on social media investments (Francois Gossieaux – Emergence Marketing)
• Social Media Measurement (Tom O’Brien – A Human Voice)

Admittedly, I’m getting stingy on new blogs to which I subscribe. When I first got involved with social media, I was subscribing to anything and everything. A while back I purged and got down to a manageable amount of daily blog reading. But, more and more people are writing interesting and engaging content and I continually want to add more blogs to my reading list.

So, what am I looking for on a blog site that will urge me to subscribe? If I was starting a blog today and looking to build a subscriber base that included other established bloggers, here are some elements I would include on my site.

• Unique, Actionable Content: To be honest, I don’t care if you’ve been blogging for 5 years or 5 minutes, if I feel I’m going to leave a site having learned something new, count me in. I’m all for subscribing to someone that can teach me something.

• Let Me Share: If you have something good, let me tell others about it. Offering methods to bookmark or post on a favorite social media site is a way to let visitors know how to participate.

• A Recognizable Avatar or Logo: The part about blogging I like best is community. Whether that be through participating on a favorite social media site like Small Business Brief, Sphinn, or StumbleUpon or through frequent commenting, I like to know you’re involved and participating in the discussion.

• Frequent Content: If you go three weeks between posts, you’re not showing you’re committed to blogging. A couple posts a week is fine – it shows you enjoy what you do and are passionate. Displaying recent posts in the sidebar also gives visitors a quick snapshot about your content.

• Have a Focus: I’m typically more attracted to sites that offer a focus and make that focus clear through easily found description or images. If your intent is to write about marketing one day and your trip to the zoo the next – that’s great – just let me know your content will be varied.

• Decorate: Put a few minutes into adding images to your posts or your site. So much of social media is visual perception!

• Show Some Enthusiasm!: I personally love writing that shows a passion for a topic. Energy and enthusiasm should be easy to show in your writing if you’re truly excited about what you’re doing.

Anything else you would add?

This seems to be the week of new site announcements! Along with the Small Business Brief which launched last week, I’ve also had a first peak at a new site called Gooruze which launched earlier this week.

The new site is a very feature-rich community for online marketers. Along with the popular voting and friending features found on similar sites, Gooruze also includes blogging, article, and forum platforms. It really gives you every option you can imagine to spread your knowledge and tap into that of others.

You can also create your own profile and incorporate your blogs feed by mentioning a custom URL like PatrickSchaber.gooruze.com.

So far, I’m pretty impressed with the functionality. But like many other social sites, you get out of it what you put in. Hopefully, many people will have the time to add their content and expertise making Gooruze a success!