Fast Company seems to have an aversion to math or basic research. Their latest story, Does Social Media Have a Return on Investment, says that no one is able to calculate the ROI of social media, and that large brands like Audi and Home Depot are just fumbling around in the dark on determining the ROI of social media.

This is complete and utter crap.

People have been able to calculate the ROI of social media for a few years now. In fact, as Katie Paine (@kdpaine) pointed out in the comments section to this article:

This is ridiculous. Back in 2008, Wells Fargo and SAP were calculating solid ROI from social media campaigns. Social media agencies like Organic have been using sophisiticated data analytics for years to predict outcomes.  You stumbled across a few creative types that are allergic to math and haven’t a clue what data is available who don’t care about measurement or  ROI. And if they are using Klout, the really don’t care much about the accuracy either. Other marketers, the smart ones, are embracing all the data and analytics now available and providing solid ROI on a regular basis.

It’s not that hard to calculate the ROI, or to measure anything when it comes to social media. Here are the basic steps you can use to calculate even the most rudimentary ROI of a sales page:

• Set up Google Analytics on your website. Make sure you put the code on every page.
• Set up Google Webmaster Tools, and use their Campaign Code Creator.
• Append any URL you tweet out or put on Facebook with the Campaign Code Creator.
• Shorten every link you send with Bit.ly, including the campaign code, and send it out. Assign different campaign codes to different messages, tools, and campaigns.
• Track down the visits that filtered down into visits to the sales page. Total up the sales from those visits. Cross-reference them with the contact data that came from the sales form.
• Subtract the cost of your campaign from your sales total. That’s your ROI.

And that’s the writer’s method of dealing with ROI. There are entire suites of tools built to answer the ROI question, and professionals like Katie Paine have been doing it for years.

With thinking like this being erroneously spread by Fast Company and writer Farhad Manjoo, it’s no wonder businesses are afraid to spend money on social media. When uninformed media — who frankly should know better, or should have done some remedial research — start spreading bad information based on their own misunderstanding, it not only shows their ignorance of the industry, it spreads bad information to the rest of the business community.

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• 

Have you gotten any sales leads from Twitter? Have you ever found any opportunities, whether personally or professionally, from the micro-blogging network?

While some of the social media purists might still gnash their teeth and pound their laptops from the safety of their moms’ basements, anyone who wants to see Twitter (and other social media tools) succeed needs to show their bosses that it can generate business. If you’re in sales or marketing, here are four ways you can use Twitter as a lead generation tool.

1) Connect With People in Your Industry.

Twitter is a great way to easily get connected with people in your industry. Use tools like Twellow (for Twitter Yellow Pages) to find people in your industry, and search.twitter.com to find people talking about your industry keywords. Also try Googling a title and/or company with the words “on Twitter” in the search. So, look for VP of Creative Services on Twitter or Professional Blog Service on Twitter, and see what pops up.

If you’re a TweetDeck user or use Twitter lists, save your industry contacts into their own list, and communicate with them. By keeping them in their own list, you’re more easily able to see what they’re talking about.

2) Build Relationships.

The newbie mistake that many new Twitter marketers use is to treat Twitter like an advertising channel. That is one thing you absolutely cannot do. People don’t want you to sell to them.

Instead, establish relationships. Have conversations with them, retweet them, introduce people, share articles, ask them questions. If they’re local people, or you have a chance to attend industry conferences, connect with them in person. Meet for lunch or coffee, and create that all-important offline relationship. Then, you’re a person, not a handle. You have a face, not an avatar. By creating those relationships, you become someone they’ll trust, especially if they ever need what it is that you do.

But never, ever try to sell anything. Do that in phone calls and meetings, when the time is right, not when they start following you.

3) Establish Your Expertise.

When people have a problem, make sure they know you’re the one to solve it. Answer questions, share information, refer useful articles to them. If you write a blog (you do write a blog, don’t you?), share the useful posts with them. Ask them to comment, and leave thoughtful comments on their blog.

If you’re trying to reach people in your industry, write about topics related to that industry, especially if you can make them useful to the problems your Twitter network is having. For example, if you own a Mac repair shop, and you know a bunch of Mac-owning public speakers, and you know a lot of them are having problems dealing with the new Keynote 09 (which, irritatingly, ruined a bunch of my past slide decks. Thank God for backups), you could write a couple blog posts about how to solve that problem.

Then, forward the article on to them via Twitter or DM. They’ll see that you know your stuff (as well as theirs), and they’re more likely to call you for that problem that can’t be fixed with a few keystrokes, or explosive cursing and an external hard drive.

4) Direct or Facilitate the Conversation.

If you create the subject people are talking about, or steer people to the place where they can find answers, you are helping people figure out they may need your product or service in the first place.

The best example I can give is Apple computers. Before 2001, no one knew they needed a portable MP3 player. No one knew they needed a way to play music on anything besides a portable CD player. No one knew they needed a way to create or listen to podcasts, or that they could even learn through radio shows of random length and scheduling. Once Apple introduced the iPod, people realized they needed this device, and the industry changed.

By directing or facilitating the conversation, you can help people see the pain point they never knew they had, and they will look to you for solutions.

How do you use Twitter as a lead generation tool? Do you even do that, or do you think it’s just wrong and that people shouldn’t do it? Leave a comment, and let us hear from you.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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• 

Web pages are useless without traffic, and the same is true about LinkedIn profiles. It doesn’t matter if you are looking for new customers, a job or just more connections, no traffic = no opportunity. Here’s a simple strategy I used to increase the traffic to my LinkedIn profile page from 3-4 people per day to 70-80 people per day (that means 27,000+ visits in a year). Feel free to make it your own:

Step 1: Figure out what your goal is with your LinkedIn Profile.

This isn’t that hard. Your LinkedIn profile is a resume with a couple of places you get to be creative, and there are really only a few practical uses for LinkedIn. Most likely your goal is one of these four:

1. Finding New Customers
2. Finding a Job
3. Expanding your Network
4. Recruiting people

Step 2: Make your summary do something.

Your summary is the block of text that goes right below your vital stats on your LinkedIn profile page. You can put four or five pages of text there, and you can say whatever you want. Most people use it to talk about how great they are. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to change our summary into something that grabs people’s attention and gets them to take action. That means we’re going to talk about our visitor’s favorite person in the world: our visitor. In other words, we’re going to tell people “what’s in it for them”.

The key, according to LinkedIn guru Flyn Penoyer is to make your summary be about the reader. That means you are going to use the word “you” a lot, Here are the most common goals for LinkedIn, and what you can do with your summary:

Step 3: Change Your Professional Headline

Note: This is the most important step, but you’ll look like an idiot if you don’t do steps 1 and 2 first.

Right now, your professional headline (the one line ad for yourself that goes next to your picture) probably says something about you like “Innovative Sales Leader” or “Customer Acquisition Guru”. While this makes you look good, it doesn’t engage people who see your profile, and if it’s to braggy or buzz word riddled, it probably acts more like opportunity repellent. Since the professional headline shows up everywhere you do, right next to your picture, we’re going to make it drive people to click on your profile and learn more. So, out with the “Foremost Change Agent and Project Manager” and in with “I can make your project finish on time and 10-25% under budget. Visit my profile to find out how.” (Oops. I just clicked on your profile). Here’s what I did with mine:

Before

After

The results: I’m getting 10-20x more visits to my profile page every day.

Tying it Up

So, we’ve changed our summary so it tells our visitors what’s in it for them and called them to take action. Then we changed our professional headline into a powerful invitation to view our profile page (where the summary lives). Now it’s time to get the word out. This is the best part. All you have to do is participate on LinkedIn. When you post a message in a group, ask a question or send messages to other LinkedIn users, your headline is right next to your picture… click.

Mike Seidle

Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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• 

Kim Kardashian annoyed more than a few Twitter users when it was leaked that Kardashian commands $10,000 to send a promotional tweet out to her then-2.7 million followers (now 5+ million).

(Kardashian denies that she receives that much money. Rather, she says she just tweets about products she likes.)

While I don’t follow her, I’m sure that her 5 million followers (minus the ones who aren’t spam bots and people who abandoned Twitter after a month) are looking forward to reading something interesting and not very vapid or shallow. (Yeah, good luck with that.)

How disappointing is it for her fans to learn that their favorite non-celebrity celebrity is only telling you she likes her shoes because someone forked over 10 grand to say so? While marketers think a so-called celebrity’s time and endorsement are valuable, they are also showing they think my time or interest isn’t.

So I have a new offer to marketers who want me to read celebrity endorsements and social media marketing messages: I will read anyone’s tweet, watch their commercial, or read their marketing copy for a fee.

That’s right. You can pay me to absolutely look at, read, watch, and consider your product. Think of it as a personal endorsement. After all, my time is valuable. Time I could spend working or being with my family is instead interrupted by you and your spokespeople trying to get me to buy something. And I do my best to ignore it, hide from it, or block it completely. So you come up with something new and creative, which means I have to do something new and creative to avoid it.

So how about you pay me instead? If you pay me, I will read whatever you put in front of me (except for that damn Kay Jewelers ad where the brain-addled woman is afraid of a thunderstorm). Rather than spending $10K on someone who is famous without actually doing anything useful, spend the money on me, and I will read or watch to your heart’s content.

According to my new Pay-For-View pricing schedule, I will:

• Read any celebrity advertising tweet for $75. Any non-celebrity advertising tweet is only $25. (Hey, if you’re forking out $10,000 because someone is famous, chances are I find them annoying. So the extra $50 is for the wear and tear on my soul.)
• Visit any company website for $150, and spend 10 minutes on the site, plus additional charges for any of the following:
• Watch any video less than 5 minutes in length for $200. For videos longer than 5 minutes, it’s an additional $75 per minute.
• Read any marketing copy, up to 750 words in length, for $150. Since I can read 750 words faster than you can say it in a video, I’ll cut you guys a break on the cost.
• Also, any marketing surveys, registration forms, or instances where I have to give you my personal information is $100 plus a $25 per minute processing charge (minimum 5 minutes). I had originally considered charging a flat fee per information field (i.e. mailing address, phone number, etc.), but the rate sheet ended up being three pages long and still required a lengthy explanation.

Now, these prices are actually fairly reasonable, and I feel completely justified in charging them. After all, my time and consideration are valuable. I have a job, a family, and disposable income. I’m not easily swayed by celebrity endorsements, and will go out of my way to avoid most commercials and marketing messages. In short, you’re spending all that money to get celebrities to reach me, and I’m going to support you (and them) by spending my money. The least you can do is support me for spending my time thinking about you.

Kim Kardashian may be on to something, and I have to give her credit for helping me stumble upon the idea. As a thank you, I will read her next three promotional tweets for free.

No guarantees I’m buying anything though.

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• 

I’m surprised at the number of attorneys who aren’t blogging.

If there was any form of communication made for attorneys, it’s blogging. It’s not a website, not TV, and certainly not the Yellow Pages. Here are five reasons why private practice attorneys should be blogging.

1. You show up higher on local search engine results. Many people are forgoing their Yellow Pages in favor of Google. And Google will automatically give results from your current location, not where they think you live. So if someone looks for an intellectual property attorney in Indianapolis (like my friend Matt Schantz), Matt may or may not appear at the top of Google’s results.
2. You demonstrate your knowledge and experience in your particular field. If you specialize in corporate law for green companies, you should be writing about green issues. For example, if you wanted to specialize in working with alternative energy, you should be writing about alternative energy law, alternative energy news, and even Congressional bills that may affect alt. energy companies. The net result is that you’ll be seen as one of the leading voices for the industry, and more likely to be called whenever a company needs your advice.
3. It’s a way to build your personal and professional brand without spending a lot of money advertising. It’s also a way to market yourself while staying within your state bar association’s rules. For example, we have a Kentucky law firm as a client, and we know that as long as we’re offering information (see point #2), and not providing legal advice, we’re within their guidelines. And our client still gets the benefit, because they’re beginning to win local searches for their specialty, and being seen as an expert in their particular field.
4. It’s a way to learn new information. The old “see one, do one, teach one” model comes to mind here. If you read something, you may know it, but if you have to explain it to someone else, you’ll truly understand it. This also forces you to find something new to write about on a regular basis. It keeps you up to date on your chosen specialty, by reading different news articles, law journals, case law, and court decisions.
5. You can improve your writing. Your blog should not be written for other attorneys, it should be written for clients. And your clients don’t talk or read like attorneys, so they don’t do “wherefore, whereas, and heretofore.” They do “if, except, and until now.” The best way to create tight, easy-to-understand plain English is to be forced to do it every couple of days

Photo credit: umjanedoan (Flickr)

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• 

The one advantage social media marketing has over traditional marketing is accurate measurement.

With tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmasters, SEOMoz, and even bit.ly, you can see how well your corporate social media campaigns are working. (Doug Karr has a great post, Your Analytics is Missing the Mark, on the different social media tools you can use.) I can use these tools to measure my social media performance, down to the visitor, the second, and the penny.

But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

Why Can’t You Predict the ROI of Social Media?

Last week, I talked about why it’s important that — at least in early discussions — you ignore the question of “what’s the ROI of social media?”. That’s because, as Scott Stratten said, you can substitute words like “Twitter” with “talking.” Then you’re asking questions like “what’s the ROI of ‘talking?’” “why should we be ‘talking’ with our customers?”

Part of the reason is that social media is so new, it’s difficult to say what your ROI is going to be. For example, we have one client that has $20 million in sales each year, and we helped him grow his sales by 6% through social media. We have another client whose business is big enough to employ four people, and she tripled her sales — that’s 300% growth — through social media.

So, our range of success is 6% to 300%. That’s a pretty big range. We could split the two and say “on average, you can expect 153% growth,” but that wouldn’t be accurate or honest. And we could say “you can expect anywhere from 6% – 300% growth,” but that would also be misleading.

However, what we can tell you is that we can accurately measure every step of your social media efforts, from the number of people who visit your blog, how they got there, which stories they read, how long they read it, whether they read another story, and did they follow your sales funnel?

But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

Traditional marketing can’t do that

The reason the ROI question for social media is rather silly is because traditional marketing can’t measure those same numbers with the same amount of accuracy. To be fair, traditional marketing has a long history of measurement, and they can give you basic numbers, like “the industry ROI on direct mail is 2%,” or “100,000 people usually watch this station locally on Sunday nights.” But they’re still missing a big piece of the pie.

• Cable TV stations like to tell you how many homes get their channel, not how many people watch it. The Golf Channel boasts their channel is received by 110 million homes, but they don’t tell people that their daily viewership averages around 77,000.
• Magazines and newspapers will tout their readership, but they can’t tell you how many people read a particular story on a particular day, or how many people saw your ad.
• Billboard companies can give you an approximation of how many people drive by, but they can’t tell you whether they actually looked at the billboard, or how many times people have seen it.

And bottom line, none of these marketing channels can tell you which of your ads compelled people to buy, or which one contributed to increased sales.

The closest you can come to measuring these channels is by putting channel-specific phone numbers and websites on the ads. If someone calls that number or visits that website, you can assume they responded to your ad. But you still don’t know how many people saw it or how many times they saw it, and you can’t monitor overall traffic.

Profit is the most important measurement

Of course, the only thing that really ultimately matters is your profit. It’s not just increased sales (although that’s important), it’s also reduced costs in customer service, travel, and even printing. If social media can help you answer customer questions while reducing phone hours, improve networking to help grow relationships without traveling, and disseminate marketing information without printing out brochures.

The analytics tools that exist can show you all of these things. And by tying those figures in with your customer service, sales, and marketing departments, you can easily figure out how social media is making or saving you money.

But you can’t do that with traditional marketing.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

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• 

Fellow social media pro Jay Baer, and author of The Now Revolution, is busting some social media myths with his latest post, Destroying the 7 Myths of B2B Social Media.

My favorite busted myth was “My Customers Don’t Use Social Media”. I hear that one a lot from businesspeople.

“That’s interesting,” I said to a business person once. “How do you know?”

“Well, because I don’t use it,” said this otherwise-intelligent business owner.

I wanted to say, “You drive a sedan. Does that mean all your customers buy sedans? You have two kids. Do all your customers have two kids?” But I didn’t, because I’m a nice guy.

However, had I known what Jay knows, I would have instead offered some pretty interesting statistics instead:

According to the recent Social Technographics® report from Forrrester, 81% of U.S. adults with an Internet connection use social media in some form or function. Further, last year’s Forrester study of B2B technology buyers found that they use social media nearly twice as much as U.S. adults overall.

In other words, if 67% of US homes have broadband access,, 81% of them are on a social network, or 54.27% of people with broadband access are on a social network.

That’s half your customers, half your vendors, half your competitors. And if social media is so cheap to use, and your competitors are already on there, they’re reaching your vendors and your customers more efficiently, more frequently, and more effectively than you are.

Don’t assume that just because you don’t use social media means that the rest of your customers are waiting to join social networks until you do. Just because you do or don’t do something doesn’t mean your customers will follow suit.

If you want more proof, Jay recommended that you take your customer email list, and see which of them are active on different social media accounts by using Flowtown or Gist.

Another way to see whether your customers are using social media is to do the following:

1. Create a new Gmail account with your company name or your name. (You should do this if you’re trying Flowtown or Gist too.)
2. Upload your entire customer list to Gmail. (Don’t worry, your original is still safe.) Merge any duplicates.
3. Create a Twitter account (Twitter.com) or LinkedIn account.
4. You’ll be prompted to import your email list to see which of your contacts are on that network. Follow those instructions and connect your Gmail account.
5. Start connecting with/following anyone in your list.

Those are the people who are using Twitter and LinkedIn. My guess is that at least 25% of your list will be found on those two networks, and possibly more.

So why aren’t you communicating with your customers on this channel? It’s cheaper than any advertising or trade shows. It’s more effective than traditional marketing. It targets your audience better than direct mail. It’s new enough that people are still paying attention to it. And it’s got enough acceptance that it’s not going away.

Basically, if you think your customers don’t use this because you don’t like it, you’re making a big mistake. Social media is not going to go away, and it’s only going to get bigger. People said the same thing about the Internet, computers in the workplace, fax machines, and telephones. But newer, more technologically-daring companies are willing to try these things, and they’re going to leave you in the dust.

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• 

Do you know how search engines can help your business?

Are you hearing new terms like “search engine marketing” and “online marketing,” and wondering if it’s even important? Or do you think that people in your industry aren’t using search engines to find your company, because most of your sales come from offline results?

If you think so, you’d be wrong. Just because you aren’t getting sales through your website doesn’t mean no one in your industry is getting sales that way. It just means you’re missing an important revenue stream.

How big is search engine marketing?

According to a February 2010 SearchEngineLand blog post, Google reports 34,000 searches per second. That works out to 2 million searches per minute, 121 million per hour, 3 billion per day, 88 billion per month.

So if you think that “no one searches for us,” or “our customers don’t Google us,” how do you know? What stats have you looked at to tell you that no one is Googling your site? And if they’re not Googling your site, is it because no one in your industry uses the Internet, or is it because your website lives on page 6 and no one goes that deep into the results? (Hint: It’s the latter.)

To paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk,

“If you’re not using (Google) because you’re in the camp that thinks it’s stupid, you’re going to lose. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s stupid. It’s free communication, and there’s a crapload of users.”

While Gary was originally talking about Twitter, the idea is still the same. People use Google, and they’re looking for you. The problem is you’ll never know it, because they’re finding your competitors instead.

Want to see? Go to Compete.com and type in your URL and the URLs of your biggest competitors and see where you rank on web traffic. If you haven’t done much on search engines, you’ll see your competitors pulling down bigger traffic results than you.

Those traffic results equal sales. Even if your competition is only closing 1% of their web traffic, that’s a lot more than you’re closing.

But my site appears higher on Bing than it does Google. Shouldn’t I focus on Bing?

While Bing may be great in some things, and they have cool TV ads, Google is still by far the dominant search engine. They control 71.59% of the total search engine market. Yahoo and Bing own 14.28% and 9.87% respectively.

Bing is even starting to partner with Facebook, and will provide some of their search results over there. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to crush Google. It only means they’re going to eat away at some of their market share.

For marketers, this means you should focus most of your attention on Google right now, because that’s where most of your traffic is going to come from. If you can win some Yahoo/Bing searches, that’s great, but Google is where you should be focusing your attention at the moment. (And if Yahoo/Bing/Facebook ever gives Google a run for their money, you’ll be able to optimize for Bing as well, when the time comes.)

So what does improved SEO mean to me?

Here are a few reasons you need to focus on search engine marketing as part of your marketing efforts:

• Increased web traffic means increased sales. The more qualified traffic you bring in, the more money you can make.
• Search engine traffic is easier and more cost effective than traditional marketing. You don’t have to spend as much money on Internet marketing as you do on traditional marketing. The average month’s Internet marketing spend can be a fraction of your marketing spend on radio & TV spots, billboards, print advertising, or trade shows. A basic Internet marketing campaign can cost as little as $2,000 per month. (When I was in the poultry business, our minimum budget for a trade show was $2,000 for a 10×10 booth at a three day event in another state.)
• You can track Internet marketing through packages like Google Analytics. You can’t track the effectiveness of billboards, broadcast or print ads. Sure, you can count how many calls you get, but do you know how many people saw or heard those ads? What’s the actual percentage of people who called you? With Internet marketing, you can see the who, what, when, where, and how of each customer. You can see which strategies succeed, and focus more energy on those, while dumping those that don’t perform.

What is a search engine marketing campaign worth to you?

Let’s say your biggest competitor gets 5,000 leads per month on their website, and they do a rather poor job of search engine optimization themselves, which means they’re ripe for the picking.

And let’s say some basic SEO and blogging could siphon off just 10% of their traffic. That’s 500 more leads to your site per month.

And let’s say 10% of those leads — 50 people — are truly qualified. They’re not gawkers, not people out for a stroll, but are actual potential buyers and decision makers. You set up a process where people who match your ideal customer are funneled into your system, and the non-qualified customers are funneled out. So your web traffic is up, and you’re getting 50 new actual, solid leads per month.

You’re good at your job, so you close 10% — just 5 people — of those qualified leads. Remember, if they’re qualified, it means they’re very interested in what you sell. You don’t have to convince them to buy what you’ve got, you just have to show them you’re the best.

Let’s say you’ve got a high dollar item, and make $10,000 on a single sale. Closing five of those sales just added $50,000 to your bottom line.

A single sale would have paid for the $2,000 per month investment you just made, and netted you $8,000. But we now have an ROI of 2,500%, which not only paid for the $2,000 per month fee, but got you enough money to hire someone to handle the new workload (and you just earned it in a single month).

Admittedly, these are some hypothetical numbers, but you see my point. If you want to get an idea of what search engine marketing can do for you, do some basic research:

1. Find out who the leader in your industry is.
2. Use Compete.com to figure out your web traffic versus theirs.
3. Then figure out how it would improve your bottom line if you could take just 10% of their traffic, and close 10% of those new leads.

Once you know this, don’t worry about how much an Internet marketing program will cost. Worry about how much it’s costing you by not doing it. If you were our hypothetical business, the old school methods are costing you $50,000 per month.

And one day, they’re going to cost you a lot more, because one day, your competitor is going to figure out how to do this stuff for themselves.

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• 

Facebook Controversy

This week, there has been a lot of discussion about Facebook Applications and privacy concerns. The issue for most is that Facebook is not policing their application developers well enough to audit what they are doing with Facebook user information. It is a legitimate concern. When users “grant permission” by signing up for an app, developers can collect pretty much anything they want.

While the information is not supposed to be leaked to 3rd parties, it is being leaked. Unlike scanning for your email address to spam you, depending on how much information you’ve given to Facebook, these developers are getting demographic information about you through your Facebook ID. It’s pretty easy to do, too.

As a marketer, Facebook is a goldmine. If you can create the right application, and it goes viral, you can collect a lot of information on users you otherwise would not be able to get.

So, how do they do it?

You can find the Facebook Developers instructions on the Facebook developers site.

In a nutshell, there are APIs that need to be followed, but that very doable. Here is what it takes to build the Permission button.

Note the fields it can collect. Based on the level of permission, it gives the application developer access to your information which can be sucked out into their own database.

Once you have their data, you can now communicate with personalized messages to your audience. Here’s how that’s done:

This is pretty easy for any developer to do, and many of them are. So, the debate happening today is a healthy one. As a user, you have to be aware of what is being collected about you. If you have a problem with it, beware. Make sure you are very selective about who you give access to your personal information.

If you are a marketer and can provide a value add experience for your fans, this is an excellent tool for helping build your list, personalize their experience and reach your audiences in new ways. But like all things in Social Media, don’t be evil about it. Make sure you are being responsible with the information. You will get more fans and your list will grow as a result, and you won’t make the news for being an information pirate.

Paul Lorinczi

Paul Lorinczi is the President of Professional Blog Service. The goal of the company is the help clients use Blogging and Social Media to expand their business online through planning, execution, and measurement.

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• 

The recent survey from Marketing Profs (Small Biz Report: Social Media Adoption Levels Off) makes me wonder if corporations are starting to catch up to small businesses in the area of social media, or if small businesses are slacking off. (Disclosure: Marketing Profs’ Ann Handley is writing the forward to Kyle Lacy’s and my book, Branding Yourself).

The wave of social media adoption has tapered off: 24% of small businesses now use social media, the same level recorded six months earlier. Among them, 82% use Facebook, 38% use LinkedIn, and 30% use Twitter.

Among small business owners who use social media, 73% have a company page (down from 75% six months earlier), 65% post status updates (down from 69%), and 51% monitor comments made about their businesses on social sites (down from 54%).

While news like this is usually the cue for the link bait vultures to start shrieking, “Small business social media is dying!!” or something like “nobody’s doing social media anymore,” the less hysterical of us choose to see this as a the beginning of an interesting trend. And it poses a couple of interesting questions for those of us in social media:

• What’s causing the drop in things like monitoring comments (3% drop), posting status updates (4%), or having a company page (2%)?
• Can this drop be attributed to social media fatigue, or is it an indicator that people are willing to try the shiny new object, but will abandon it if it’s not producing any results?
• Or are small businesses trying social media, but then get distracted by their regular work, and lose interest in the system?
• Could this even be attributed to companies that hire interns and entry-level employees, hand them the keys to the social media car, but lose all their efforts when the interns and entry-level people move on?

And most importantly, does this drop represent new opportunities or lost ones for social media professionals? Can they revive the interest in the businesses that abandoned their efforts? Or are these cases where the professionals could have helped, but the businesses are soured on social media?

What have you been seeing in your own work? Are clients giving up social media or embracing it? Are they easily distracted by the latest social tool, or do they focus on the ones they’re using?

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My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

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