Social media is more than just a fad, and for many companies, it is becoming a bigger, more integral part of their overall marketing mix.  Social media presents numerous opportunities for businesses that might otherwise cost a company thousands (if not millions) of dollars in marketing and advertising spend.  According to eMarketer, in 2010 social media spend for B2B industries is projected to increase 60 percent over last year. But, what does this have to do with you and why should your business use social media?

• The cost to enter and participate in the social space is minimal. Compared to other forms of marketing, such as print, broadcast and even online advertising, the cost to market your business and your brand in social media is relatively low.  The greatest cost will be time spent and human resources, but your investment will go a long way (see other reasons below) – talk about cost effective marketing!
• You can boost corporate and executive thought leadership. Focus on sharing industry expertise, insight and knowledge so that people view you and your company as a resource first and foremost.  This develops a company’s trustworthiness.
• Opportunities for providing customer service and feedback abound. Maintaining and improving client relations, and courting and conversing with potential customers create many opportunities to improve your company’s customer service reputation, and also allows for increased engagement with your stakeholders.
• You can dramatically increase traffic to your company website. Your presence on search engines will increase.  For example, a Google search for “Marketwire” results in page-one ranking for our YouTube channel and Twitter account.  This presence is an inevitable way of increasing traffic to your website.
• You can better manage and monitor your brand. In social media, everyone has a voice.  If your customers are not talking about your brand, you don’t exist.  Whether you choose to listen to the conversations about you and your company is up to you, but realize that people are indeed talking about you.   Seize the opportunity.  Positive comments should be rewarded with gratitude.  Negative comments will happen on occasion and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.  You will be surprised how often a perceived negative comment was a simple misunderstanding, how enthusiastic folks in the social space become when they learn that companies are listening to them, and how eager they are to rectify adverse situations.  If you don’t monitor what is being said about your brand on social media networks, you will miss these opportunities.
• Social media is a great place for (free!) competitive research. It is critical in business to know your competitive landscape. Social media allows you to easily monitor what your competitors are doing and what other people are saying about them.  Did they recently redesign their website?  Did they launch a new product?  What do others think?
• You can generate leads and better develop your business. If your current and potential customers are online, you need to be there, too. Social media participation requires equal investments of time, strategy and patience, and generating leads through your social media efforts can be the ultimate payoff.  But remember to be true to the spirit of social media and act honestly and transparently.  Don’t use social networks as one-way marketing and advertising channels. Instead, talk to people and engage them and leads will begin to trickle into your sales funnel.

Here are a few different types of social media:

The original social media networks:

• Forums (i.e., message boards)
• Blogs

Specialized social media and growing exponentially:

• Microblogging (Twitter)
• Photo sharing (Flickr)
• Video sharing (YouTube)
• Social bookmarking (Digg)
• Wikis (Wikipedia)
• Podcasts (iTunes)
• Social communities (Facebook, MySpace)

No one really knows how social media will change in the coming weeks, months or years. One thing’s for sure: It’s not going to disappear. Rather, it’s going to grow, develop, morph into who-knows-what. Look at it this way: Better to start now, while social media’s realm is still relatively easy to grasp.

Admit it. You can’t resist it. Thanksgiving in the U.S. has, since I can remember, signaled the start of shopping and socializing. And no one is immune. Including you. Black Friday beckons to all and in the digital age never before has this siren sounded so loudly. And never before have so many of us answered her call, taking shopping and socializing traditions to new heights and new forms.

Even in today’s fragile economy, while bottom lines won’t prove the season’s spending as a success (or failure) for weeks to come, social media marketing offers insights and tracking abilities that do prove consumers are definitely window shopping, or as Google Trends indicates, searches worldwide for Black Friday Deals are being conducted at “volcanic” proportions.

It used to be that we’d wait for our holiday shopping circulars to come to us via snail mail. Glossy colorful slicks: eye candy for the shopaholic. It used to be that during drive time, while listening to random radio tunes, we’d be lulled into desire for products promoted in jingle-bell style. And it used to be that in between our favorite sitcoms and serial dramas, those award-winning television commercials would entice our auditory and visual senses, pushing us out the door and to the store to buy. So come Black Friday, traditionally, we’d make a date with friends to meet at the mall for some good old-fashioned shopping and socializing.

Those traditions still hold true, however.  More often than not they aren’t at the forefront of capturing our attention and spurring us to action, nor are they cost-effective strategies for retailers to boost the bottom line. Snail mail circulars equate to junk mail and both radio and TV allow us to easily bypass promotional advertising. In addition, none of the traditional temptations offer immediate gratification, immediate validation, or immediate results.

Today’s hardcore shopping and socializing take place in the new media space. Click, we’re done. Nearly every one of us searches online for information on everything from products to services to coupons to schedules to recommendations to directions to you name it before we make a move or spend a penny. And even our socializing has blossomed from meeting at the local mall with a neighborhood friend, to figuring out where to meet by tapping into our mobile widget and getting advice from folks we don’t know on dining data sites such as Urban Spoon, to meeting in a chat room with folks we’ve befriended on Facebook or joining a User Group on our LinkedIn, to deciding what to buy for our Secret Santa based on some tweets endorsing this gift or that.

Our ability to promote and to consume in smarter fashion as well as our potential for networking and connecting knows no bounds and has no restrictions, except, perhaps, for our willingness to take advantage and to engage in traditions that take new form and offer new opportunities.