To Social or Not to Social

Another chapter opened this week when my 9 year old son launched his email account.  Doubly so because my 6 year old daughter could not be left behind.  Getting email from my kids makes me smile.  How could you not with messages like "i love you daddy hope you are having a great day"? 

I'm gonna make the most of it before the inevitable evolution (or devolution?) to the SMS text "dad, gonna miss curfew can't find keys" or the Facebook post about a crush or some crazy party - yikes!

This got me thinking about the second hottest topic after The Cloud...Social Media.  There is no question that Social has changed the game, but what should you use and how should you use it to drive Sales?

Stop here and check your company policy.  Robert Half Technology just completed a survey that indicated 54% of business block access to Social networks completely while 19% permit it for business purposes.  You good?  OK, we'll chew on this in a few parts.

First, what aspects of Social Media should you be using now...Next, how you can leverage Social to promote your company and your personal brand...And finally, we'll dive into best practices and futures.

With more than 500,000,000 users of social networks, chances are you have LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace account. 

LinkedIn is a vital Social tool for business.  It's a no-brainer...#1 it's not what you know, it's who you know. You'll rarely need to make a "cold call" when you realize that nearly every one of your prospects is 2 degrees away.  Major media and technology companies are using LinkedIn as pre-requisite for their receuiting, i.e. how the hell are you going to contribute if you can't even use it??

Quick note of LinkedIn etiquette: Make sure you get a chance to know someone before you "link-in".  It's sort of weird to go to a trade show, talk with someone for 5-10 minutes and then receive an invitation.  Don't be that guy! I like Thom Singer's rule "coffee, beer, meal" as the minimum interaction to bring someone into your network.

Next, Facebook (and MySpace) is for personal use, period...unless you are a brand and you can set it up for 100% business use.  It just doesn't make a lot of sense for your clients (and coworkers) to see pictures of you beer bonging at Spring Break 5-10 years ago - enough said!

Then there is Twitter and the rest.  According to Wikipedia there are about 200 "major" networks. I'm not suggesting that you use FriendFinder or Classmates.com for business, but there may be smaller networks that will pay off for you.  It's analogous to "the Cloud" and "private clouds", there are smaller, niche communities that qualify as social networks.  For example, Ning enables users to build their own networks to the tune of 125,000 at last count and my firm, ExactTarget, built a user community that serves more than 15,000 users called 3Sixty.

Stay tuned for the rest of the series.  Do you Grok it?