COMMENTS
Few, and here I thought I was the only small businessman who could't get Social Media marketing to pay. I will heed Pete's advice and continue to learn about the media. While it might take many years for the adopters of this media to become my clients, it is important to continue to learn and adapt to the ever changing business landscape.
I think it's possible to have small wins with a small amount of effort.
But, the big wins will come when there are more people adopting. That doesn't mean we can't guide adoption and benefit from it. People are attracted to people who lead. And small business owners are desperate to understand how "SEO", "SOCIAL MEDIA", etc can impact their business.
I think there are two things. Social Media as a destination and social media as a strategy. Social implies people, human interaction etc...
It's one thing to worry about how to monetize twitter, it's another to have a widespread corporate blogging strategy where most people find your human-ness (not to dupree) through search.
As Seth Godin said during your Hubspot meeting....most people are so hung up on the new new thing that they are forgetting about optimizing in the ways customers really want. Email, Search and Human interaction.
Nothing to do with destinations.
Very valid point Chris. Appreciate your insight on this. Via Exact Target, your own blog and now Compendium, you've been (and still are) at the front lines of applying "what's new" in a really big and meaningful way to true business needs.
Social media has a place within a versatile marketing strategy. Social media seemed to be used by a certain market segment, people generally more computer savvy and younger in age. Although, many baby boomers are catching on to Facebook now.
Social media can also be very time consuming. My business partner recently started to use twitter (dobesv) and I see that there is an addictive effect of twitter. He suggested that I should probably not sign on to it yet to manage our "time" better. I am tempted though, seems like a lot of fun.
The use of social media has worked wonderfully in cultivating "long tail" keywords and consistent stream of visits from Google searches however, and I feel like it is a great tool for establishing credibility.
I think online communities are actually more useful when they are small.
Twitter and Facebook try to make the internet managable by letting people form their own little cliques, but if twitter ever has as many users as google search I think it'll descend into a kind unmanageable mess.
At least in Facebook I only keep my offline friends on my friend list, in Twitter anything goes for following people and it could easily become a big unmanageable mess one day and probably will, until the successor to twitter comes out with a smaller in-group and better tools.