"It is not that the internet is a particularly recent invention. It has even had its very own economic crisis. So why are companies still struggling to engage with it?

Of course, every company worth its salt has a website, not least those who have sent their executives to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

But the discussions here suggest that many companies are still struggling to move beyond having a colourful website towards really using the internet to their advantage.

And to make things worse, hardly any company knows how to cope with the rise of social media - the Facebooks, Twitters, blogs and YouTubes of the digital world."

The above comes from an article on BBC News written by Tim Weber during the World Economic Forum. Weber reports that most companies simply haven't got a clue about social media, and either bore, ignore or upset their potential audiences. Even if there are some great examples to prove to the contrary - Zappos on Twitter, Blendtec on Youtube, MyStarbucksIdea to get consumer feedback or Southwest Airlines on Facebook - I agree with Weber that most companies are struggling to enter the social media world and are not properly using the power of the network to gain opportunities and build relationships.

Does your company really get what social media is all about?

Social Media is people having conversations online. These may be your customers, employees or investors. It is the shift from a broadcast and unidirectional mechanic to a many-to-many model. Conversations are facilitated by online tools that people use to share content, stories, opinions, insights, experiences. These tools include blogging, social networking, micro-blogging, video-sharing, bookmarking, photo sharing, wikis...

Social Media is empowering people. They are now able to create, select, share and converse on any topic they like. As already discussed in a previous article, there is nothing you can do about these conversations happening online. You don’t have control anymore! However, you can certainly participate and engage with people using these Social Media tools. The key is to start now.

Well, that being said, you might be one of those who don’t know where to begin to join the conversation. That’s not a problem at all; it is never too late to connect. What you do need are some guidelines. The thoughts and links below will help you have a better idea about where to start.

You may have already started to enter the social world. After all it is shiny, new and so many people are using it. It’s the ideal channel for advertising! But that is the wrong purpose, you need some direction! Why don’t you read on as well?

Fundamentals of a Social Media Strategy

"We need to be on Twitter", "Oh, and we want a blog" Don't jump into social media just because everyone else is doing it. Take a step back and take a closer look at the POST method invented by Forrester’s analysts Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li authors of Groundswell, one of the most important books on the phenomenon of Social Media. POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy and Technologies. It’s a four-step process for social strategy which will help you define the appropriate tools to implement in order to get the most of Social Media.

Firstly, People. Know your customers and assess their social activities. You should already have a rough idea of who you are targeting but most importantly you should identify how they use social media technologies. The Forrester’s Social Technographics™ Ladder classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives.



If you are not sure how to profile your customers, you can use the Social Technology Profile Tool. This free tool will allow you to define your audience’s social computing behaviour. Just select age, country and gender to see the result.

Beyond Forrester’s Social Technographics™ Ladder it is highly recommended to listen and monitor the good, the bad and the ugly. The list below offers some great FREE tools to listen and learn what your consumers are saying about your brand, how they participate, the tone of voice they employ, the information they are looking for etc. The only advice I could give is to be prepared for what you might discover.

Google Blog Search - Google's index of blog posts.
Google Trends - shows amount of searches and Google news stories.
TECHNORATI Search - search the blogosphere.
WhosTalkin - social media search tool that allows you to search for conversations surrounding the topics that you care about most.
SocialMention - social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
HowSociable? - provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web across 22 metrics.
Twitter Search - Search keywords on Twitter which "self-refreshes".
TweetScan – search for words on Twitter.
Twitrratr - distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.
Twilert - Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service.
Hashtags - Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags.
Friendfeed Search - Conversation tracker.

Objectives - Ask yourself what you want to accomplish. What are you trying to achieve with Social Media? No, getting rich is not the answer! Although an effective strategy should pay off financially in the long run with increased brand awareness and customer loyalty. So do you want to:

• Listen to your customers?
• Talk to them?
• Support them?
• Energize your best customers to evangelize others?
• Embrace them and their ideas?

If you don’t know where you want to go, how can you know the direction to take? Stop utilising Social Media because it’s cool, slick and popular and use it because it is effective in helping you to reach your goals. Deciding what you want from Social Media will directly determine the best strategy to adopt and the right tools to use.

Strategy - plan for how relationships with customers will change. Start figuring out what will be different after you have implemented the tools. Determine the strategy for achieving your objectives.

Technologies - Despite the impressive number of social media tools available, you should only join and participate in the platforms that matter to you, and make sure you don’t waste your time in the ones that don’t. (ie: Building a blog just because it's trendy and because your competitor has a blog) But honestly, if you have properly determined your people, objectives, and strategy, then you can easily decide what tools are appropriate to you: wikis, blogs, podcasts, content communities, micro-blogging, social networks...

Some final tips before you really join the conversation

• Always be yourself, real, human, transparent, helpful, and give more than you get.
• Try to humanise your brand as much as you can.
• To really see the result, invest time into it and to resource it properly. It takes time to develop relationships in the social media world. Finding your BBF (British Best Friend) in one tweet is exceptional. Think of Social Media as a long-term strategy!
• Remember that you’re not in control anymore. Members are.
• Relationships are the new currency in Social Media (see The Essential Guide to Social Media)
• Stay connected on a constant basis and be responsive.
• Don’t broadcast yourself, instead contribute to the conversation and provide something of value.
• Finally, keeping it simple is sometimes the best route.

At codegent we have been helping to develop our clients’ social media strategy as well as benchmarking them against their competitors and tracking their reach and results. Drop us an email if you would like to find out more.

I hope this post will give you a better idea on how to develop a successful Social Media strategy. Please feel free to share your own experience on entering the Social Media world.

Next time, we will look at how to measure your social media effort.

Illustration credit: Matt Hamm

Have heard about our latest development?!! Don't tell me you have never heard of Twilert, I won't believe you! Twilert has been a real buzz machine since its launch a few weeks ago and in this world where empowered users can express anything they like, you had better start using it straight away! Before looking at Twilert world’s coverage, let’s first explain how it works and how it can help you...

Twilert stands for Twitter + alert.

In a prior post, I mentioned the manual monitoring tools like Twitter Search or Tweetscan. But wouldn’t it be far better to receive regular email updates of tweets containing any keyword you want to monitor?

Twilert is an email alert/notification service for Twitter. It’s like Google Alerts but for Twitter! This Twitter application, built by the Codegent Team in less than 3 weeks, is an amazing tool for people who need to listen what is being said about their name, brand, products, services, industry, employees...

Twilert is much more than a mere search alert service. By using the "Advanced settings", you can filter relevant tweets by keywords, author, recipient, location, link-location, and attitude (positive, negative or neutral). For a bit more insight on the features, here is a video created by a Twilert user:

Today, Twilert has 2000 users in 70 countries, receiving more than 5000 Twilerts. Many people are talking about Twilert on Twitter and on their blogs both here and abroad! Google Blog search shows that there are over 7,000 blog posts about Twilert. Below you can appreciate a small bit of this amazing global buzz:

English:

• Chatting with the man behind Twilert - the new Twitter alert service
• Twilert makes it easy to follow tweets about your clients. (And your agency.)
• Twilert: Tweet alerts via e-mail
• Two ways to track brand buzz on Twitter to suit your information diet
• Twilert: digital data mining and identifying motivated audiences

Spanish:

• Twilert: Alertas de Twitter para seguimiento de marcas o parejas
• Twilert: Alertas por correo de Tweet interesantes
• Twilert: Recibir alertas para determinadas palabras en Twitter

French:

• Twilert, un Google Alert dédié à Twitter
• Twilert - Alerte par mail de certains Tweets
• Twilert : Alerte mail Twitter

Brazilian:

• Acompanhe a opinião do pessoal do Twitter por e-mail
• Twilert, um aplicativo Twitter que rastreia palavras-chave escolhidas por você
• Twilert: Receba por e-mail tweets relevantes

Deutsch:

• Twilert: Benachrichtigungen, wenn bestimmte Begriffe getwittert werden
• Themen-Monitoring bei Twitter mit Twilert
• Twilert schickt Twitter-Mails

Italian:

• Scopri se su Twitter viene citata una determinata parola con Twilert
• Twilert, monitora una parola su Twitter e ricevi degli alert quando viene citata!
• Twilert: Rimanere aggiornati in Twitter via email

Japanese:

• www.socialmedia.jp
• web-marketing.zako.org

Amongst all these blog posts about Twilert, 3 of them in particular drew my attention:

Firstly, KidTechGuru, a 14-year-old boy from Singapore, who’s probably one of the world's youngest professional bloggers and technology expert, explains in a great post what Twilert is all about and how it works.

Then, Twilert was recently cited in a post on Mashable as a tool to help you focus on the signal rather than all the Twitter noise.

Finally, The social media guru Guy Kawasaki, author of Reality Check, wrote a really interesting post on How to Use Twitter as a Twool listing Twilert as a tool to monitor what people are saying about you, your company, and your product.

In addition to this great coverage on blogs, Twilert was named Mashup of the day on the 5 December 2008.

Via word-of-mouth the news is spreading fast; the tool is powerful, so why don’t you give it a try at www.twilert.com? Set-up any keywords you would like to receive alerts about and start interacting with other twitter users discussing topics aligned to your keywords.

Every day we use something called Social Media. Social networks like Facebook, Myspace or Linkedin are really pervasive in our life and we use them either for professional or friendship networking, events planning, pictures sharing, comments or chatting...

We spend so much time sitting in front of our screen connected to our online communities that we are even putting on weight! Facebook 'makes you fat' as Britons pile on the pounds.

But Social Media is far larger than social networking websites. It is actually about all the available online tools that allow us to communicate, create, share, listen, recommend, network... in fact, it is a new world of free media transforming the passive user into the content creator.

When you think Social Media, you have to think blogs (Blogger, Wordpress), video sharing (YouTube, Dailymotion), microblogs (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku), wikis (Wikipedia), social bookmarking (del.icio.us, Digg), virtual worlds (Second Life, Entropia Universe)…

The internet is becoming social and users' behaviour is inevitably being altered by this trend. Indeed, consumers are less receptive to interruptive and monologue communication from advertisers. Instead they turn to Social Media for information, real life experience, opinion and recommendation. Trust is shifting to the network and therefore marketers must re-adapt their techniques and their strategies in order to engage consumers and build strong relationships.

Marketing professionals must understand that people are overwhelmed by messages and that the old communication model is not as effective anymore. Companies must learn to move from interruption to inviting participation. The new communication model is a transparent, authentic, vibrant and consumer driven dialogue. Social media offer tools which allow companies to listen to what consumers have to say about their brands. More importantly, it offers companies the opportunity to interact with their customers. However, to make efficient use of social media marketers must relinquish control. The goal is not to control messages but to inform, share, inspire, engage and satisfy. Finally, marketers should aim to leverage consumers as a Media.

Here are some companies making the most of social media:

Dell:
Blogging: Direct2Dell
Crowdsourcing: Ideastorm permits users to suggest and vote on ideas
Microblogging: Dell on Twitter
Virtual Worlds: Dell on Second Life

Jeep:
Online video: YouTube The Jeep channel
Photo sharing: Flickr Jeep Experience
Social networks: Facebook Jeep fan page - MySpace Jeep page - Jeep community

Doritos:
Crowdsourcing: Consumer-generated Super Bowl ads

Many other renowned brands harness the power of communities and YOU, are you ready to embrace social media marketing?

We recently re-launched Meet the Author's interview site as Authors' Lounge TV.

The site had been around for about 5 months and had built up a decent following from the blogosphere. It made sense as fans are quite likely to write about exclusive video interviews of their favourite authors.

With bloggers in mind we introduced a few cool social bookmarking and embedding tools to help syndicate the content around the web, as well as overhauling the look and feel so it felt more like an Internet Television Channel.

In the two months since re-launch the traffic has tripled on average and the number one source of referrals are indeed blogs, with natural listings on Google a close second. Well you have to chuck in a bit of SEO haven't you?

When it comes to opinions, we've got plenty! And none so more than our creative director,  Mr. Matthew Jukes :)

Today New Media Age have published his diatribe sorry, whitepaper, on the declining numbers of facebook and the future of the social web. It's a genuinely interesting read and will certainly get you thinking, you can download it here.

We've just produced our first Facebook application for iFan. The good old game of keepy uppy is given a contemporary setting.

For us, we just wanted to see how you go about getting an application onto Facebook and be able to watch the viral effect, and for iFan it's a great tool for raising awareness and driving people to their site.

Check it out for yourself: the Facebook "iFan Football Ball Control" game