Running parallel to the coverage of social media has been analysis of the precipitous fall of the economy. Given the overlapping timing of these two sea-changing stories, I can’t help but think about the connection between them. Obviously both the global economic crisis and the ubiquity of social tools are complex phenomena with causes and effects too large to number on these pages, but at the same time, it’s clear that the faltering economy played no small part in the explosion of social media services.

In other words, social media probably wouldn’t have grown so quickly if marketers hadn’t been forced to trim their bloated advertising budgets. Without free or low-cost ways to reach customers and prospects, how else could they stay relevant in the face of slashed budgets?

As people who already use social media in our daily lives, this is old news. We know how these applications and platforms have helped to shape online communities, build brand awareness and cultivate sales. For those who don’t spend their free time reading tech blogs and plotting a way to attend SXSW, however, social media is suddenly showing up everywhere.

I wonder if social media has gotten increasing media play because in some ways, it is an antidote to the dread-inducing stories on the economy that have dominated the news for months. After all, each day we read how the global financial catastrophe grew out of a cascade of decisions that allowed for individual gain at the expense of the common good. That’s not exactly heartwarming news. Wouldn’t we rather hear about how Christopher Walken is using Twitter? (update: He’s not)

Social media, on the other hand, is predicated on the sharing of information between individuals and groups. People who evangelize social media tend to highlight how it fosters transparency, a refreshing contrast to the back-door dealings of large financial institutions on Wall Street.

What will happen to social media once the economy picks up steam? My hunch is that businesses will find new ways to monetize their social media tools and we will see even further competition among services. Social media isn’t going anywhere. In fact, just last week, Mashable posed the question, “Is social media an industry?” It seems like just yesterday we were trying to convince our colleagues that blogging was worth the investment of time and now we’re discussing how it contributes to our capitalist economy. Without a doubt, social media has taken a positive turn in ways that nobody predicted. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that our economy does the same.

What are your predictions for Social Media?

As forms of advertising, these commercials show how the narrative in branding flows from the inside, out. Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, works by soliciting the narrative directly from your customers. As a result, the creation of the narrative resembles not a straight line, but rather a loop between you and your audience. And what better way to post a question to the crowd than by using Twitter, a free and flexible crowdsourcing tool?

A well-crafted tweet can be an immediate call to action. Got a great idea for a new product but having trouble naming it? Wondering if people would rather view ads before or during a video segment? As long as you’re able to restrict these questions to 140 characters, you can receive real-time information from a diverse range of followers within minutes. Like it or not, Twitter is big, at least for this moment in contemporary social media, so we might as well use it to our advantage.

One such advantage is its ability to disseminate and collect information quickly to and from a varied audience. In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki outlines four principles of crowdsourcing: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization and aggregation. In this sense, Twitter is a tool of aggregation; it draws together independent voices and displays them in a collective forum for you to analyze and dissect.

Surowiecki also encourages us to stop “chasing the expert” and instead pose questions to the crowd.

In other words, share the spotlight! When you’re trying to sell something – a pancake, a tax service, or an idea – your audience can be the best source of information because it can help you write the most compelling and relevant narrative.

Among other reasons, crowdsourcing works because people like to feel included, not manipulated. Giving your customers a voice creates an invaluable feedback loop that helps to create and refine your brand. So, while Twitter is far from finding a cure for halitosis or predicting the winner of March Madness, it does hold sway as a crowdsourcing agent. Just ask the crowd.

The history of Internet memes is as old as the Internet itself.  In fact, you could say that one of the major wonders of the Web is how it has scratched our human itch to share pointless twaddle with everyone we know. (As a disclaimer, I should point out that I mean, in no way, to ignore the Web as a revolutionizing and often positive force in our lives. I simply want to illuminate how it has also handed us a way to indulge our obsession with offbeat cultural phenomena.) To put it bluntly, we have never seen a cat in a onesie that we didn’t feel compelled to broadcast far and wide.

Do you remember the dancing baby from Ally McBeal? Or the video of those guys dancing a choreographed number while on treadmills?
These snippets from popular culture, and countless other examples, passed quickly through college campuses and corporate offices because the Internet enabled such an efficient proliferation of information. These days, anyone with access to an email address, Facebook page, or social news website can alert her community to the latest “OMG moment” within seconds.
In the past, we’ve called these viral sensations “trends” or “fads.” Yet, in recent months, I’ve noticed how we’ve begun to use the word “meme” to describe patterns on the Internet. The word “meme” has become a meme in and of itself.
Just during the short tenure of the Obama administration, we’ve seen the Socialist meme and the Aretha’s hat meme. Lest you think the meme meme has been restricted to politics, just look at the Skittles meme, which found some traction in the Twitterverse.

In the 1970s, when laypeople were still twenty years away from beholding a conceptual understanding of the Internet, Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, coined the word “meme” to describe how units of culture self-replicate much like genes. Memes, he reasoned, were subject to selective pressures in the environment that could determine the meme’s ultimate survival. In Web terms, this amounts to how an idea can move from isolated incident to viral sensation in the blink of an eye.

In similar fashion, but in the opposite direction, the “meme of the meme” could simply ebb over time until we have found yet another new word to describe popular themes on the Internet. Until that time, however, it seems worthwhile to track the proliferation of “meme” as a potent example of viral media. While we can’t know exactly why “meme” has rather suddenly found a home in our lexicon, we can trace its winding path through the online sphere, at least until it goes the way of the Hampster Dance.

Feed readers aggregate new content from multiple sources— blogs, news sites, and multimedia— using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology, allowing you to quench your thirst for a particular field without visiting individual websites. Given its utter simplicity and its extreme utility, it astonishes me that I still have friends who haven’t yet set up a feed reader.

Staying up to date on the themes, trends and events in social media has been my personal hobby for the last three years as I’ve been studying how people use the web in their daily lives. With that said, I can’t imagine how my hobby would have ever developed beyond a glimmer in my eye if I’d had to learn about this field by visiting individual websites. Aggregating data into one web page gives me access to information quickly so I can scan for the bits I find useful or intriguing whenever I steal a few moments.

So, now that I’ve convinced the naysayers to finally start using a feed reader, I should relay a few tips I’ve discovered through trial and error. With any hope, these practices will allow you to get the highest ROI on your RSS:

Play around

Crafting the ideal feed reader page can require some trial and error. When you first set up your page, don’t be afraid to subscribe to content from a wide variety of sources. Over time, you’ll get a sense of the content you find “sticky” enough to grab your attention.

Prune continually

It can get overwhelming to stay on top of the sites with more prolific posting schedules. I’ve found a personal threshold for how much information I can commit to reading in one sitting. If I end up feeling overwhelmed when I see a large number of updated items from one particular site, I’m likely to take that as a sign that I should delete my subscription. After all, feed readers should make your online life more enriching, not more stressful.

Star, skim and skip

All feed reader tools include some functionality so you can separate the informative wheat from the chaff. In Google Reader, you can “star” an item for later viewing so it doesn’t get buried in subsequent posts. Skimming headlines and skipping items altogether are also entirely appropriate practices within this medium.

Part of increasing the ROI of your RSS is also recognizing its inherent social nature. In Google Reader, for instance, users can share links with their Gmail contacts. These shared links show up automatically within a “Shared friends” category once you launch the reader. Other services, including Bloglines, Feedly and Netvibes, include their own social functions. When it was time to choose a feed reader, I went with Google Reader simply because it was already interoperable with my Gmail account. The upside of this choice is that most of my email contacts are also Gmail users, so I can easily view the posts they find intriguing, or share my own.

Using Google Reader, I tap into the brains of some of the heavy hitters in the social media world—Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, and Beth Kanter—on a daily basis. Their words inform my view of the dynamic social media landscape and inspire me to use social tools in new and effective ways. In an industry that changes minute to minute, it’s helpful to know that my feed reader is working even when I’m finally asleep.

The “25 random things” list has embodied the social media zeitgeist of late, which is to say, for the past week or so. Like most online cultural phenomena, reactions to the exercise run from disgusted eye rolls to exuberant participation. One friend posted Facebook status updates throughout the week stating defiantly that he would not, under any circumstances, be compiling a list of his own random facts. Roughly four days later, he changed his status to, “I gave in,” and sure enough, he had written a list of his own that was at turns illuminating and captivatingly mundane. It didn’t take me long to join him in posting my own list.

Inevitably, we will all forget the “25 things” list phenomenon by next week. We’ll be back to creating our own Shepard Fairey images on Obamicon or sending breakdance e-cards. Before the moment passes, however, it seems worthwhile to look at the exercise as a salient example of both social and viral media.

Can we pinpoint where the social part ends and the viral part begins? That is to say, at what moment does the exercise move from one that is shared among members of a group to one that carries its own momentum to self-perpetuate and even influence people outside of the immediate group?

If we examine the “25 things” list, we see that built into its structure is a method to turn the list from merely social to significantly viral:  tagging.  At the top of each “25 things” list is a set of rules:

“Once you have been tagged you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you because they want to know more about you.”

The instructions then tell the user exactly which buttons to use to find and tag people and then publish the new list. Tagging becomes a vehicle to viral because it disseminates content extremely rapidly among a group of 25 people who are all connected to hundreds more online friends beyond the intended audience of the note. While tagging does not guarantee viral success, it does increase the odds. Imagine if 25 people compiled individual lists and then tagged 25 unique friends, and then those 25 friends tagged 25 more? Within minutes, 15,625 people could potentially be exposed to the “25 things” virus.

Regardless of their personal feelings about the general usefulness or value of “25 things” (or even Facebook, for that matter), marketers can learn lessons from this phenomenon. Why did “25 things” become a viral sensation?

1. It was simple.
   Participants in the “25 things” challenge were handed nothing but a blank canvas and straightforward directions for how to get started.
2. It “sold” compelling content.
   Online readers are consumers. No, they’re not necessarily clicking on ads or filling shopping carts, but they are consuming information and ideas with alacrity.
3. It took advantage of network effects.
   As exemplified by my friend who finally “gave in,” the power of the network is in its insidious ability to convince you that you’re missing out on a global activity. “25 things” spread rapidly because its influence grew beyond the individual nodes; it began to affect enough people that it felt somehow rude to shun the invitations to participate.

Of course, it’s difficult to predict the effects of any virus. Some lie dormant for years. Others flare up and then quickly die. While no one can estimate exactly how long or far the “25 things” virus will travel before it runs its course, we can be sure it will leave its mark on the Facebook community

Although the economic ground beneath our feet is squishy at best, we’re standing in a particularly sweet spot in the world of social media marketing. As more marketers turn to blogging, microblogging and social networks to build brand loyalty, the social media services themselves continue to wrestle with how to make a profit off all of our online activity.

Twitter has finally hired its first business development executive as it continues to look into pay-per-tweet and advertising revenue streams while Facebook has implemented a fairly lucrative advertising model and even manages to convince some of us to purchase digital “gifts” for our online “friends.” MySpace has found currency, both literally and figuratively, in the music world, as it offers bands a forum to reach new audiences and build their online following.

While these social networks flesh out their budget plans, marketers continue to search for the best way to retain customers and find cost-efficient strategies to communicate with them. As the economic forecast calls for more gloom in the coming months, those marketers who have managed to hold onto their jobs need to find a way to keep their brands in front of their customers without depleting their company’s remaining funds. Now is the time to shed your misgivings about social media marketing. Until these services start charging a registration and usage fee, it’s too costly to your own business objectives NOT to try them out.

With that said, remember that the only solid social media strategy for your business is the one that works. There is no one, perfect way to maximize the reach and scope of Facebook or Ning or Digg. If you create a space in which you can continually offer compelling content and value to your customers and prospects, then they will return. Simply put, the old excuses for why your business can avoid dipping its toe in the social media marketing pool no longer work.

Social media marketing takes too much time to set up and monitor

In the time it took you to read the opening paragraph of this post, you could have signed up for a new Twitter account, written the topic sentence of your next blog post, or invited twenty people to become fans of your business on Facebook. While it’s true that social media marketing requires attention and upkeep, you will get the hang of it with enough practice. Over time, you’ll develop your own voice and get a sense of the type of communication your customers and prospects react to the best.

Social media marketing can’t possibly bring value to my business

According to a 2008 study by Cone, 59 percent of Americans regularly use social media, and of those, 56 percent find a stronger connection with brands that have established some sort of interactive social media environment. While the ROI of social media marketing can be difficult to calculate, social media’s intangible bang-for-your-buck is as a lead-nurturing tool. You might not make a direct sale through Twitter marketing (although Dell certainly has), but you will help your business to stay in front of its future customers, so that once the economic ground grows more solid, you’ll be in the right position to move forward.

In other words, social media marketing has grown from a fringe service into a viable marketing strategy for companies of all sizes. As Americans spend more time in online environments, it’s more important than ever before to solicit feedback and generate forums where you can demonstrate your company’s expertise. And while Twitter twiddles its thumbs over how to make money off of 140-character tweets, marketers can test a rich array of free services to communicate with their customer base and wait out the storm.

This is a guest post from Megan. Subscribe to our feed if you’d like to hear more of her thoughts in the near future.