These grammatical slights are not creative. They are examples of lazy, uncreative people expressing themselves in lazy, uncreative ways. Like telling an old joke over and over again to the same person, what once was impactful for its uniqueness has become ineffectual by way of ubiquity.

As a brand – you stand for something. You have some concept that you are – or desire to be – tied to, and your messaging reflects it. Google is synonymous with search, in the common vernacular. Mercedes’ name evokes images of luxury, and quality. Harvard and Yale make you think of the best and brightest minds. Victoria’s Secret is sexy. One thing these brands share is a consistency in their messaging. They know their audience – broad or narrow – and they know how to talk to them, but not down to them.

You want to stand apart on Facebook? Stay true to your core message. Know who you are. Know who you want to be seen, as. Ensure that your status updates, wall posts, comments, and photo captions reflect this. Be true to the message you want to convey, and do it in a genuine manner. Own your voice.

I’m all for the creative use and application of language in order to communicate your point. In fact, without a certain irreverence and spontaneity, we’d be stuck with a decidedly restrictive set of words with which to conduct our affairs. Get creative; spread your word, and spread it your way. Toss out the rules that hold back the more artful aspects of your expression. Poetry pwns pedantry, every time.

Between you and me, I think most people out there don’t understand Twitter. I think they’re confused by the RT #hashtag @mention mumbo jumbo. But truth be told, it can be an insanely powerful business tool and can help spread your brand’s message like a wildfire.

Think of it like this: on Twitter you can chat with someone without being their “friend”. You’ve never been able to do that on Facebook. I’m not hating on Facebook, it’s amazing for so many things, but Twitter is a completely open arena for two-way communication.

The problem with Twitter is that people who aren’t confused by it sometimes abuse it. This is mostly by companies or people trying to sell you something. Realtors are a great example. Do you follow any real estate agents on Twitter? Don’t bother. All they do is Tweet house and apartment listings. Isn’t that what you already do on your website, Facebook page and blog? Don’t show me the same listings on 3 or 4 different channels and expect that to get my click. Say “Hi” to me or link me to an article you wrote on how awesome a particular neighborhood is. Would you ever meet someone in person and just start shouting real estate listings at them without saying anything else or even listening to them? Then don’t do it online either.

Twitter, more than any other social network, is more like a modern-day AOL Instant Messenger. Remember when people used that? The key is that it’s a conversation tool and shouldn’t be used to broadcast a one-way message. You are not a billboard, sir.

So how do you grow your following on Twitter? Well wait, why is having a big following important?

It depends on your intentions. What will Twitter function as within your business? It should definitely have a unique purpose and not just be an extension of your Facebook page or regurgitate the same information as your blog; otherwise, what’s my incentive to interact with your brand on multiple platforms? A lot of people are using Twitter for customer service. Dealing with compliments, complaints, questions, and overall brand mentions are easy to track and practically instantaneous. You want a big following in that instance, to take care of as many customers through that interface as possible. If you’re using it for feedback and customer interaction, a bigger following means a bigger data set. In both these instances, a bigger following also means a larger reach when you post the occasional promotional tweet.

Now let’s figure out how to grow your following. I’ve basically already told you, but I’ll say it again: Talk to people. Be interesting, produce or link to cool content, and sound like a human. Have a profile photo and an “about” blurb, and make them both awesome; now start using Twitter’s search feature to find people that would be interested in the content you produce. Say “Hello”. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

This may sound like common sense, and that’s because it sort of is. If you’re providing value, entertaining or educating your followers, they will love you for it, and probably spread your message to their friends as well. The problem a lot of people face is they don’t see instant results and they give up. Let’s dispel the myth of overnight Twitter success right now. This is going to take time and effort. You should be spending at least a couple hours per day on Twitter (spread out throughout the day) if you want this type of growth. For example, I spend my morning checking my feed and finding some interesting content to post throughout the day. After that I check in every 1-2 hours for about 20 minutes and have a few conversations, and explore other people’s content. It sounds like a lot of work, but the return is fantastic. When you’re active and followed by many, you can participate, influence and help control your brand’s message, even when you’re not the one Tweeting about it. What company wouldn’t want that?

Keep an eye out for a post within the next few weeks about how powerful a simple Twitter search can be for your business.

• I drive an SUV
• I do virtually all my reading on a Kindle
• I wear mostly jeans and t-shirts, with the occasional custom-tailored, black two-button suit (even us noveau minimalists have to retain some semblance of style)

Understand, this is not some deep-rooted philosophy of engagement with life. This isn’t some quest to rid myself of “things”. What this is, is a preference to keep things uncomplicated. Clutter makes me crazy. The less stuff I have complicating my life, the more streamlined that life becomes (or, at the very least, feels). I am infinitely more effective, creative, and agile when things are kept uncomplicated. Note – I didn’t say simple. Remaining sensitive to the fact that life, inherently, is complex, it behooves one to move through it in an uncomplicated manner. Path of least resistance, ftw.

This all aside – there is at least one arena of life in which I embrace – nay, relish – the complexity ardently resisted in other spaces: the written word. In this case and in this case only, simplicity be damned. Now that my guts are spilt, let’s address the fact of this linguistic love affair, and its bearing on the effective use of your brand’s social media assets. For this, I offer three guiding principles:

1. Don’t be wordy for the sake of being wordy

Jargon is a killer, as are all manners of verbal chicanery. A simple turn of phrase, bounded only by a capital letter and punctuation mark, will almost always do the trick. (note: that sentence is only mildly ironic). I’ve seen far too many Facebook status updates/Tweets/Foursquare tips/etc trying to be overly clever. Communicate one simple thought. When you try to be witty, you fail. Do or do not; there is no try.

2. Form without function & Function without form

When crafting a post for your various social networks, remember that each mandates its own form. You wouldn’t use a hashtag and butcher the spelling of critical words on Facebook, but on Twitter it’s par for the course (if not required to even play the course). You wouldn’t – as a brand – tweet just once a day, and hope that those following you will chance upon your oh-so-brilliant 140-character romp. But on Facebook you’d likely do just that, timing that post so that you’ve reached your Active User base at the hour that ensures a high level of engagement. As in all other forms of written communication, the audience must be considered.

Your Twitter followers are not your Facebook Fans; you should not address them as such. While Twitter has its own linguistic structure (read: form), that form’s function is entirely lost on a Facebook newsfeed. While Facebook’s algorithm, and just about every statistic out there, says that the best brands on Facebook don’t flood their fans’ newsfeeds with content, any member of the Twitterati will extol the virtues of continuous tweets (often in excess of 5 times per day). Are there exceptions to this? Sure. Look at Jesus Daily (currently the crown jewel of Facebook engagement statistics). But then have a look at Starbucks, Skittles, Oreo, and Justin Beiber (who incidentally gives Jesus Christ a pretty good run for his money, on a weekly basis). The principle to follow is this: respect both the form, and function of that form. If you opt for observance of just one, versus the other, consider yourself lost to the dark side.

3. Everyone’s Got Opinions

A favorite publication of mine used to run a monthly column under this same name (with the acronym E.G.O.). In this same vein, understand that everyone – and I do mean EVERYONE – on your social networks has opinions. When these coincide with the photo you post, or the piece of text you write (or link to), remember that you’re on that network to engage – to dialogue – with that individual. Too often, the tendency on a social network like Facebook is to delete anything negative, or potentially detrimental, to a brand’s image. Why? Why not, rather, write back to this person? Assure them that they have been heard, and offer a way to remedy their frustration. Use your words carefully. Reinforce that you understand, and then offer a way to take that conversation offline (call whatever phone number or email address you give them a “direct line”, and watch their consternation abate). The upset individual is now channeled to a proper medium. Your fan base has seen that you’re not deaf to their concerns. You, young Padawan, have become a Jedi.

Are these the only three rules about effective use of language, in social media? Heck, no. But armed with these guiding principles, you are well equipped to craft, spread, and then manage your social copy. May the force be with you, always.

People that claim it’s impossible to calculate ROI in the social space are really just saying that they can’t calculate ROI in the social space, or probably in any space. The truth is, calculating ROI for social media is just like figuring it out for any other media – print, TV, radio. I’m not saying it’s easy. ROI is difficult to calculate across any medium, especially on the “return” side of the things. For example, you know how much that magazine ad cost, but how much business did you see as a direct result of it? It sounds difficult, but I assure you, it can be done! The tips below will help you get a handle on social ROI:

1) Plan and Understand How Social Fits in Your Company

Social media is like the new telephone. It’s not a department within your company like the marketing or PR team; it’s a tool that those departments can now use to communicate with consumers. Think about it, when the telephone was invented and companies started using call centers to provide customer service, those were still called “customer service departments.” There’s no such thing as a “telephone department,” and there should be no “social media department”. It’s silly. So the first thing you need to do before you even think about ROI, is understand where social media fits into your overall business strategy.

In other words, maybe your goal is to increase overall sales. And maybe you plan on reaching that goal by getting new customers through an increase in brand awareness. The right way to do this is not to set a goal of getting 10,000 Likes on your Facebook business page. The goal should be to acquire 10,000 net new customers through Facebook. As in, Facebook is the tool with which you accomplish this goal. Now that you have a goal, an objective and a tool, what’s your tactic? Before social media, your tactics may have been putting up a billboard or putting an ad in a magazine. Now you can use a highly targeted Facebook ad and have clickers land on your branded Facebook page where you advertise a 25% off sale to all new customers if they share your link with a friend. Or, perhaps, convert your Twitter page into a customer service network where you can get instant feedback and provide real-time support.

2) Know What You Can Measure

If you’re exclusively an e-commerce company, you’ve got it made in the shade. Tracking a sale through your site back to a Facebook or Twitter link is as easy as setting up a free Google Analytics account. But we don’t all have such a cut and dry business and therefore not all metrics are available to everyone.

Think logically about what you can measure. Don’t worry yet about what you should measure. Metrics are not one-size-fits all.

3) Decide on ROI vs. Correlation

There’s only one way to calculate return on investment, and that’s sales minus expenses, divided by expenses, expressed as a percentage. There is no other formula. But sometimes, getting at true ROI is difficult, especially on the “return” side.

In those instances, you might opt to instead examine how social media success ties to business success over the long haul, and make correlation studies about that relationship. What you want to see is a situation where business success (sales, donations, etc.) increased in conjunction with social success (or slightly trailing social success). While correlation does not equal causation, and one or two statistical anomalies can and should be ignored, it sure looks good when you data points consistently coincide.

4) Select Metrics

Once you’ve gone through the first 3 steps, you can pick actual metrics that make sense for your company. Picking them before you get heavily involved in social media reduces the temptation to pick metrics that support your position down the road.

There’s a lot to be said for picking just a handful of good metrics that fit into your business well, rather than selecting too many and being overwhelming or doing unnecessary tracking.

For example, if you’re trying to increase sales by getting more repeat business, tracking return visits to your site through Facebook and Twitter are great metrics to record. But in this case, it wouldn’t make sense to record your daily increase in fans and followers.

5) Share the Data Widely

If you want your whole company supporting your social initiatives, it will help if the whole company (more or less) has access to the scoreboard. Don’t treat social media results like nuclear launch codes. Sharing your results will inspire the internal discussions and ideas necessary to take your program to the next level. Two heads are certainly better than one, and by making the information available to nearly everyone, people will see the company’s success, thus motivating continued effort.

6) Embrace Stories

Anecdotes (or other qualitative measurements) are not mathematically defensible in the way ROI is, but you should try to include them in your social media metrics. Get your customer service and community management teams to document instances where you delighted a customer, turned a frown upside down, or just did something awesome in social media. A lot of times those unique case studies create more internal support than a whole stack of spreadsheets because of the actual people and dialogue behind the exchange. It’s something you can point to directly and say “we made a difference” or “this resulted in a sale, guaranteed.”

Conclusion

Metrics and ROI in social media have been typecast as unattainable for too long. Hopefully now you see that when you draw out a comprehensive plan and focus on only the numbers that make a real difference to your business and its goals, it’s a relatively straightforward process. The key is to not lose sight of what your brand is trying to accomplish. Write it down somewhere and be able to answer “How does this support my business goals?” when you do something in the social space.

Image by Beverly & Pack

If I had a nickel for every time someone brought up “brand voice” in a marketing meeting over the past year, I honestly think I’d be a millionaire. “Brand voice” is one of those concepts that’s easy to say, but hard to correctly put into practice. Over the past few months, however, it has occurred to me that a discussion about “brand voice” isn’t even the right discussion to have. We need to be talking about “brand voices”

Oh…that’s right…plural!

There has been (and still is) entirely too much emphasis on creating a massive, omnipresent Voice with which a brand communicates to all consumers at all times; as if consumers would rebel and lose faith in the absence of this Arch-Voice to guide them along the dark paths of the modern world. This is absurd, and its silliness has become even more apparent as conversational mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, Quora, YouTube, and blogs increase in importance in a brand’s communication plan.

“Why is it absurd?” You ask. It is absurd because people do not speak with one Voice. I do not speak to my family the same way I speak to my coworkers. I do not speak to my clients the way I speak to either my family or coworkers. Furthermore, I speak to my close friends in an entirely different fashion than I do to any of the aforementioned groups. I am, of course, the same person with the same accent and same linguistic substrata regardless of who I speak to, but as I speak to different groups of people, I most certainly dress-up, or dress-down, or dress-sideways my Voice by altering my argot, rate of speech, use of idioms and/or profanity, and overall tone.

You all do the same thing. Everyone does. It’s not a linguistic accident, or evidence of underlying schizophrenic tendencies, but a necessity of human communication. As Stephen Fry says in his Language Podcast (which every person on this planet should listen to), “You slip into a suit for an interview, and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances.”

At no point in my life has this shifting of my Voice been held against me as an indication that I am somehow insincere or of flimsy character. I very much doubt that a close friend even thinks about the very different way I communicate when hanging out with him versus when we are at a dinner with a larger group of people.

This shifting of one’s voice is not a new phenomenon. I’m talking about changing our styles based on our audience, but linguists often talk about a process referred to as “code-switching,” which is the concurrent use of more than one language or language variety in conversation. Not only do people change they way they speak depending on the situation, but sometimes may even change their register, tone, lexicon, and argot in the middle of a conversation.

I bring this to your attention because this type of voice-shifting is a common occurrence in human communication. It therefore stands to reason that a similar shifting would occur in a brand’s communication. Why would a brand speak the same way on Twitter that it does on the customer service section of its website? Why would a hotel feel the need to speak the same way on its Facebook Wall as its front desk manager speaks to a guest at check in? These are fundamentally different situations with different contextual requirements and expectations.

When a brand knows who they are, they don’t have to worry so much about an Arch-Voice. Instead, they should focus on developing contextually relevant brand voices for their various communications channels. You can dress down on Facebook. You can dress down even further on Twitter. Your voice can be more refined and polished on your website where it’s a publication mechanism, not a conversational one. The number and style of your brand voices (sort of like linguistic dress codes) will be up to you, and, most likely, based on your consumers, communication channels, and product/service offerings.

If you take this approach of situation-relevant brand voices, you will make better connections with your consumers on each communication channel, and, I would bet, you will run no risk of sounding fragmented or inconsistent.

In honor of ushering in another year that is sure to be bursting with technological advancements, I want to humbly submit four tips that are important–nay crucial–to success in social media marketing. My mind is filled with that scene from Varsity Blues where Jon Voight repeatedly bangs his whistle against James Van Der Beek’s helmet, intoning, “Stick to the basics, stick to the basics, stick to the basics.”

And so, some basics. But do not for one second think that because these tips are “basic” that they are not important. That is a mistake too often made by the arrogant. Is breathing (certainly one of the most basic functions of our living bodies) not important? Are the basic impulses sent from your brain telling your heart to beat not, in some ways, among the most important functions of your body?

The tips commence.

Beware of Shiny Objects:

We’ve all sat around laughing at the microsecond attention spans of our pets. There are few things as amusing as watching a dog or cat try to stay focused on one thing when you jingle a toy across the room. External stimuli appear to be the bane of any canine or feline mission.

I doubt it’s understood (or perhaps it is simply ignored) that humans often exhibit just the same manner of ADD in our own endeavors. I see this most often in the archetypal marketing executive. For an entire month, they are focused on the creation and launch of, say, the official company blog. Then, right before that project is complete, they read an article in AdAge or the Wall Street Journal about Foursquare and by Monday morning it is nearly impossible to convince said executive that they were ever even thinking about a blog.

We, like our quadrapedal counterparts, are just as susceptible to new, shiny objects that distract us from our best-laid plans. Digital marketing these days is as much an exercise in discipline as in creativity. I am reminded here of the famous English figure of speech, “Jack of all trades, master of none,” and perhaps the more fitting Spanish expression, “A todo le tiras, y a nada le pegas” (“You aim for everything, you hit nothing.”)

The fact of the matter is this: you cannot successfully execute every possible social media marketing strategy you think of. You must look at your customers, your needs, your strengths, your budget. From these data points you and your agency create the optimum social media strategy. Then you must be disciplined. Don’t throw a wrench in everything if your competitor launches a Gowalla initiative. In the immortal words of my old swim coach, “Race your own race.” To do otherwise will not result in success.

Your Greatest Asset:

You may not realize it, but your greatest social media asset is buy-in from key members of your C-suite. In my experience, nothing has such effect on the power and success of your social media strategy as the true buy-in of your company’s decision makers.

Christopher Nadherny and Dana Wade address this point well in their article on AdAge.com:

Only executive-level sponsorship will break down organizational silos, secure the appropriate resources for digital initiatives and attract experienced, digitally adept leaders in key roles, including the CMO, head of media, brand leader, chief digital officer and head of e-commerce.

Respect the Mobile Device:

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard various “rumors” that this whole mobile phone thing is catching on. I’m betting it’ll be as big as MC Hammer. The straight dope is that consumers are walking around with devices in their pockets that are multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than all the computing power used to put a man on the freakin’ moon.

Everything about mobile devices is improving. Better battery life, improved user interface, faster data transfer speeds, slicker web browsing.

I daresay that in 2011 we will be likely to see the mobile device become the dominant computing device (by time used) for many key demographics in the U.S.A. It may be a bit overzealous to think that mobile devices will become the dominant platform for transactions, but I do not think it is a stretch that by the end of 2011, mobile devices will be the dominant platform of discovery for many Americans.

Bottom Line: if you don’t reach your consumers on the devices they use when they are discovering and making decisions, then you’re fighting an uphill battle for their attention when they’re buying.

Fear Not Your Data:

I am perpetually perplexed at peoples’ various attitudes and approaches towards analytics in social media marketing. After six months in the African bush studying this behavior, I have come to note that these attitudes all have the same prime emotional manifestation: fear/anxiety. This prime emotion stems from two roots:

1. Fear of what the analytics will show
2. Fear that the analytics aren’t perfect and therefore invalid

Neither of these fears should impede the correct and effective usage of analytics to refine your social media marketing endeavors. No analytics are perfect (in the cosmological/divine sense), but to ignore potentially useful data for fear of what it might say is absolutely asinine. Yes, you may in fact find that your “awesome twitter promotion” did not work. That may make you look bad…temporarily. But you will more than make up for it when you return to the table with analytics and data from which you have distilled key learnings that will allow your company/brand to be more effective in the future. I think that in-house marketing/PR people are too often guilty of setting aside the scientific method when it is not convenient for their egos and/or final reports.

And so ends my four tips for social media success in 2011. Basic? Perhaps. Crucial? Absolutely. Please feel free to share your tips for the upcoming year in the comments.

1. They get caught up in that “new car smell” and they try everything with no planning
2. They plan, but they bite off more than they can chew

Both of these issues lead to problems. At best, you find yourself with lackluster results. At worst, you fail miserably in your social media marketing endeavors.

We avoid this problem with a very simple solution: ADR. ADR stands for Awareness, Demand, and Revenue. Here’s a good ol’ fashioned Venn diagram to show you how it works.

This isn’t astrophysics, but I can tell you from experience that this diagram will help you reach greater success in your social media marketing efforts.

The Rules:

• Every social media initiative you undertake must fall into at least one of the circles
• When I say “fall into,” I don’t mean that you think your Facebook Page will drive demand, I mean that you have to be able to measure it and prove it. You have to be able to prove that your digital PR is driving awareness. You have to be able to prove that your iPhone app is driving revenue. “Thinking” that something is working doesn’t count.
• As you begin building your social media marketing campaign, you brainstorm. Every idea that comes up must be able to provably exist somewhere in the diagram.
  • If an idea falls into one circle, it’s good.
  • If an idea falls into two circles, it’s great.
  • If an idea falls into all three circles, it’s a bulls-eye
  • And if the idea doesn’t fall in any circles, IT DOESN’T GET DONE

The reason this very simple system works is that it ensures that the social media marketing campaign you undertake is made up of components that measurably affect at least one of those key marketing areas: awareness, demand, or revenue. This puts you in a fantastic position when it comes time to report on the success of your social media efforts to you client and/or boss.

Epilogue:

This past weekend I gave a talk at PodCamp Philly 2010 (#pcphilly2010), and I talked about the importance of ADR in campaign planning. I also spoke about the various metrics that can be used to measure the effect your efforts are having on awareness, demand, and revenue. The presentation led to a fantastic discussion and I want to thank all involved for making the session so interesting and dynamic. For those of you who requested the deck, I have uploaded it to Slideshare an embedded it here:

Where are you Jumping?

Thanks to social media, we are now able to connect to the world in ways we never thought possible. Whether you are writing on your friend’s wall on Facebook, texting or tweeting, there is always a way to communicate and most of us don’t think twice before doing so. However, did you ever consider that you may not be communicating with the right person or that what you are tweeting may be used against you at work next week? Unless you have experienced the dangers of social media firsthand, these thoughts have probably never crossed your mind.

The Dangers Of The Public Domain:

Are photos ever put up of you on Facebook that represent you in a way that may get you fired from your job or in trouble at school? Did you ever update your twitter status and write something that was not necessarily PG-13? You may not think twice before posing for a picture or updating your status, but this could backfire. When something is posted online, it is permanent and open to the public eye. Even on certain applications, your privacy settings may limit who can see your profile, but your friends profile may not be limited and what if they display a negative photo of you? There isn’t much you can do about that. Larry Johnson of the Kansas City Chiefs recently experienced the dangers of the public domain firsthand when he decided to use twitter to tweet some comments that were not necessarily “politically correct”. Once his tweets were out there, they drew more attention than Johnson had intended , which has resulted in his release from the team. In today’s world we need to be extra careful when doing something that could land us as victim of the dangers of social media.

Chiefly a Twitter Problem

Identity theft:

Social media platforms have made many of us more vulnerable to identify theft. By providing too much information on sites such as Facebook and My Space, many of us are making it simple for criminals to create false identities and access our bank accounts. Have you ever received a message on Facebook asking you to verify your Bank of America account number and password? I have certainly received messages similar to this. Although I do not fall for these counterfeit messages, a user new to the world of social media may not think twice before giving out their information. With the increase in identity theft now a days, users of any type of social media networking sites need to be extra cautious with what information they provide to the public.

Who are you really connecting with?

Are you sure Twitter user Soccer452 is really your best friend Suzie? What if it is somebody pretending to be Suzie? Celebrities have so many users trying to impersonate them on twitter that they are now given verified accounts to help the twitter community decipher the authentic accounts from the phony ones. What about on Facebook? I don’t think twice before accepting a Facebook user who has requested to be my friend. However, there have been incidents where Facebook users have been impersonated. Take for example, the tale of Facebook user Bryan Rutberg. In January ’09, an unknown user got in his account and updated Bryan’s status to say “Bryan NEEDS HELP URGENTLY!!!” The unknown user then sent one of Rutberg’s Facebook friends a direct message saying that Rutberg was robbed at gunpoint in London and needed money in order to return to the United States. Rutberg’s friend wired him over one thousand dollars thinking he was helping him out. Meanwhile, Rutberg was safe at home during this whole incident and the money was never to be seen again. Impersonating people on social media platforms is becoming more and more common these days. Although the warning signs may not be clear, we need to always be on our toes when trying to connect with our friends.

Social media has changed most of our lives for the better. It helps us maintain relationships with family and friends, promote our brands and products, and communicate more clearly across borders. However, we need to make sure to be very careful when using any form of social media and watch out for the danger signs. For brands, the ramifications are multiplied. With more people and resources on the line, it’s crucially important that brands know what they are doing when enacting a social strategy. With the typical faceless brand, people often lose sight that a brand is really just one face for an entire community of people and treat brands even less respectfully online. Vigilance and foresight are the only winning strategies.

The two biggest pieces of advice that can be given to any user of social media to protect yourself, whether you’re an individual or a representative of a brand, are the following: Make sure to be careful of what information you put out there else it may come back to haunt you later, and do your diligence when connecting with others. Getting your safety squared away first allows you the freedom to reap the multitude of benefits of the social sphere.

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.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit old for some of us. How about RSS feeds for news sites? Who needs to check CNN.com when you can just grab the RSS feed and be alerted about new stories?

One of the nice things about RSS is that it automatically brings news to me. New post on your blog? I don’t have to remember to check every day. RSS tells me when there’s something new.

Similar to this, we’ve seen the emergence of auto-tweeting in the last year. For those of you who don’t know, services like Twitterfeed allow twitterers to auto-tweet any RSS feed. Mostly, that takes the form of, for example, “New blog post: Day 46 of the Mayonnaise Diet http://nondescriptURL.com.”

As well, services like Tweetlater and SocialToo allow twitterers to automatically direct message or @ reply new followers. Sometimes, that takes the form of, “Just wanted to say hi and thanks for following. Looking forward to tweeting with you.”

These are great tools when used politely, but too many people have gotten lazy with these things and are obnoxiously taking advantage of them.

The problem that many of us have is the blatant, over-the-top advertising that is done. Personally, I think Twitterfeed is really useful. I like knowing when my tweeple post something new. I won’t always read their stuff, but at least, I have the option. The problem comes when you auto-tweet things like, “If I suggested you read one thing today, it’d be this http://URLshorteningservice.com.” To me, that sounds like you found something interesting, and you’re not just shamelessly promoting yourself.

Have a new blog post? Think it’s spectacular? Set your auto-tweet to begin with something like, “My new blog post,” not, “Let me mislead you just to increase my pageviews.”

Now, a lot of so called Twitter experts will complain about auto-tweets for hellos. Truth be told, I think they’re great. I simply cannot send a personal hello to everyone that follows me within a short time of them doing so. Sometimes, I’m too busy. Other times, I’m just not on Twitter. So, what do I do? I auto-direct message a polite hello and then follow up later with a personal hello to anyone that has responded.

This has two benefits. One, it’s simple for me to welcome people, and two, it cuts down the number of people I have to say hi to because there are so many twitterers that follow just to see if you will follow back, but they have no genuine interest in you. So, I figure that, if they message me back with a hello, I should take the time to check out their profiles, maybe their blogs too, and then tweet them a genuine greeting.

The followers that I ignore are the ones that direct message me something like, “Your the coolest person ever! So, I’m giving you access to my new top-secret post on making money the easy way http://ShameShameShame.com.” Notice the confusion between your and you’re, as well as the person just assuming I’m interested in that sort of post, and saying I’m the coolest person ever when s/he likely has never met, or even heard about, me? That’s just poor and annoying salesmanship there.

Chris Brogan would say, “I offered to shake your hand, and you stuck your tongue down my throat. Yuck.” Wait until you’ve built a relationship with me before you assume I’m even interested in your moneymaking tips. If I am, you’ll get lots of pageviews from me instead of just an immediate unfollow due to the uncouth hello you just sent.

What does this all mean? Automation services are great when used correctly. When they’re used incorrectly, they burn bridges that you’ve barely begun to build. Go ahead and auto direct message me a hello and maybe even your URL. Go ahead and auto-tweet your new blog post. Just don’t make any assumptions about what your new followers are interested in, and definitely, do not mislead them. This way, you can join the ranks of Twitter for Smart People and not Twitter for the Socially Inept.