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?

When you do post though, how do people find your posts?  Even if you are a personal blogger like Paolo Jr, you at least have a small group of dedicated readers… be it your immediate family, circle of friends, or Second Life buddies. But, how do new people find your posts?

In your blog design, you need to make it very clear how people can subscribe.  Look at the big RSS button with “subscribe” next to it there on the right.  You could be doing that.  I have to like your site a lot in order to check back frequently without simply using a subscription option to tell me when something new has been posted.  If people are not subscribed to your blog, it is easy for them to forget about it and stop checking in.

Now that you have subscriptions displayed prominently, you need a better way to bring in new readers than simply just waiting for the search engines to crawl your new material and then hoping that someone’s search brings them to your site. If you are on Twitter, and you should be if you are a blogger, you need to tweet links to your most recent posts. If there is anything Twitter is good for, it is spreading news quickly.  If you have 500 followers, 50 that click on your link, and 1 or 2 (also with 500 followers each) that retweet your link, how many people do you think you can get reading your new blog posts?

Sadly, I see too few bloggers who take advantage of news aggregators like Reddit, Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Stumble Upon, etc.  This is seriously how often some people check these sites for new things to read.  My personal favorite is Reddit, but that is because I like the stripped down UI, the customization options when it comes to topics, and the general vibe of the community.  Digg is the big dog in the arena though and should not be overlooked even if it is impossible to get to the front page.

Ideally when you post something new, your readers will submit you to news aggregating sites because your post was just that great! Why not help them out and include buttons for them to do so… like the Sphinn button at the bottom of this post or the set of buttons on Self-Promotion for Smart People.

Regardless of whether readers would submit new posts to news aggregators or not, I usually beat them to the punch, making it even easier for them when they come to read the post because they only need to vote it up or down. A solidly formulated title and a good post can easily explode your daily visits and pageviews by 2000% of your average.  I have had it happen.  You can too.

Let’s say that you average 100 visits/day, but you rework your design to display subscription options and news aggregation buttons, and then, you use Twitter to get 1000 extra people to visit your new post and Reddit to get another 2000.  If only 1% of those new visitors subscribe and you formulate compelling titles and great posts once each week, you can see how you can quickly get your news spread around.

So, how quickly does your news spread?

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.

Do you simply use those tools?  Or, do you participate with their communities?

Personally, my favorite internet tool is Twitter, but I have a hard time dealing with tweeple, who only tweet about what they’re doing and thinking without ever interacting with their followers or the tweeple they follow.

Take a look at Twitterholic.  Even if you have something witty and insightful to contribute, you will be hard pressed to get a response from anyone on the first page.  Now, many of them are extremely busy and simply cannot follow every tweet.  However, the sheer numbers of people they follow or are followed by make it difficult for them to really interact.

As Chris Brogan has said before, there is constantly a torrent of tweets coming his way, and unfortunately, he cannot address them all.  I applaud Chris for being as interactive as he is.  However, check out some other twitterholics.  See how often they @ reply people.  Not often, right?

Now, let’s widen our scope.  How many social networks are you a member of?  If the answer is more than maybe 3 or 4, do you ever find it difficult to really take part?

I, for example, find it hard to get involved in Linkedin’s Answers section or my Ning group’s events.  What does this mean?  I take slight advantage of social media by being a member, but sometimes, I am just spread too thin to actually take part.  Do I try?  Yes.  Do I always succeed? No.

In this sense, the social web is exactly like regular, old, face-to-face networking.  If you cannot spend quality time in your network, people can tell, and they will take it as a sign that they are less important than whatever else you are doing.  That is a turn off.

If they can see that you really are not trying to interact, but are instead just broadcasting your thoughts or selling/promoting yourself without end, they will again get turned off.

Often, I find that I build the best online relationships with people, who only interact in just one or two places.  We can chat in depth and give thoughtful commentary to each others’ work because they do not have so much to deal with that they cannot focus on what we have in common.

It’s easy to explain to individuals that spreading yourself too thin waters you’re your ability to interact and meaningfully take advantage of social media.  Now, if we could only find more companies that understood that we do not want them to simply use their Facebook pages, blogs, or Twitter accounts to just broadcast about their latest promotions.  We want them to talk to us like they care about what we have to say.

Thoughts?  Do you find yourself spread too thin?  Or, do you get more out of being in lots of different places?  What can companies do to actually take part in social media and not just take advantage of it?

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.

If you are working as a marketer, PR person, advertiser, or any other related job-type, you might have a hard time making the case to your superiors that your company should create a Facebook fan page or its own Ning group. Why? It is so difficult to measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns, because while they have the ability to create better public perception or increase share of voice, they do a poor job creating sales when they are not managed correctly. And, your managers do not even know those things yet. They likely just have the impression that it is an untested medium largely populated by people talking about how drunk they got last weekend or why they hate Britney Spears.

If you were to propose a new print ad campaign, you would argue for it using numbers: impressions, increased sales due to coupons or announcements, etc.  Why not get some numbers on social media so that you can do the same when you, say, argue your fledgling record label needs to post videos on Vimeo?

One of the biggest movements I believe we will see on the web this year will be an increased need for and discussion around social media analytics.  If you know your customer reps can turn unhappy customers into happy customers on Twitter, great! They should be on Twitter, but are you able to measure how many people you connect with there that are going to buy products from your website?  Do you know if that ability exists?

How about this? Website analytics is fairly well understood now, but what about web (and I mean the WHOLE web) analytics? What about social media analytics? Do you know where people are talking about you and what they are saying? Do you know what people are saying about your competitors? Because, you need to if you are going to try to measure growth in a social media campaign in a serious industry. You need to know the size of the digital footprint your company has on the web and how a social media campaign can change that. Otherwise, when you go to your boss to argue for getting everyone on Twitter, you might be hard pressed to find more reasons than “Well, everyone else is doing it.”

Everyone can sign up for free Google Alerts and Tweet Alerts, but few hardcore social media measurement tools exist, and those that do are primarily used by social media marketing companies that are carving out their places in a field that is set for huge success or huge failure this year. If your company is hesitant to jump into the social media frenzy, that is fine, but when you make an argument for it, realize that people are talking about you and your competitors, and if you do not have the tools, counseling, or skills, you will not be able to participate in the conversation and will therefore miss out on the chance to use social media to grow your business.

Do you know of valuable ways to measure social media impact on your business?  Working in the industry, I am aware of plenty, but so many impressive tools pop up everyday that I cannot always keep track of them.

Beaker singing “Ode to Joy” is not a redub or reedit of old episodes of “The Muppet Show.” It’s one part of original web content featuring various characters from “The Muppet Show” created and produced by the Henson Company. Some of them include “Classical Chicken” with Gonzo, and “Rolling with the Skateboarding Dog” with Rowlf the Dog. What I find unique about the clips is that they update the Muppets to the digital age while retaining the character of Muppets as they have been since the ‘70s. The “Rolling with the Skateboarding Dog” has Rowlf with the skateboarding viral video bulldog and trying to do his own trick. At the end of some of the Muppet clips, we see Waldorf and Stadler peering into their own “web cam” criticizing the clips (W: How many hits did that receive? S: Unfortunately not enough to kill it.). Much the same way “The Muppet Show” parodied, as well as celebrated, the form of the variety show, these web clips use the viral form for as much of the comedy as well as the delivery of the message. In that sense, it is self-referential and thus keeps the brand name and brand quality intact.

On top of this, the advantages to posting it as a YouTube video have clear benefits to the company. When I showed it to my daughter, she wanted to see some of the other Muppet “boxes” (which is what she calls them). Each link led to another, including those clips, redubs and reedits of “Muppet Show” episodes. She loved a bunch of the clips of the show itself and it brought back fond memories for me. Because of that I was looking on Ebay pricing DVD packages of the first and/or second seasons of the “Muppet Show” to buy for my daughter. Now, this seed alone of  “Ode to Joy” received 4.5 million hits. Suppose that only 10% of those start to do what I did and look up the Season One DVD of the “Muppet Show” and 10% of that 10% decide to buy the DVD set– roughly 1% of those who saw the clip. That would be still 45,000 units of Season One “Muppet Show” DVDs sold. Even at the Amazon.com rate of $33.99, that means over $1.5 million in revenue for the company ($1,529,550). If they shopped around and got a deal at $23, that’s still $1 million and change for the company ($1,035,000). That’s mostly revenue for pushing existing stock of inventory for one season of DVDs. Even if the cost of one of the viral videos is close to $100,000 or more, the cost to profit ratio easily justifies the expense of the video. Take those numbers and extrapolate them across all other instances of the video and other videos (mentioned above) and we have a serious needle-mover.

Even if it didn’t lead to a sale, it leads to more recognition of the existing brand and continues the legacy of the show and company to a new generation, which is often immeasurable. Separating the quality product from the inferior is essential for any company, especially for children’s programming. Using the online community resources to help plug your product can mean the difference between not only profit and loss, but between obscure fad and sustainable memory that can survive generation gaps.

When the economy first began to slide into the deep and ugly spiral that we have found ourselves in, rumors spread through the social media sphere about how corporate America would drop the bomb on traditional advertising and marketing budgets with shady ROI in favor of social media marketing in hopes of much smaller budgets with much larger brand impact.

And with this rumored influx of cash to the social media sphere, so began the “social media gold rush.” Headed west (figuratively) these newly professional millennials and middle managers struggling to stay relevant polished up their Web 2.0 speak to make a name for themselves and would take a few bucks from anyone who needed help setting up their Twitter account or cover up some embarrassing MySpace pics.

While eager to take advantage of this new financial opportunity, it became clear very quickly that the vast majority of this group was far too eager to don their new “social media guru” title on their resume, linkedin profile, twitter page and facebook info. They became little more than modern day snake oil salesman when their skills and professional creds just weren’t up to snuff.

The sad truth for many of these wannabe gurus is that just because you grew up with Facebook and were a Twitter early adopter, that doesn’t mean any of that knowledge is immediately transferable to the business world. You may be able to fool a few and sell them on your services, but as the economy continues its slide and each penny is even more closely watched than the last, only the real Web Strategists will survive.

The impact of this recession has played an interesting part in the evolution of the social media guru role. Unlike recessions in the past, there was no huge bubble or explosive downfall. The truth is that the trickle down effect of this recession has had most businesses running extremely lean for about 6 months now. Under those conditions, anyone that wasn’t able to clearly and immediately justify their value earned themselves a spot at the front of the like to get the axe.

While social media budgets ARE still being cut just as much as traditional marketing budgets, I think it is fair to say that it is at least easier to determine the real gurus from the snake oil salesman. With the extra financial pressure for a clear ROI, if you can’t prove your value, you aren’t going to make a living and will already have polished up your resume with a brand new set of skills.

In case you still aren’t sure who you are dealing with before hiring a social media consultant, Web Worker Daily has compiled a great starting point for questions to ask before offering any contracts.

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.

You lost your job? You have some experience marketing? Thinking about becoming a new media marketing consultant? You have a Twitter or Facebook account? Social media is big right now, is it not? You could be a social media consultant!

Better yet… times are rough, so your company needs to work on new marketing angles? Some of your younger employees are real whizzes with Youtube and Friendfeed? You have heard that Zappos, Southwest, and Burger King are doing social media, right? You could totally put those kids in charge of your new social media campaign!

No, without the experience, you probably could not be a social media consultant, and please do not put those kids in charge of your company’s new media marketing campaign. At least read Businessweek’s 5 social media myths and make sure you’re not buying into the sizzle first.

I applaud people trying to work on their marketing chops and trying to figure out how to use social media for business purposes, but there is a big difference between social media marketing and what I will call “non-social media marketing.”  As well, there are many different kinds of social media consultants: technical, creative, crossover, engagement, viral, and on, and on.

Social media has a love/hate relationship with the marketing world. Some of us believe that there is great potential, and we just have not figured out exactly how to transfer that potential to every industry, product, or service. Others of us believe it is just a fad, a buzzword, and that only the inexperienced or the dumb are jumping on that bandwagon.

I tend to be in the former camp, but I am also of the opinion that social media is simply another tool set to use in tandem with other types of marketing. It will not replace non-social media marketing. I mean, only 56% of Americans check their email on a daily basis, but what percentage of people in all developed countries watch TV, read newspapers, listen to the radio, receive mail, or even see billboards on a daily basis? Wouldn’t a comprehensive plan, including both social and non-social media help you reach the largest number of people?

When we talk with clients about marketing campaigns, we make plans around what will draw offline customers online or vice-versa. Can we email a coupon to potential clients and get them to bring a printed version to our shop? Or, how about, can we mail them a postcard that tells them about a special drawing we’re holding for people who submit the best idea to our blog?

This brings me to why you should not ask those whiz kids, as smart as they might be, to help you get a social media marketing campaign going. They might have tons of friends on Myspace, but they have never asked those friends to buy anything from them, have they?

As well, have you checked their Twitter histories to see if they pop off with comments that are inappropriate for business? I’m not saying that it is bad for people to be open on the internet or that individuals should censor themselves, but you want to keep a certain image of your company, right?

Social media consultants are paid to achieve your goals in a professional manner. They have experience, are creative, and know how to leverage online media to turn your website visitors into increased store visits, more phone calls, or increased orders, but they also need to weave non-social media marketing into the work they do for you.

I know that this sounds like a shameless plug for social media consultants, but honestly, it does not cost you anything, but a bit of time, to get one or two of them on the phone and see if their ideas gel with your company’s plans. Or, if you are looking at becoming a consultant, why not email or call one that looks pretty reputable and pick his/her brain?

Everyday, you will hear the same refrain “due to this economy… etc, etc, etc.”  Well, if things are getting worse and the pie is shrinking, why not see if someone can help you grab a larger slice so that, when the pie grows again, you’ll be set for even greater revenues. It’s a win-win for you and your potential consultant. But, remember to not be fooled by hype about social media solving your problems. In many cases it needs to come along with a healthy dose of non-social media marketing and real world metrics.