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The Global Neighbourhoods blog scratches the surface on the relationship between the high cost of travel (local and long-distance), and keeping up with your customers and business partners. This seems pretty obvious to social media evangelist-types, but I don’t feel shy about hammering the point home to small business folks who have yet to take advantage of social media opportunities.

Businesses will increasingly use social media to get closer with customers. This, of course, is already happening and happening at a pretty fast rate. But I think the trend is about to accelerate. Because it is getting too expensive and inconvenient to meet face-to-face in the real world, there will be more efforts to bring the conversation to the next best place, in the form of virtual communities.

From the article Social Media & the Cost of Fuel, Global Neighborhoods Blog

A few years ago, in the early months of the podcasting phenomenon, I was the web-presence guy for a very funny and briefly popular podcast called “Area 51″. I had my own little niche podcast, and I recognized the importance of being “of” that community, surfing on its excitement and innovation. But somehow I could never get the “Area 51″ performers to become a part of that adrenalinized world, and the podcast died for lack of direction and commitment. To this day I believe that if the Area 51 crew had been a real part of the nascent podcast community, the exhilaration would have carried them over the rough spots.

I think it is very important to take the time to absorb the zeitgeist of the social media world in which you wish to work. Chris Brogan poses this observation:

It’s interesting to note that companies will spend anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 on a good website design, but will fail to implement even the most rudimentary listening tools to move their capabilities to understand the impact of such a site beyond the realm of hits and clicks.

Read Chris Brogan’s piece concerning listening tools for social media. Or don’t, and just sling spam into a world you don’t really “get”.

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

The idea of Social Media Marketing, as I interpret it, is to get other people to happily do your work for you. In this spirit, and with sincere appreciation for the work and thought that went into it, I present this excellent blog entry from “Viper Chill” by Glen Allsopp. It is itself a compilation of how-to-leverage-social-media articles and tips:

Here is an excerpt:

MySpace Tips Summary

• Look Around - Really get to know all the options available in MySpace before you start comment spamming. Messaging can be a good option and there are also paid advertising spots.
• Target a Niche - If you are going down a ’spammy route’, don’t just try to target the whole of MySpace. Look into people in niches for example women or members of certain groups.

Read How to Get Traffic from the top Social Media Sites from “Viper Chill” (Cool name, huh?)

If you are reading this piece with a beginner’s mind right now, then you are probably very lucky. You have probably not cobbled together a social web presence higgledy-piggledy, signing up for various services as they arrived on the scene with various identities, agendas and degrees of commitment. You have a chance to put together a social media strategy that will present you or your business in a unified and coherent manner across the web. (Actually, it’s never too late to start fresh, but what to do with all that accumulated juice, eh?)

As usual, I’ve found an article from someone who is a lot smarter than I am, and I offer this excerpt to whet your appetite.

Begin with the End in Mind

Strategy isn’t the goal. It’s the path you plan to take to get there. So, let’s put some goals out, and then talk through how to build a strategy to reach them. Here are a few sample goals. Feel free to add some to the comments, if I don’t cover yours.

Increase customer base.
Generate leads.
Drive sales.
Build awareness.
Make money from your content.
Establish thought leadership.
Educate customers.
Customer-source part of your product development.
Reach new channels of customers.
Improve internal communication.

Read the rest of Chris Brogan’s article “Starting A Social Media Strategy.” His is another blog one might consider subscribing to.

Unlike old media (tv, radio, newspapers, magazines), social media is a better servant of small business than it is of giant corporations, because Social media is the Great Equalizer. Here’s one reason why– General Motor’s Facebook page or Twitter tweet looks the same and has the same potential reach as Joe’s Pizza’s Facebook page or Twitter tweet. There is a democratic leveling of the playing field here that can raise tiny players to star status (and back again, if you’re not prepared) in a matter of hours.
In what other time in history has this been possible? Will this opportunity exist forever, or will regulation or GiantCo bring dull hierarchal order to this Wild West? Beats me, but why not take advantage of this fun, cheap (and by “cheap”, I mean “free”) marketing opportunity? Investigate further, even if you don’t think social media marketing is right for your kind of business.
Thanks to Duct Tape Marketing!

Although this little piece was written with an emphasis on medium-to-large business, the principles are, if anything, even more applicable to small business, whose promotion budgets are often quite small.

Normalization is happening, A checkbox for ’social media’ on every announcement, product launch, product development and support will be using these tools. Social media tools to listen, converse, collect knowledge, and build new products will integrate across the customer cycle.

Read the article “The Five Questions Companies Ask About Social Media” from Web Strategy by Jeremiah.

… and a new breed of organization techie.  Skip this one if you are still struggling with basic concepts, but it appears to be a little peek into the future of small-business IT-guy-dom.

A good I.T. person, though, knows how to interpret “user-speak” and present them with the tools they need even if they didn’t know how to ask for them in our language. If anything, they’re going to be more likely to say something like: “Sending out an email newsletter seems outdated - I wish there was a better way to communicate with our customers,” or “I wish there was an easier way to keep up with the industry news,” or “Wow, how many different versions of this documentation is saved on our intranet, anyway?” The old I.T. guy might mumble and turn their head, but the I.T. 2.0 guy knows to say “Blog! RSS! Wikis!” instead.

Read the whole story on RWW here.

This won’t put you to sleep–

Ms. Worley…shared successes and lessons learned from H&R Block’s most recent social-media campaign. The campaign cast a wide net in the social-media space, with MySpace and Facebook profiles, YouTube postings, a Twitter account, widgets and even a virtual tax office in Second Life.

Read the whole article from Advertising Age