My co-worker walked in this morning talking about her new workout regimen, and I about my re-focused eating habits. Everyone probably has personal goals that sometimes need to be dusted off and renewed. But what about professional goals? I’m officially declaring mine here, in public view on the Barnhart blog, to put that extra kick in me to remain accountable.

1. For each goal, make a plan with measureable objectives. Everything I do during my workday should help me achieve at least one of the agency’s or my clients’ goals. If it doesn’t, then it’s a waste of time. A crucial aspect of a plan is ensuring that you know when you’ve found success, or when you need to adjust your tactics. This requires measureable objectives.

2. Make time for things that should be a priority. It’s all too easy to let things slip to the backburner because other important tasks need to be completed. No one (be it a potential client, co-worker, current client) will be impressed with so-so.

3. Share awesome. This is especially true for social media marketing, but is applicable to just about any and all messaging.

Now let’s see how I can walk the walk, too.

Note: I also attribute this inspiration to attending Explore & Engage with Jason Falls and Brian Solis last week. I highly recommend these two influencers and future Social:IRL events.

But, social media for small businesses can be tricky. Which avenues do you pursue? What do you write? What the heck is a hash tag? Who keeps following me? My best advice is: copy the cool kids. It’s awesome to be an early adopter, but the products being used out there are the ones that work. I use Facebook because almost 600 million people use Facebook. I use Wordpress for blogging because it’s easy to use. Why would you make life hard for yourself?

It can all sound a little overwhelming, but it isn’t if you learn to harness the power of these tools correctly. For a small business this is essential and the goal should always be to leave a social media footprint with all of your online marketing activities driving consumers to your business website.

After years of using social media for my businesses, I’ve definitely made mistakes and learned a lot about the interaction capabilities of these tools. Below are 12 tips to increase your social media footprint and harness the exponential power of social media.

1. The Interaction Economy is replacing the Experience Economy as an anticipatory approach to creating customer value. Interacting with your customers will have them coming back.

2. Research all of the social media sites out there. Find the ones that work best for your business. If you make children’s clothing, you wouldn’t market to engineers.

3. SEO, Search Engine Optimization (helping those pesky search engine spiders find your site and rank it at the top) is important but needs to be combined with a solid plan for Search Engine Visibility (SEV).

4. Get to know what your competitors are doing in the social media sphere and read what social media pros have to say. They know what they’re talking about.

5. Tagging. Tag in Facebook to mention clients, customers, sites or vendors (use the @ symbol in front of the name you wish to tag). Tag in Twitter to spread the word to the Twitterverse (tag with the @ symbol to mention a specific person/group and # to tag a concept). Tag your blogs to increase search possibilities. Tag (and title well) videos to YouTube and Flickr.

6. Social media in the short term doesn’t work. You have to be in it to win it. Be persistent, consistent and committed.

7. Read about technology. It changes. Often. Like, everyday.

8. Interactions count. Every like, comment, Re Tweet: they all count.

9. Who you are and where you come from matters. People want to know they are dealing with real people, not machines.

10. Use Google Alerts to see who is talking about your business and anything related to your business.

11. Anyone who owns a small business can participate in social media, but not everyone actually does. That is to your advantage.

12. If you have a spare hour or two each day to surf the net, watch TV or stare into space, you have more than ample time to commit to implementing and using social media for your business.

How long have you been using social media for your small business? What have you found works best?

A look at the following statistics should help light a fire:
• According to eMarketer, consumers now spend 23.5% of their time each day online, second only to TV at 40%

• According to GfK MRI, eReader ownership is expected to triple in less than two years from 2.1 to 5.9 million units
• iPad sales will more than double in 2011 from 8.5 million units to 19.4 million units and will almost double again in 2012 to 30.1 million units (eMarketer)
• eMarketer predicts there will be 49.4 million mobile social network users by the end of this year and 79.1 million by 2015

• U.S. mobile phone users will top 250 million in 2011, over 80% of the population (eMarketer)
• Social network advertising will reach almost $4 billion (yes, billion with a B) in 2012

So what does all this mean? It means that your customers are reading, writing and communicating on mobile devices more than ever before, and they are not looking back. Sorry, newspaper…

Now don’t get me wrong, I am still a big advocate of traditional media as part of your media mix because let’s face it, it still works, and still gets noticed. However, balance is the key. The more ways you can reach your customer, the better, and the recent explosion of digital media offers us yet more alternatives to do just that. Everyone consumes media differently, so you need to have as much variety as possible in the way(s) you try to reach people, because you never know which touch point will be the one that resonates with someone on any given day, or hour, or minute.

As technology continues to advance, the way we consume media will change and we agency folk need to keep on top of things, as difficult as that can be given the rapid pace of adoption these days. Mobile apps and advertising aren’t right for everyone, and I caution against shoehorning something into your media mix just because you read somewhere that someone did something “cool”. Like anything, make sure you know where you are going, and have a strategy in place, before you make the new media leap.

A recent study published by USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism has proclaimed public relations pros the winners of the online social media fight when it comes to budgetary appropriations. (Pause for all the marketing specialists to gasp in horror and outrage.)

Agency budgeting for social media is ever increasing as its popularity and vitality continues to boom. Sure, marketing and public relations professionals alike do warrant some of the control over social media, but it’s all in response to the general public. We must keep up with the ebb and flow of the social media world, and ensure we are providing our clients, and by extension the public, what they want.

So as much as I would like to gloat as a PR person that we are the top dogs, I’m afraid it isn’t so. Just for kicks, though, the study did conclude these findings:

“When asked to define, in percentile terms, how much budgetary control PR/Communications exerted over digital/social media in their organizations, 25.4 percent of corporate participants said that PR/Communication has 81 to 100 percent of budgetary control. Only half as many – 12.6 percent – said that Marketing had that much control.”

Where there’s action, there’s money. And he who controls the action gets all the money. So naturally, the online tug-o-war for social media control will likely continue to be a battlefield. Until then, it looks like dinner’s on us PR people.

Where do you stand on this ever-changing topic? Who, in your eyes, should or does control social media? PR or marketing folks?

Twitter seems to be THE social media tool that achieves the best results and relays your message to the most people in the shortest amount of time. And the fact that Twitter enables the user to find and follow their audiences – thus encouraging their audiences to follow them back – makes it that much more appealing in my book. You can’t do that with a Facebook fan or company profile page, which I feel takes some of the control out of the marketer’s hands – and I hate not being in control (I’m a PR person after all)!

The statistics from eMarketer’s survey are quite interesting. Although Twitter is tops, it barely edges out Facebook. And these two sites have grown in importance as blogs have dropped further down the list.

Clearly, experienced social marketers know what they’re doing when it comes to social media, and most of them are using Twitter. That doesn’t mean Twitter is right for every company. But after seeing these statistics, if you’re not already using Twitter, I think a second or even third look at the social media tool is in order.

What social media tools are you using most? Which ones yield the best ROI?

Amen!

We feel like we’ve been screaming this message from the mountaintops for a while now, but only a few seem to really get it. The amount of companies talking at their audience rather than talking with them is staggering.

Baer provides a couple good examples of large companies that are helping their customers via social media. My favorite is the Geek Squad example:

“Geek Squad makes its living providing technology configuration and repair services, via BestBuy stores everywhere. But yet Geek Squad has a YouTube channel that includes hundreds of videos showing people how to do it themselves. They aren’t trying to sell you services – at least not at that point – they are being helpful.”

I like this example because it shows how you have to give a little in order to get more back.

Along those same lines, a friend of mine went to change his car break pads a while back – something he had never attempted before. Midway through he realized he needed some help, but his car tires were already off and he couldn’t drive to a garage. His solution? YouTube. He found the YouTube channel of a legitimate car maintenance company and followed their video demonstrating how to change break pads. He was so impressed, he now brings his car to that company for maintenance he can’t do himself.

These are both perfect examples of, as Baer puts it, “understanding the difference between selling and helping. That’s understanding that social media success is a long putt, not a tap-in.”

The sooner companies realize that no customer or potential customer wants to be talked at or sold to and that they should find ways to support and help their customers, the better off they both will be.

I got the new free Snowbird iPhone app, created by the amazing guys at welikesmall.com, and so of course I gave them my name and number. Now they could have texted me and begged me to come up during the last 30 days of little snow and fewer customers. That is what they needed — Customers. But they waited until they had something I wanted. Snow! So instead of being pissed off that I got a text from some company I was elated.(And normally I do get pissed off).

Give them something they want and your business will grow. Try to “sell” them on their mobile device, Facebook, Twitter or whatever, and you will fail.

CauseWorld is available for free at Apple’s App Store. And it’s not hard to find because it’s on the front page, at least for today. Launched by a startup called ShopKick and sponsored by Kraft, Citibank and others, it’ll make you feel better about buying that eighth pair of re-issued Air Jordans. And really, you don’t have to buy anything, you can just window shop if you want. Just check in with the retail outlet and you’ll get karma points. When you’ve collected enough points, one of the sponsors donates cash to your chosen cause. Choose a different cause with every donation if you wish – there are plenty to choose from. It’s a philanthropy game and it’ll be interesting to see how much good can be done when the numbers come in.

1. I will not jump blindly into social media until I have identified my audiences, goals and results.
2. I will not pretend to be an unbiased message board/blog reader when I comment about my company – If I do, people will find out, and the backlash will be severe.
3. I will actually dedicate the time it takes to maintain my social media tools. Contrary to popular belief, social media is not “free” – it takes hours every week, between strategy, content development and engagement with readers.
4. I will offer real value to my social media audience, whether in the form of insights, entertainment or deals.
5. I will listen to and respond quickly to my audience. Social media allows for faster engagement than any other medium. But if we’re slow to interact with them, they’ll go elsewhere.

Cheers!