On June 19, I attended a local event sponsored by the Taylor University MBA program called “Evolve or Die.  The Future of Online Communication”.  The presenter was Kyle Lacy, CEO/Co-Founder of Brandswag.  I have to admit, I went into this event hoping to find the Ultimate Truth of the social media universe.  Don’t get me wrong, we are definitely on-board the social media bandwagon at Ambassador.  We blog, tweet, connect though our corporate Facebook fan page, collaborate through our intranet, and share information on Yammer.  Even so, I continue to look for bigger and better ways to derive business benefit with these tools.

If you’re new to social media, you may find yourself asking: Why should I care?  Have you seen the latest version of the “Did You Know” YouTube video – if you haven’t, you should check it out.  The statistics in this video make it glaringly obvious that the Internet has completely changed the game.  The business model that was used to start your company five or ten or twenty or fifty years ago becomes rapidly more obsolete as the world grows more connected and information & ideas are widely available (…and cheap, if not free).  “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less” (General Eric Shineski, Retired Chief of Staff, U.S. Army).

Now that you understand why you should care, let’s look at where to start.  I often hear that the whole “social media thing” feels like a perplexing conundrum of too much to learn and no time to act.  And then there’s the common frustration that as soon as you learn something, it changes.  In reality, the Ultimate Truth of the social media universe simply doesn’t exist.  There is no one-size-fits-all approach. However, rather than allowing yourself to get overwhelmed, try to leverage this list of actions you can take today to apply social media tools to your business:   

1. Understand your target market.  This goes beyond knowing their demographics and means digging deeper into psychographics to understand their social media patterns and behavior.

2. Build a presence where it makes sense.  If your target consumer/customer does not tweet, why are you?  If you’re a Recruiter, Sales Rep, or Job Seeker, why are you NOT on LinkedIn?

3. Stop over thinking.  You can conduct your own market research experiments today with little to no cost.

4. Read case studies and success stories.  Look for ways to apply these best practices to your business.  (e.g. Comcast’s success with Twitter.)

5. Block off time each day.  Whether it’s 10 minutes or an hour, spend time daily reading (and/or writing) blogs and keeping up with your various networks.  Put it on your calendar, and reschedule if you miss it.

6. Don’t procrastinate.  I liked this quote so much I’ll mention it again:  “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less” (General Eric Shineski, Retired Chief of Staff, U.S. Army).