Remember when we used to say that “people” are the power behind the social web?   Can we can honestly claim that any more?  The social web has rapidly become just another a mass-marketing channel like TV or magazines, dominated by the mega-brands.

Think about the videos going viral these days.  What was the biggest hit of the year?  The Nike Tiger ad, a bizarre production certainly aimed at the viral potential of the Internet more than any paid TV opportunity. In fact eight of the top 10 most-viewed You Tube videos of 2009 were professionally-produced:

1. Evian roller babies (see above to view)
2. New Moon movie trailer
3. Wedding entrance dance
4. David after dentist
5. Britain’s Got Talent – Susan Boyle
6. through 10 – professional music videos

1. Texas Hold ‘em Poker
2. Mafia Wars
3. Michael Jackson
4. Barack Obama
5. Vin Diesel (Vin Diesel???)
6. Starbucks
7. Lady Gaga
8. Twilight
9. Coca-Cola
10. Skittles

Neicole Crepeau is among the smartest bloggers on my social media radar.  Imagine my surprise when out of the blue she sent me this email: “Your blog made me think about some things and I’ve written an article for you. Here it is.”   Isn’t that cool?  So I get to take the day off and we can all enjoy Neicole’s unique perspective today …

Mark’s post Does the social web primarily benefit service companies? discussed some of the obstacles to greater use of B2B social media marketing, particularly by small and medium businesses.  As he points out, businesses must do a better job of integrating social media into their overall marketing strategy.  However, there is an even bigger obstacle to an expansion of business use of the social web, and it is in the networks themselves. 

Wake up, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even LinkedIn.  You might have started as a lark, a side-project done just for fun.  Now, you’re a business.   But you’re not acting like one.

These popular social networks have failed to recognize where their bread and butter is going to come from. Even YouTube, under Google, continues to focus on ads as its potential source of income. It has yet to make that work. Chances are, that model will never be successful enough to turn the profit they need.

I see a clear evolution of social networks, as outlined in my video and blog post of December 8th. It begins with a great idea, like micro-blogging or connecting friends via status updates. That draws an initial, small set of users. The customer base expands as the social network transforms and improves.

But end-users won’t pay for these services—not enough, at least. The social networks now need to look to the corporate world to make a profit.  Remember, you have two customers, guys:

• End-users
• Business users

You’ve correctly focused on building a great tool for end-users, and you need to keep doing that. However, you also need to recognize that business users are an equally important customer. Now, go focus just as fervently on them!

Google built a great search solution that end-users love—but weren’t going to pay for. They turned to innovative corporate solutions and found a goldmine.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn need to do the same. But NOT through the same tired technique of ad serving.

These companies need to take a page from the marketing 101 handbook and listen to their customers — business customers — and find innovative solutions for them. What do businesses want to do via your site? Marketing … maybe customer support?  What do they need in order to do that successfully?  Ways to engage and maintain contact with consumers?  The ability to find/target the right consumers? Mechanisms to track and measure their engagement and ROI over time?

They are your customers.  Solve their problems. Make money.

Look at Ikea’s photo-tagging campaign on Facebook. There’s a creative new revenue stream.  How can you make that method available to lots of businesses, with a low barrier of entry/use? How can you monetize it?  Could YouTube do something similar, by making it possible for businesses to find and tag their products in user-supplied videos? Or make it beneficial for users themselves to do product placements in their videos.  Businesses would love to promote those user-created placements!

When social networks treat the corporate world as a key customer, the innovation will really start that will drive businesses to the social web in droves and drive profitable new business models from themselves.

Neicole Crepeau is a 25-year veteran of the tech industry, with experience in technical writing, usability testing, user experience/interaction design, website design, and product management. Her outstanding blog can be found at http://nmc.itdevworks.com/

While the case for social media as a marketing channel is compelling for consumer products companies, I’ve been particularly interested in how it is being used … or not … by mainstream industrials.  Earlier this year I assessed the social media presence of most of the major Fortune 500 B2B giants looking for case studies.

I found some great examples, but for fun, I’ve decided to start out with the WORST companies I found out there. With few exceptions, major industrial companies are not utilizing – and in many cases ignoring — social media as a stakeholder connection point. A few fun facts:

• Number of Top 25 B2B companies with more Twitter followers than me (None)
• Worst B2B corporate Twitter-er (by far) — DuPont. An example: “Back off weeds! 4 new herbicides are coming to get you …”
• Most popular corporate social media platform: Facebook
• Percent of companies with either Facebook or MySpace pages: 75%
• Percentage with both: 25%
• Most popular use of social media: A place to post press releases

With no further delay, let’s take a look at the Top Five biggest B2B social media screw-ups.

5. 3M Corporation – I love 3M. I’ve always cherished their heritage of innovation and product development. If any company in America could take advantage of the awesome power of global community it should be 3M. Where are you guys? We need you out here.

4. General Dynamics — There is a not-very-good techno rock band called General Dynamics who dominates the social media bandwidth. That’s a problem for a Fortune 100 company with the same name. This is the time for the company to flex some legal muscle and tell them they were there first! In the corporate world, this ID theft is tantamount to a porn starlet naming herself “Pepsi.” You have to take action on this, General Dynamics! Go kick some techno butt!

3. Oracle Corporation – You would expect an ego-laden company like Oracle to be sucking up the social media space, but not so. The Twitter account is exclusively a press release machine and their other sites are ill-attended placeholders. Larry, look at what SAP is doing with social media. Work it baby.

2. Johnson Controls — This Fortune 50 titan has had their name usurped on Facebook by a bunch of disgruntled employees. An example of social media gone very wrong when you’re asleep at the wheel.

1. Dow Chemical Company. The pinnacle of social media mayhem. The first search result for Dow on Twitter is called “spillspill” and the largest company-related Facebook page is called Fuck Chemical Valley and Fuck Dow (42 members). The MySpace presence has also been hijacked, complete with fake logos, fake employees and a mission statement that includes: “minimizing damage by angry citizens who have been affected by our pollution through legal suits and PR campaigns, making sure scientists who find our products to be dangerously toxic are not allowed to publish.” Dow has a proud history of PR fubars. The legacy continues.

Disclosure: My ex-wife had family ties to the chemical industry. While clinical tests have shown she is toxic to humans, she is not associated with the Fuck Dow campaign.

A lot has been written about the “danger” social media poses to companies and brands, but what about the real threat it poses to us as individuals?

Immediate, transparent, global, free communication is one of the most breathtaking information advances since the telephone. But when there is an opportunity for human corruption, there probably WILL be human corruption. Here are the biggest threats posed by the advent of social media:

Risk to personal security. For fun, I follow a few celebrities on Twitter, the digital Post-it note. The other day, one of them tweeted: “Down at Gino’s having a pizza with my boys.” Earlier in the day he had established the city he was in. With this kind of shoot-from-the-hip public broadcasting, it’s only a matter of time before we see the first Twitter-related crimes. Even for non-celebrities, how safe is it to post to the world, “My husband and I are off to Boston for the Web 3.0 conference.” Not very … unless you want your next post to be “Our house got wiped out by crooks while we were away!”

Risk to personal finances. Every time you register for a site, sign up for an app, or populate a social media profile, you are adding to a databank all about you. Strangers can find names, birth dates, family members, school and work history, e-mail addresses and much more. One blog writer recently quipped, “Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to steal a person’s identity online.” Even more severe than identity theft and the obvious financial ramifications for an individual — we will begin to see online crimes being committed under the alias of another person.

Risk to personal reputation. Thankfully, nobody was holding a video camera in my face during my college years. But the lives of today’s youth are explicitly documented on You Tube, blogs, photo albums, and social media sites, creating a permanent online record. One corporate recruiter told me that a web search is more important to him than a resume. How will your Google-image affect your future job prospects, personal relationships, political aspirations? Did you read about the teen girls who took pictures of themselves in their bras at a sleepover, texted them to friends and then hours later ended up on porn sites? How do you erase something like that? Google never forgets.

Risk to data and information. A few weeks ago, a computer worm, using Twitter, infected tens of thousands of computers as it replicated itself across the Internet. The worm was created by a 17-year-old to “expose the vulnerabilities” in Twitter. The red-hot social networking/microblogging service has been scrambling to plug cross-site scripting and other Web site vulnerabilities to thwart worm attacks but, as one researcher points out, it’s much easier to misuse the Twitter API as a “weak link” to send worms squirming through Twitter.

Risk to personal health. Neurologists and doctors warn that obsessive immersion in screen technologies and social network sites will lead to short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, weight gain, and a tenuous sense of identity.

Risk to personal productivity. A friend recently told me that he needed to find a way to block himself from social media sites at work. “I’m hooked,” he said. “I can’t stop myself from getting online every minute that I can.” According to a U.K. study, British firms are losing $264 million A DAY on lost productivity due to undercover activities on Facebook. Businesses are starting to look for ways to deal with the social networking problem. Several companies in America already block social media sites.

So, where does this lead?
I’m a fan of social media. These new platforms have connected me to countless interesting people, opportunities and ideas. The purpose of this article is to serve as a counter-point to those who seem to be hypnotized by the hyperbole and beat the drum of social media while ignoring these certain consequences. There is virtually NO dialogue on the risks of the inevitable corruption that will result from having a free and pervasive window into YOUR life.

I’m hoping the dialogue will start now …

Jennifer Yeager, Marketing Communications Manager, said some of the success so far includes:
o 112,00 webpage views
o More than 1,000 registered job seekers
o 1,500 Twitter followers (growing >100/month)
o 6,331 job-related Twitter posts

This week, my boss asked me to construct his company’s first Facebook page and establish a presence on Twitter. My qualification? I’m young.

The truth is, I probably know less about social media marketing than he does … Tweet what?

Sure, I am a child of the new media generation. But, the truth is, my generation is still trying to figure all this stuff out too! Granted, there are a handful of SM savvy hipsters who can tweet and blog their way through life, but half of us can’t figure out what to do with all this stuff.

Sure, we all have Facebook or MySpace pages and we love YouTube, but at college, we’re using these channels just for fun and we’re too self-involved to realize that SM can be used by businesses on so many other levels.

The “youth-as-social-media-change-agents” myth got pumped up to a whole new level a few weeks ago when a much-publicized 15-year-old delivered a report on media channels to Morgan Stanley. Not all of us in the under-25 bracket can do that … most of us are just not that precocious!

The only reason I’m on Twitter is because my Dad is there. When I found out he was on Twitter I thought, “Whoa! The old man is on Twitter? I must be falling behind!” Truth is, my whole generation is behind. Nearly every study shows that people OVER 25 are the ones most rapidly adopting social media … not us. And the fastest-growing category on Facebook is over 50!

Here’s my point: For all of you from the generation ahead of me who have been running rampant through SM sites to compete with my generation of “digital natives,” SLOW DOWN. You’re winning a race against a competitor that doesn’t even know the race exists!

The social media finish line looks a lot clearer in your reading glasses, than in my generation’s youthful 20-20 vision.

To turn online connections into serious business relationships, you need to surround your cyber-self with useful, interesting content. Difficulty in providing consistent, meaningful content is the NUMBER ONE reason people give up and never achieve social media business benefits. So you just have to find a way to do it! First, let’s get those excuses out of the way:

1. If you’re interesting, entertaining and funny, people will be drawn to you. But if you’re shy and have difficulty being entertaining, you just can’t provide content, so why try?
2. Takes too much time. No person with a full-time job can possibly have time for the incremental effort needed for social media. Who has time to write a blog???
3. Social media is just a stupid fad any way.

We are not going to accept these excuses, right? RIGHT! So, I’ve worked up a strategy for you to efficiently deliver meaningful content even if you’re not a natural writer. All you have to do is be yourself and tenaciously ENGAGE. Ideas to create content for the non-writer, in just a few minutes a day:

• In the last post, I emphasized the importance of joining Linked-In Groups. Now become INVOLVED. Twice a week, respond to a question or comment in the group. You can answer questions can’t you? Of course you can! Time commitment: 20 min/week.
• Once a week, peruse online magazines related to your industry. Find an interesting article. Leave an opinion or your appreciation in the comment section then tweet the article out to your followers on Twitter. You’ve created meaningful content twice. Time = 15 min
• Find five or more blogs related to your industry and put them in an aggregator like Google Reader. Once you have this set up, review blog content at least once a week and comment + tweet out your favorite articles. 15 min
• Find interesting and useful content that has already been created by your company. Are there ways you can reference this content to help others, solve problems, and answer questions?
• In the last post we talked about finding connections through Facebook. Now visit them. Share, engage, comment, react, ask more questions. 20 min
• Tweet AT LEAST three times a day (at different times), AT LEAST three days a week. (45 min/week)

At first, I know it can be difficult to figure out what to tweet, but you have to keep at it! When you get stuck, here are some subject matter ideas to get you going again.

• An entertaining observation you made – it could be a funny bumper sticker, a movie or a commercial you saw on TV.
• Something interesting related to your business or industry. But DO NOT SELL. Here’s an example of something appropriate: “Finally landed a great contract – business has been tough.” Or, “Went to a great training program on social media today – I recommend it”
• Re-tweet a particularly good article or post provided by somebody you follow.
• Comment on an observation made by one of your followers.
• Take a picture from a place you’re visiting and comment on it.
• Express an opinion on a national news story.
• Ask a question and authentically seek help from the community.
• Thank followers who do something nice for you, like mentioning you on a Follow Friday.

To provide meaningful content, you don’t have to write a lot, but you MUST COMMIT. You know that old saying: You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him tweet. I can’t make you engage, but I promise that you can’t be successful without it.

If you were to help a friend get started in social media, what other ideas do you have?

Tomorrow, the final part of the success formula: Authentic Helpfulness.

Other articles in this series:

Part 1: A formula for social media business success

Part 2: Building meaningful business connections

Part 4: Social Media’s Economy of Giving

The fact that I think you should be focused on the quantifiable business benefits of social media marketing seems to put me squarely at odds with many thought leaders right now. This quote from a very respected blogger still haunts me:

“When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? If they say, “to make money,” then they will fail, because currency in the social web is found in both relationships and content.”

Another leading observer opined yesterday that his “economy is relationships.”

How is social media marketing any different from holding a company open house for community leaders or hosting a dinner to get to know some potential customers? Are those things about building trust and relationships? Yes, of course! But we also have no problem admitting that the ultimate goal is to burnish our image with these influencers to improve our chance of business success. Why are we so intent on carving out a special little place in the sun — where results don’t matter — for the social web?