The Economist is one of my favorite magazines. I usually read it cover to cover. So imagine my excitement when I saw their special report this week, Social Networking: A World of Connections.

After I read the report, I concluded — to my surprise — that there was really not much new in the report. This is not a negative reflection on The Economist. I believe it’s a positive reflection on the efficiency of Twitter to stream the most important news and trends my way before they get summarized by a business periodical.

Nevertheless, there were a few interesting nuggets I wanted to pass along:

>>Follow me on Twitter signs are appearing on the doors and windows of small businesses around the world. Asurvey found that 17 percent of Britain’s small businesses were using Twitter. They saved an average of $8,000 a year by cutting out other forms of advertising.

>>  A survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by Robert Half Technology, a recruitment firm, found that only 10 percent of them gave employees full access to social media networksduring the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether. The  executives’  biggest  concern was that social networking would lead to “social not-working.”  Some bosses also fretted that the sites would be used to leak sensitive corporate information.

>> An astonishing amount of time is being wasted on investigating the amount of time being wasted on social networks.  One study estimated that personal use of social networks during the working day was costing the British economy almost $2.3 billion a year in lost productivity. Another concluded that if companies banned employees from using Facebook while at work, their productivity would improve by 1.5%.

>> The magazine described Facebook’s “hacker culture.”  Their head of engineering’s motto is “move fast and break stuff.”  What matters is getting fresh products out to users quickly, even if they do not always work as intended. To generate new  ideas, they hold all-night hack-a-thons to at which engineers work on their pet projects. This Red Bull culture maybe why Facebook has just one engineer for every 1.2 million users.

>> Survey of 300,000 Twitters users showed more than half tweeted less than once every 74 days and 10 percent of all users account for 90 percent of all tweets.

>> Facebook’s audience is bigger than any TV network that has ever existed on  the  face  of  the  earth.

>>In Asia several social media companies such as Japan’s GREE, South Korea’s Cyworld and China’s Tencent, are already making healthy profits from sales of games, premium personalization options, virtual goods, and custom backgrounds.

>>Salesforce.com predicts that demand for corporate internal social networking services will riseas managers realize that they now know more about strangers on Twitter and Facebook than they do about the people in their own companies.

>>Intel estimates it has saved millions of dollars a year in fees by recruiting senior managers through LinkedIn rather  than using headhunters. US Cellular said it saved more than $1 mm last year by using a LinkedIn system that produced good candidates faster than traditional recruitment channels.

>> Social networks have made the labor market more transparentin another way too. A survey by CareerBuilder.com of  2,700 executives last year found that 45 percent of them looked at job candidates’ social network pages as part of their research, and more than a third of those had unearthed information that put them out of contention. Time to turn up those privacy settings?

Some interesting stuff!  Of these facts and trends, which jumps out for you as having an impact on the way you do business?

Illustrations: Part of The Economist report.

Last week I attended a premiere of a wonderful film called That Evening Sun.  I live in Knoxville, TN, which is 2,191 miles from Hollywood. We don’t attract too many premiers around here. This one was special because the film was produced and filmed about 10 miles from my home and the making of it is a story that may inspire you. 

That Evening Sun was the first film by a new company, Dogwood Entertaiment, and executive producers Larsen and Adrian Jay.  Like so many triumphs, it was born of tragedy. In 2007, Larsen, a successful media executive and entrepreneur, sustained severe injuries when he fell off of a roof.  Being confined to a wheelchair gave him a lot of time to think about his life and what he was really accomplishing. “Life is too short,” he said in an interview. “I know that all too well now.” 

After multiple operations, he arose from his wheelchair with a new passion to achieve his dream of making a feature film.

Larsen and Adrian made their dream come alive with fierce determination and keen business maneuvering. They raised the necessary capital, partnered with executives in Los Angeles, and filmed a feature-length film in 22 days. Best of all, they delivered an award-winning film that has legitimized their venture and launched a bright new company. 

Larsen and Adrian inspired me to think a little bigger about my own life and career.  Heaven forbid it should take a life-altering injury to be a catalyst for change. 

What if you viewed yourself as the executive producer for YOUR dream?  Could you assemble the resources and create it in 22 days?  Could I do it?  Would I do it?   How about you?  Would it take a catastrophe to even give us the time to dream these dreams?

P.S. Click on the picture to see the movie trailer, and don’t miss a chance to see it. Hal Holbrook deserves an Oscar nomination for this!

I’d like to start with an excerpt from a a recent Gregg Morris post. This is an email from one of his associates, expressing frustration at an inability to convince small businesses to engage in social media marketing:

Social networking is making zero inroads into any of the businesses (SMBs) we have visited and interest in “mining” those networks is similarly zero.  It’s not that they are rejected as future possibilities, but rather that SMBs haven’t time for it, since they sense the costs far exceed the benefits … The facts are the facts – SMBs are still the same as they always were: overworked, scratching for dollars, but now fighting even harder for market share. They are competing not just with local competition but also with online, distant suppliers and, of course, big box retailers.

To the point: Joe average – architect, restaurant owner, retail store – are not stupid, nor are they unaware of the need to handle their customers better. All I see … is the same, stupid Social CRM Expert-type of messaging. A bunch of esoteric bullshit skimming the surface of the problem, with no real solution offered. Everywhere I look, they all say the same thing: “You have to communicate with your customer…”, “you need to serve your customer…”, “you need to do this, that or the other…”. Lots of “you needs”, but few “here’s exactly how”

This little rant hit a chord for me because I teach a social media marketing class for small businesses and I constantly hear these same concerns.

There is a business cultural gap that is keeping many SMB’s from working this channel: Typical SMB ”advertising” is a hand-off. All the work is done by an ad agency and/or the advertising sales people.  There is little personal time expenditure and the cost/benefit is usually easily measurable. Not so with social media marketing.  There is more hands-on doing and the results may not be immediate.

When I consult with small businesses, I recognize that for many, the time commitments and demands of maintaining a consistent, effective presence seems overwhelming so I help them cut through the hype and FOCUS.  I encourage them to consider five very practical questions:

1) Do I know enough about social media marketing to make the right decision for my business?  Not knowing the possibilities would be the same disadvantage as operating a business without knowing such a thing as television advertising existed.

2) What is mybusiness strategy and how could a social toolkit align with my key initiatives?

3) Are my customers using the social web?

4) Are my competitors using this channel, and what are the competitive implications if I decide to participate or not?  Could I create advantage by being an early adopter?

5) Do I have the resources, or can I acquire the resources, to conduct limited, focused experiments to see if working through the social web can provide a cost-benefit exceeding traditional advertising?

After my students walk through these questions, they usually conclude a) yes, this is something with a lot of potential and b) there are practical and manageable methods to approach this if I stay committed and focused.

Does this make sense to you?  What is your experience with SMB’s and the social web right now?

{grow} community alert: Pete Mosely, a frequent contributor to {grow} has a new eBook out on promotion fundamentals which is a nice companion piece to this blog article.

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/

Awhile back I put forth a “success formula” to create business benefits through social media:

Connections + Meaningful Content + Authentic Helpfulness = Benefits

The more I see and hear and learn about the social web, the more I’m convinced this is spot-on.  You can see the whole article here, by the way.

I’m learning that within this formula, content is a SEVERE bottleneck for most companies.  Here’s why:

1. Companies are piling on to the social web and are desperate to provide content that will cut through the clutter. It takes a special talent to do that. Typically, they don’t have that special talent … but are willing to pay for it.
2. I’m sure you’ve heard stats like, “more content has been created in the last five years than in the history of mankind.”  I either made that up or I heard it someplace (or both) but I’m sure you’ve heard similarly ridiculous statements.  There is a kernel of truth in there, however.  There’s already too much freaking content for any normal person to keep up with.  And the problem is going to get worse.  In fact, it will never get better. The need for content seems insatiable. This exacts more pressure on companies to not only develop “meaningful” content, but content that will knock your socks off.  Every day.
3. The need for “authenticity” is an artificial barrier set by the social media country club that is keeping some people from ghost blogging. (Article on how to do it RIGHT is here.)  That barrier will go down as the price companies are willing to pay for content goes up.  There will be plenty of content-whores around for everybody.  And I mean that in the most respectful way.  

So here’s the business plan: Come up with a posse of technical writers/content whores who can churn out blogs on a variety of subjects (maybe organize by verticals) and fill this out-sourcing market niche.  I would do it myself but I’m far too lazy.  

So there it is.  Business Idea of the Year!  Go be the Wal-Mart of content.  The Blog Super Store.  Content Whore Warehouse.  Whatever, just go do it and I’ll be the first to hire you for my customers.   See, you can’t tell me I never did anything for you. : )

1) It’s all about your audience: If you only remember one thing, remember this point. This is where social media is no different than traditional marketing. Ask yourself these questions: who are your customers, where are they living online, what communities do they participate in, what do they like to talk about there? Now go play in that field.

This is the second in a series exploring the keys to achieving business benefits in social media:

There are hundreds of ways to build targeted contacts but these are a few ideas that have worked for me and my clients. What is working for you? Please share in the comment section below.

The other day, I heard a guest speaker tell his audience, “If your company is not expecting you to account for your efforts with financial measures, well, that’s just great — do whatever you want!”

And for a short period of time, you might get away with it. But to gain credibility as a company leader in a B2B environment, you must hold your activities accountable to the same standards as an engineer trying to get funds approved for a new production facility. You should be able to demonstrate a business case and that business case must be built on hard dollars … eventually.

In the mean time, the softer side of metrics may be the only thing available. Tomorrow we’ll start taking a look at the importance of “non-financial indicators” that can influence brand equity.

This is part 2 in a series addressing social media marketing measurement issues.

Part 2: Social media ROI shock treatment

Part 3: Irresponsible social media measurement research            

Part 4: Social media impact on brand equity                                                        

Part 5: The most important question to ask in social media marketing     

Part 6: A double standard for social media marketing?                   

Part 7: Yes, it IS about the money!                                                          

Part 8: Creating a measurement plan                                                     

Part 9: Measurement is like a bartender                               

M.C. Escher

You’ve decided to lay bare the evolution of your social media campaign — warts and all. It’s a fascinating read. What made you decide to expose your strategy to the world?

It was a simple decision, really. Business.com is focused on helping people find actionable solutions to business challenges, and what better way to add to the “solution set” for B2B social media than to chronicle our own challenges, insights and solutions?

We also took this approach to accelerate our learning about the value of social media for business, and for our business in particular. If we blog about the evolution of our B2B online marketing Twitter account with updates every 30 days, will we get useful feedback from other business people using social media? What does it take to get a discussion going around a topic of interest that produces real, valuable answers?

You’re a company executive but take an extremely hands-on approach to your social media initiative through blog entries, tweets and presence on SM platforms. Is this typical of your style, a new demand of social media, or something you just do for fun?

It’s a combination of the three, united by the requirements of the situation. In my experience, the fastest way to develop effective marketing strategy and tactics for a new channel where the rules are still being written (as is the case for B2B social media!) is through a combination of the following, which form a nice acronym – REAP:

Research – Collect as much of the current “best practice” info as possible and triangulate findings, in the context of your unique business and business goals, to establish an initial position on where to focus and what to do. At Business.com, we started with an overview of the current state of B2B social media.

Tomorrow, Part 4: Executive tips for managing the social media time commitment

Ben, your company evidently took a very well-thought-out and measured approach to embarking on a social media campaign. But even the best plans usually go awry. What have been some key lessons you can pass on to somebody starting their own B2B social media initiative?

Whether we’re talking about eCommerce, online communities, display advertising, search marketing, blogging, micro-blogging, social networks or other channels, most B2B marketers shoot themselves in the foot the first time they use it for a couple related reasons.

Second, focus on the campaign over future scalability. OK, so you put your best people together for six months and ran a successful campaign, but did you learn what you needed to get 3-5x the return next time?

Third, even with the best talent and creative, there are simply too many variables that will interact in unexpected ways during an initial campaign in a new online channel to expect a home run.

Here are a couple key things we picked up in our learning phase:

Start with listening broadly, and then join the conversation – It’s critical to get a feel for the ebb and flow of online conversations around your brand or other brands in your industry, and to do so by observing, not just online thought leaders but also the comments, tweets, posts, etc. of the occasional, peripheral social media participant.

Focus is absolutely essential – In B2B social media, with lots of hype, a broad range of tactics, and no clear best practices playbook, it’s very easy to take on more than your team can handle. We chose to focus initially on blogging, both with our own blogs and micro-blogging via Twitter. Even managing these initiatives well seems like twice the work we expected. Have a great idea for an integrated social media campaign across a new company blog, Facebook group, Twitter account and YouTube? Table that until you establish a firm presence in each.

No one is a social media expert today when it comes to your business – This is a bit of an overstatement to make a point: don’t expect that anyone has the recipe for a successful social media campaign for your company right away. B2B social media is too new, the platforms and users are evolving too quickly, and there is too little objective data available for anyone to say “If you do A, B and C in this social media campaign, you will generate $X in new business.” The apparently hard-and-fast rules in this domain are constantly being written and re-written so the best approach is to learn what you can from the pros and try things in a variety of ways.

For example, we have two Twitter accounts (see graphic above) that we approached differently: @whatworks for general business and @B2BOnlineMarketing for B2B online marketing topics. With @whatworks, we’ve been much more interactive with the Twitter community (more replies and direct messages), followed and retweeted more of the twitterati, did more “what’s happening now” type of posts like live tweeting events and just generally followed more of the standard rules for building a Twitter following.