This week, I’m featuring personal case studies to demonstrate how the social web can provide tremendous business benefits … often when you least expect it!

Today’s example started when I tweeted ”Go Steelers!” … and ended with the video about my business that you can view by clicking the image above.

I was watching a Monday night football game and tackling a little work at the same time. I flipped to Twitter and cheered for my favorite team. “I’m cheering for the Steelers, too” Michelle Chmielewski tweeted back.  And soon we were sharing our love for football, Pittsburgh (where she was a student), and blogging.

I had never connected with her before but Michelle had been reading {grow} and had just started to blog herself,  The Observing Participant.  As a new blogger, she asked me for some feedback on her own posts.  Over time I grew to really love the  quirky, funny video posts she featured. One day I had a brainstorm — one of these videos would be a great way to explain my business to potential customers!   Michelle agreed to do it, but on one condition – instead of pay, she needed a new high-definition camera to take her video blogging to a new level.  I was glad to oblige and provide her with a tool that could further her career.  

I’m sure you’ll agree that Michelle’s video is awesome, and in a week or so I will be featuring it on my website.

Throughout the year, Michelle and I continued to learn from each other. She talked me into getting on to Skype and has looked to me as a mentor on career issues.  Best of all, Michelle is my friend, and that never would have happened without the social web.

So here’s the lesson of Twitter: You just never know!

Let’s check in again with my formula for creating business benefits on the social web and see how it relates to this case study:

Connections + Meaningful content + Authentic helpfulness = Business benefits

How this worked in the real world:

• Michelle and I both actively created connections by engaging with people on Twitter.
• Because of the meaningful content on my blog, Michelle became an interested follower.  Michelle’s video content created engagement with me and eventually resulted in a mutually-beneficial business benefit.
• We continuously offer authentic helpfulness to each other without regard of any future “pay-back.”  This trusting friendship will continue to pay personal and business dividends.

This formula works.  What “unexpected” Twitter stories do you have?

This is the second installment of the unexpected benefits of the social web. You might enjoy these other articles:

Part 1: How to become a CMO in 10 tweets or less

Part 3: LinkedIn: A goldmine of business benefits

Something amazing has happened.  I have nearly 8,000 Twitter followers in eight months.  How does somebody maintain a meaningful presence on Twitter with a crowd like that?  I’m a work in progress, but here’s what’s going on with me.  Maybe it will help you too!

First, after I block out the creeps, I consider it an honor to have somebody follow me.  Sure, they still might be trying to spam me, but my underlying assumption is that a new follower has genuine interest in me and I generally follow them back.  I want to treat anybody who follows me with respect. My intent is to connect with you if you sincerely want to connect with me.

The wave of noise

Obviously there is no way to have a meaningful dialogue with 8,000 — or even 1,000 — people.  It is a wave of noise.  As my followers grew, I realized that I was simply not going to be “engaged” with most of them.  

The compromise is, I try to stay engaged in a meaningful way with anybody who makes an attempt to connect with me through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or (gasp) the real world.  I manage this through Seesmic (or Tweetdeck, take your pick).  I have segregated lists of people who connect with me and I try to watch their activity and support them as much as possible.   If you make an effort to engage with me, I’ll put you on one of these lists so I can hopefully get to know you and engage. I truly want to help and support people in my audience any way I can, whether it is tweeting, reading your blog, or having a chat about a problem. 

Everybody’s equal

In my Twitter World, even though you may be one out of 8,000, everybody has an equal chance at dialogue.  I generally follow back — now it’s up to you!  I also make an attempt to engage in some way with new followers, especially if I see something in their profile that indicates a common interest. In general, if people connect to me, we stay connected.

I also maintain a Seesmic list of the folks I consider to be thought-leaders from a wide range of disciplines.  Learning from these great thinkers and having access to them is one of the best benefits of Twitter, in my opinion.

I have not used public Twitter lists for two reasons. First, I don’t see an advantage over the lists I’ve already built on Seesmic. Second, I don’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings. If I had a list of “B2B thought leaders” and one of my followers wasn’t on it, it could hurt their feelings.  As I said, bottom line this is about respecting people. I know there is a real person behind that little picture and you are amazing in your own way.

What’s next?

This strategy seems to be working for the time being.   Can I maintain relevance with an audience of 10,000 or 20,000?   I’m sure I’ll have to adjust and I’ll probably have a new post to write you at that point!

In the mean time, I would appreciate your feedback.  What issues do you face with your growing list of followers? What ideas do you have that can help me do a better job staying connected with you?

I wanted to write a post on the ability to “geotag” on Twitter but my friend Frank Podlaha is so much smarter than me and gratefully he contributed this guest post:

What the hell is it?

Twitter Geo-tagging is simply attaching your exact location to an individual tweet.   Not only does a tweet contain its message, it also contains the name of the person who sent it, when it was sent, etc.  That’s obvious.  Recently, Twitter has allowed additional attributes to be tacked on each tweet, specifically your latitude and longitude coordinates of the tweet’s location.

Your Earthly coordinates are your “geo-tag.”  It’s a very specific point on a map, ex: 35.9550,-83.9249 (paste that into Google Maps).  To use geo-tagging on Twitter takes a few steps.  First, the feature must be turned on for each Twitter account under the “settings” menu.  It is turned off by default.  Second, the geo-tag can only be attached to a tweet by third-party Twitter applications.  The main Twitter website does not attached a geotag.  Mobile phone applicationsare the most likely to attach geotags.  Ubertwitter is a mobile app with this feature.  And once a tweet is geo-tagged, you will need an application that can display this map point.  Tweetdeck, a popular Twitter desktop interface application, has this feature (look for the tiny yellow pushpin icon under certain tweets).

Why in the world would I want to do that?

“So let’s get this straight.  I turn on the geo-tagging feature on my Twitter account.  I’m in the coffee shop and send a tweet from my phone that I’m laughing about a girl in a purple blouse that has a long piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe. She reads that tweet, sees the geotag for that coffee shop, figures out she’s in a purple blouse, finds me sitting in the corner, and whammo – I get hot coffee thrown at me.  What are you insane?  This is the craziest feature I ever heard of.”

Yup, that’s what it can do in all its creepiness.  But let’s stop for a second.  Twitter is a public broadcasting system, really.  And a public message is so much more relevant when you know who, what, when, AND where.  Does it help to tell your friends which restaurant you’re in (like in the game @FourSquare)?  Sure, sounds like fun.  Could a travel tweeting app help you find the next gas station with clean bathrooms?  That would be nice.  Could I brag in a tweet about robbing a bank and the police track me down?  Yes, you dumbass.

The business of geo-tagging

The business possibilities for geo-tagging go well beyond individuals spouting nonsense.  Twitter is that public messaging system, remember?  Many use Twitter for actual communications, oh my God.  There are numerous websites and applications that search specific cities to find local tweets.  These tweets are often displayed as content on their websites.  A tweet that is geo-tagged to that location will appear in that search.  In this way, tweets can be broadcasted to a small region.  Ah-hah, the light bulbs should be going off.  Take a look at the tweets from @LocalChirps with a geo-tag-ready client (like Tweetdeck).  Each message contains a different geo-tag specific to the message in the tweet.  One of these tweets may end up in a search for that specific city.  It’s like sending banner ads directly to a targeted audience.

How about a trucking company tweeting status and location of your package?  How about a restaurant giving away a free dessert for the next person who tweets from within their store?  I could go on, but Mark asked to keep this post under 600 words.   Now it’s your turn, what ideas can you think of for geo-tagging?

Frank Podlaha is a brilliant technologist, an inspirational entrepreneur and creator of LocalChirps.com

The latest research report from Business.com shows that small business owners are still trying to figure out Twitter … but those who have mastered it are seeing an advantage.

The expansive report covering 1,711 small business decision makers showed that of all the social media channels, Twitter was the least-used. Just 27 percent of the respondents were active on the micro-blogging site.

But even that figure may be deceptively high – the survey sample was of business leaders already using some form of the social web.  Translation: This is why you are still getting blank stares when you talk to most small business decision makers about Twitter.

Although Twitter fell to the bottom of the list of most-used social media resources for business, those actively using Twitter are very positive about the business value. In fact, Twitter topped the write-in list with small business decision makers praising the ability to get quick feedback and access relevant business information. One typical quote:

“On Twitter, the people I follow provide me with more relevant links and information than any other tool. It saves me time and helps me learn about new technologies or innovative ideas, as they are happening.”

As we have come to expect, the Business.com research is thorough and fascinating, with detailed data segmented by industry, job type and company size. Study participants in the healthcare, retail and legal industries use significantly fewer social media sites/resources for business information.

Based on the findings, companies interested in using social media to engage small business customers and prospects would be wise to:

• Develop educational webinars and/or podcasts which address specific small business needs in the process of introducing company products or services. Businesses value convenience and speed in their information sources.
• Encourage, and carefully tend, online reviews of company products or services.
• Establish a presence on one or more major social networking sites and use this as a hub for corporate social media initiatives.
• Participate in more focused online discussions where it is easy to find and respond to questions specifically related to company products or services – such answering questions on Q&A sites like LinkedIn Answers or Business.com Answers, or in online business forums – rather than trying to work a promotional mention into discussions on 3rd party web sites and blogs.
• Further investigate how their target audience is using Twitter for business today and begin developing a Twitter strategy.

Source: Engaging Small Business Decision Makers through Social Media: A 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study Report. Business.com, December 7, 2009, http://www.business.com/info/engaging-small-business-through-social-media.

One of my customers is a brilliant management consultant. An engineer by training, he does not come by marketing instinct naturally and asked me to help.

This is a customer tailor-made for Twitter:

• Small business-owner
• Enormous, global market potential (needs a lot of awareness)
• Small budget
• No time to blog, develop content, etc.
• Tech-savvy
• Is a charming, bright person with engaging personality.

And yet he WILL NOT TWEET.   I coaxed, cajoled and threatened.  I’ve trained him patiently and even prescribed a daily Twitter regimen.  I demonstrated the power of the platform when I found him a potential new business contact on the first day of operation.  He didn’t follow-up and seems content with his tweet-free existence.

This may seem strange, but it isn’t.  I’ve found similar resistance from many people who can benefit from this business tool. I asked my client ”why” and (published with his permission) here is his answer:

Not sure why really.  I guess the idle chatter (which is mostly what I seem to see when I log on) just doesn’t make any sense to me.  There’s obviously some self imposed barrier that I can’t or just don’t want to cross.  You were kind enough to introduce me to Twitter, and I appreciated that.  There’s the old expression about leading a horse to water.  Guess I’m just not that thirsty for Twitter water… at least yet.

This type of reaction is not unusual. In fact I was a Twitter Quitter myself and had to really push through a few weeks of of this non-intutive communication platform before I had an expereince that changed my view forever …

I was bored one night and noticed a trending topic titled #newnameforswineflu.  I clicked on it and was entertained for a half hour as people from all over the world chimed in with alternaitve names like “Hamthrax” and “The Aporkalypse.”  Although this event was playful, it dawned on me that I was watching a real-time global brain-storming session.  Now THAT was very cool.  That was something that could never have happened before in the history of mankind.  I got it. The light bulb went on for good.

I’m wondering, what did it take for YOU to “get” Twitter? Was it simply perseverance? The fear of falling behind? Or did it take an “a-ha” moment like me?   For the 40 percent of us who didn’t quit after trying it, what lit the lightbulb for you?

Illustration: Natalie Dee

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 …

REALLY?

I dissected his follower list (public information) and estimated HALF were “trash,” meaning they were spam-generated, get-rich quick spammers, or porn. Those followers are not going to be effective in receiving or re-transmitting any message of “influence.” So that brings us down to 40,000 potentially effective followers in TK’s community.

Harvard released a study this month showing that among the people who don’t quit, the median number of lifetime tweets is one. I think it’s reasonable to define an “active user” as somebody who tweets at least once a day (less than 15%). Applying that reasonable logic, the number of ACTIVE users this media mogul brags about is actually 4,060.

I decided it would be fun to feature some of the great people of the {grow} community from time to time. You’ll probably recognize the name Kimmo Linkama as a regular contributor who has distinguished himself with his insights and perspective.

Ever since I connected with Kimmo there have been two things on my mind:  How did he get such a cool name and what’s it like to work in social media in Estonia. So I decided to ask him … and share it with you!

Mark:  How has your career path led you to your interest in social media?

Kimmo: I’ve had the good fortune to see marketing communications from all sides. I’ve worked on the agency side and the client side, in advertising and in PR, and have had assignments with both national and international audiences. Finnish marketing communications works on pretty much the same principles as in the US, so now that social media is clearly becoming the next “big thing” in marketing, especially in my B2B niche, I need to know what’s happening and what are the best strategies.

Mark: And how’s business in Estonia?

Kimmo: Let me first give you a little background. I’m originally from Finland and moved to Estonia about four and a half years ago.  Business is difficult in Estonia, especially with the recession, and I still work almost 100% for Finnish clients.

Europe, in comparison with the US, is extremely fragmented. There are 50 countries and 230 languages (although the official European Union languages only number 23). Estonia, where I live, has a population of 1.3m, about the same as Philadelphia. Finland’s population is 5.3m, a little more than Los Angeles and is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union.

From where I live, Otepää in south Estonia, it is only some 160 miles “as the crow flies” to Helsinki, Finland, where most of my clients are located – although there’s a two-hour boat trip across the Gulf of Finland in-between.

Mark:  Sometimes I feel like the social media trend swamped marketers here in the U.S. and we’re still recovering. You are in a unique position of being able to watch for what is happening in the rest of the world BEFORE it hits your region and your customers. How does that help you or hurt you?

Kimmo: It definitely helps.  Although most ideas that are taking off in the U.S. reach even my remote corner of Europe very quickly, there’s still a slight delay.  That’s why I am – as you said – in a unique position to get on board a little before a new trend becomes mainstream here. The benefit, of course, is that I’m able to get some hands-on experience in social media, so when it begins to really catch on as a marketing ideology, I will know better what I’m talking about and be able to help my clients in a relevant way.

Mark: What social media platforms are being used in Eastern Europe?  Are entrepreneurs developing regional-specific platforms or are you seeing global apps like Twitter take off?

Kimmo: We have the whole spectrum: blogs, forums, chats, microblogging.  There are regional-specific platforms, but on the whole I think the global applications have so much critical mass that they will eventually come to dominate. For example, the development of the Finnish Jaiku microblogging app, roughly similar to FriendFeed, began almost concurrently with Twitter. When Google bought Jaiku a couple of years ago, it has gradually stagnated, and now a new development, called Qaiku, is trying to take its place. I have my doubts about the chances of survival of these regional developments against the big globals, though. It is more probable that a bigger player will buy them in the end.

Mark: What is social media adoption like in your region? Is it being used for business? What are the hurdles?

Kimmo: Finns have always been pretty tech-savvy. Blogs are proliferating, and Facebook is very popular. A fair number of companies have adopted blogging as one of the ways to get their message out, but for example Facebook seems to be mostly for personal-type contacts. I haven’t yet seen many serious attempts at business use, although some companies do have a Facebook presence. The company pages, however, seem to be mostly of the press release type, publishing company news rather than encouraging dialogue.

Microblogging is done more by individuals; so even if they are clearly associated with their employers, the messages mostly have a personal point of view. I think the biggest hurdle for wider business adoption – if we rule out lack of knowledge – is exactly the same as everywhere else: businesses are so used to traditional push marketing that the idea of losing control of the message is frightening. It takes time to alleviate this fear, but as the trend grows stronger, everyone will have to go with it one way or another.

I also don’t know how many agencies really know how to go about this “new way of marketing” when it comes to recommending the best ways to their clients. I’m hoping my social media experiments, if you will, enable me to fill that void for my part.

Mark: Kimmo, you have such a cool name. Is it a family name or just a common name in your homeland of Finland? 

Kimmo:  Thanks for the compliment! Kimmo is not a very common first name.  I looked it up and there are about 18,000 men with that name. Its roots are sometimes traced back to the Greek St. Evdokimos, but I don’t know how scientific this is.

Feel free to ask Kimmo additional questions in the comment section …

In addition to his contributions to the {grow} community, Kimmo’s blog, “Marketing Communicator” can be found at: http://linkama.wordpress.com/

My friend Jayme Soulati sent me a great little story about getting new business through Twitter. I thought you might enjoy it!  Here’s Jayme:

The name of the game, as they frequently say, Mark, is developing relationship for ultimate Twitter success. I began tweeting for Cardthartic, a 16-year-old private greeting card publisher, in June.  Currently, we have merely 130 followers and 200 tweets.  Because the web site relaunch was not slated until September 2009, I knew I needed to establish a presence, build reputation and tweet about our passionate greeting cards in a sincere way.

Content is king. No doubt about that. While I could not drive traffic to the antiquated Web site, all I could do was tweet about the greeting within each card. To gain followers, I reviewed trending topics for “florists” who carry our cards that are nationally distributed and kept following people oriented to moms, grandmas, pet lovers, gift givers and florists. In a little over a month, I got my first authentic sale from Twitter! 

Here’s Jayme’s list for Twitter success: 

• Establish yourself with relevant and sincere content.
• Do not directly sell with offensive marketing gimmicks, like teeth whiteners.
• Personify yourself; a human is tweeting so who are you?
• While tweeting for a company brand is acceptable, come out from behind the curtain and be accessible.
• To convert a lead into a sale, ensure you pull in the traditional troops to close the deal.
• Monitor, monitor. Had we not been in close touch with the Tweets, we could easily have missed potential sales.