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Are social media and social media marketing something your business feels it must ‘embrace’. Not sure where to start? Thinking about hiring a big firm like Forrester to help you out? In an effort to ensure you get your hard-earned money’s worth, offered here is cheat-sheet to help guide you. Why 10? No reason, other than lists of 10 seem to be social media friendly. The number of fingers involved in a handshake.

WHERE SHOULD I START?

Before I get to the list, a few words about social media. It’s not rocket engineering. You can figure out a lot by simply opening a Google Reader account and adding feeds to your list. Start with Seth Godin’s blog if you’ve never heard of him (he’s not a social media guru but his blog will save you from a lot of Charlatanism).

Check out ChrisBrogan’s blog and subscribe to his email, RSS and Twitter account. I never met the guy, but my intuition tells me he’s a straight-shooter; he’s authentic, cares about getting social media right and will help you if you call on him. He’s one of the few true pioneers of this immature puppy called social media.

Twitter is good as a mini-RSS reader. Who to follow? Well for a little contrarian spice and punchy temperance of social media Charlitanism, follow @aMANdaCHAPel. That Tweeter follows all the social media illuminati and from there you can follow Amanda’s victims followers. Many in the community don’t like those tweets, but skepticism is key to getting social media right.

WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA ENTERPRISES SHOULD DO FOR YOU

So what should social media consultants / evangelists / experts/ strategists/ tacticians / engineers / wizards do for you? If you were to pay a fee, what should you expect them to do for you? Here’s 10 (it could be 50 or 101, but I thought I go easy):

1. Explain exactly what social media means in clear and falsifiable language
2. Outline a specific plan of action on how to migrate your business model from the age of Mass Communication to Mass Connection (warning: this hasn’t been completely worked out yet, so you’ll have to get working on this yourself)
3. Provide concrete evidence of how social media is relevant to your business
4. Tell you, in clear language, what NOT to do (hint: befriending random targets is NOT part of any honorable business strategy)
5. Define the terms of their relationship with you (e.g. will their fees depend on deliverable and measurable goals?)
6. Offer open and honest communication with a commitment not to waste your time with tools and strategies that make no sense for your business
7. Provide meaningful, relevant, easy-to-read reports on the achievements, blunders and lessons throughout the planning, execution and evaluation phases of your overall strategy
8. Diligently monitor your online public reputation, your public image and the feedback from customers
9. Help you meaningfully and productively expand your network
10. Never lie to you about their (and your) failures

You don’t have to use electronic social media to maintain your business. Love it or hate it, however, your customers are increasingly going online on their desktops, laptops, mobile devices and other virtual connection-engines. Ginsu knife tactics don’t cut it anymore.

Don’t just set up a FaceBook account or use Twitter to randomly follow potential targets. That’s just a stupid waste of your time. There are intelligent uses for these tools. Use your brain. Don’t get bogged down with specific tools. You need a strategy: the tools are simply tactics (today’s tools can be tomorrow’s fossils). A tool is only as good as the brain connected to it. If you’re confused at this juncture then order this book and read it two times.

So the next time you get a call from Jeremiah Owyang (pronounced: Ow-Yang) wanabes pull out this list. Be open-minded, listen to what they have to say. But hammer them hard, bust their proverbial balls when they throw unverifiable claims your way; don’t tolerate vague language or promises that sound high-and-mighty. Use your head, damn it!

SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS ON SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

If there’s one lesson about the evolving phenomenon of social media, it’s this: every move you make is now going to be in the open for all to see. It’s a double-edged sword: you can promote yourself, only to fall on the blade. So make sure you get it right.

Your best insurance policy in this age of mass-connection can’t be purchased from AIG. Running a business in the age of mass-connection, however, does demand hard work: offer nothing but meaningful products and services. If you do that, and if you learn the elements of good social media habits, then your business should not only be sound but also heard. Heard meaning heard from other customers, not your self-gloating drivel.

Play with these tools on your own. Putz around before getting so serious. Again, this isn’t rocket engineering.

Words like conversation, engagement, community, sharing, embracing are all pretty-sounding memes. But you’re running a business, not a circus or a lily-patch. Even Barnum & Bailey and and gardeners understand the value of pragmatism and results rooted in something deep and palpable.

At the conclusion of social media marketing pitches, throw this acronym into the air, step back, and observe body language: ROI. There’s no right answer. It’s not so much a quantifiable number (as in the ROI of a widget-lathe). But the way the pitcher answers goes a long way in telling you how much they understand business, accounting, finance and common sense. If they look nervous, or sound vague, graciously say “Thank you, but no. Give me the names of three of your competitors and enjoy the rest of your day.”

WHAT THE HELL DOES A SCHMUCK LIKE PHIL BAUMANN HAVE TO DO WITH ALL THIS?

(This part of the blog post isn’t required reading. I just added it because you have a right to know that I have no experience in this field. But I am honest.)

You can follow me on Twitter. Following me won’t boost your revenues, but I’ll do my best to do interesting things and maybe link you to useful places. I’m no social media expert, but who in the hell is?

So what are my qualifications and why listen to me?

I used to be an accountant and could interpret and implement FASB pronouncements for Fortune 500 companies and piece together accurate SEC filings. I got out of the business years ago when I realized the profession started losing its moral edge.

Subsequently I became a critical care RN and figured out how to operate life-saving ventilators and infusion pumps. I learned how to tell family members that their loved ones were going to die and I fought like a warrior to defend the dignity of the last moments of fellow human beings: human connection is deeper than you know until you face death.

Right now, the pharmaceutical industry consumes my attention and benefits from my hard work. Perhaps along the way I’ll help that industry learn how to move away from the outdated marketing model of last century and toward the yet-to-be-discovered model of this one. Quality drugs are medically necessary for a healthy economy. Intelligent uses of social media just might help market those products at lower costs. Just a thought.

None of my history makes me a social media marketing genius. It just means I enjoy figuring out things and passing along what I learn in this short life to others in meaningful ways. I have an interest in the success of every honorable business. My son’s future depends on getting social media right. That’s my argument. You make your own assessment of my worth to you.

I hope the list above is useful to you. Feel free to use the content in this post however you wish. I hope you spend your money wisely. Lord knows last week showed us how easy it is for experts to blow a large portion of a world-englobing nation’s GDP. You’re smarter than those geniuses, aren’t you?

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Tags: Business by Phil Baumann

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The Dow lost over 500 points today. I don’t know how big a deal it is that the market dropped 4.42%. (4.42% isn’t a newsworthy soundbite, is it?) Don’t get me wrong: today produced historic news which could signal a dark time ahead.

Time will tell how much damage the speculative project of mortgage-backed securitization does to the domestic and international markets. At the heart of our current economic dangers lies Consumerism.

Democracy depends on freedom of capital flow as much as it does on freedom of ideas. Capitalism remains the most reliable system of economic justice. The problem is: most of us are selling capitalism short.

CONSUMERISM IS ASSAULTING CAPITALISM MORE VIOLENTLY THAN COMRADE MARX

Let’s not confuse capitalism with consumerism. We live in an age of consumerism. We want instant gratification. We have tall orders and short attention spans.

What happened today on Wall Street and on other trading floors is simply a consequence of the greed of a consumerist culture. If our system was truly capitalistic we wouldn’t be crying about today’s metrics. A system is only as good as its people.

Capitalists understand the value of discipline, focus, and long-term perspective. Capitalists understand the value of values, the payoff of hard work, the necessity of risk-taking, the soil made by failed crops.

Consumerists understand nothing.

Many of our CEOs and fund managers are consumers. There are very few capitalists anymore. We have been selling capitalism out for a long time now.

Perhaps it started when auditors became their clients’ consultants. Perhaps it started when investors rewarded executives who boosted quarterly earnings and share prices merely by downsizing. It probably doesn’t matter now. The damage is done.

The last century was infected by the scapegoating dellusions of untested Marxist hypotheses. I understand where Karl Marx was coming from: he lived in a time of catastophic socioeconomic change. We live in a time of socioeconomic change. And so his shadow, no matter how re-worded, may continue to cast well into this century.

HOW TO RESURRECT THE SPECTRE OF CAPITALISM

Let’s not make the mistake of selling capitalism short.

Let’s appreciate the value of intelligent, disciplined, creative and focused wealth-building. Let’s instill in our youth the value of the time-value of money; the value of understanding opportunity cost; the value of values.

We are part of a culture war. It’s no longer a war between Capitalism and Communism.

We are now enmeshed a war between Capitalism and Consumerism. Consumerism is winning.

We’re losing our capitalists, everyday, to a consumer culture that is hell-bent on instant gratification at the expense of distant satisfaction.

Here’s what to do, now that you’ve had a rough day:

• Work hard. Work smart.
• Jettison despair.
• Embrace discipline.
• Be valuable to others.

In short: Do meaningful things and the money will follow you.

Civilization abhors a lack of focus and adores an abundance of grit.

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Tags: Business by Phil Baumann

A good friend of mine sent me this link today about the future of the work world, asking me if I thought that the predictions would come true. The executive recruiting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas has peered into its crystal ball to predict the future of our work environments. According to the Information Week Blog, the recruiting firm expects:

• More employees will work from home
• Cubicles will be phased out by shared communities via wireless devices
• Free agency will flourish
• The US will increasingly target recruiting efforts oversees
• Companies will offer more of their own educational programs
• A four day work week will become more common
• Companies will provide less health benefits to employees

A lot of these predictions make sense. In light of the proliferation of novel productivity tools, they actually are very reasonable expectations. But will these predictions actually bear out?

NOT SO FAST
Well that depends on many factors, including:

• Global economic conditions
• Geopolitical catastrophes
• The degree of corporate allegiance to 20th Century industrial mechanics (e.g. The Short Snout)
• The willingness of businesses to adopt distributed collaboration over centralized command
• The advancement of entrepreneurial deployment along the Long Tail

I’m not so sure that the Short Snout is all too willing to hand it over to the Long Tail. Chris Anderson has the right idea about the general trend of inventories becoming freer. But those Short Snouts clustered around the Small Head don’t give up the bone easily. Swiss Bank Socialists: they will cry Mommy after dropping the ball on their own foot.

(Incidentally, there’s now some controversial evidence out of Harvard Business School that sort of challenges Chris’ theory, of which his analysis you can read about here).

Although these predictions were made a decade ago and still have yet to become major trends, I do believe the technological and cultural changes that are taking place right now will in fact bring some of them true within another decade.

It just doesn’t make sense for businesses to ignore Moore’s Law, nor for people not to exploit the benefits of sleeker means of community inter-reach. Moore’s Law is making tools increasingly more powerful and robust while diminishing their relative and absolute costs.

No, the problem, as I see it, is that the changes are themselves changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up. Businesses, less and less, can project with a straight line. Their vision has be be curved through the space-time warping that is Moore’s Law.

HIKING

If you’ve ever hiked up Mount Rainier or Half-Dome in Yosemite, you know that the beginning trek is a pleasent stroll. You’re excited about your journey. You hike for hours and you feel great. You enjoy the views as you stop for a break.

But then a curious thing happens. Your feet feel a bit heavier. And pretty soon your huffing up steep edges, rough woods, through cold air. The view is spectacular, but you wonder if you’ll get to the top. It seems much farther now that you’ve gotten closer.

That feeling that things are getting rough… Well that’s the feeling of hitting the inflection points along the metaphorical curve of Moore’s Law. And if you don’t know that you’re climbing up a mountain, and not just a small hill, you’re less likely to make it. You’ll be psychologically blown down. At that point, businesses will either have to get huffing very fast, or they’ll just stop in their tracks and be done.

VISION and CLEAR FOG

Even the smartest of large enterprises sometimes vastly underestimate the Tao of Change. Years or decades of financial boom and comparative advantage tend to make the Short Snouts blurry-eyed with reverie. When startled awake, gluttony seizes everything around.

A 13,500 ton ship is no way to sail down the river of change.

We can all predict wonderful things as our technologies become increasingly refined, more potent and cheaper. But if millions of people continue to work in organizations that see the world through clear fog then we’ll continue to see much of the same as we see today: cubicle on cubicle, cog-job after cog-job and clinical depression to accompany the economic malaise that follows dysfunctional social traditions.

Overall, I’m optimistic about our opportunity along the expanding Long Tail. As should you. Optimism breeds itself.

For perhaps the first time in history, we all have the chance to manifest our entrepreneurial visions on the side. Moonlight Entrepreneurship might be in the cards for those who can’t yet quit their cubes. Which means that those predictions which Challenger is making might come true only if individuals take the initiative to make them come true. It could be a nice future, the brightest ever.

…But: never take your eyes of the Short Snouts. History has a long tail of them ruining promising things.

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Tags: Business, Work by Phil Baumann

All of us are marketers. That’s what you need to keep in mind when expecting customer service that gets results. This applies as much to Apple products as it does to medicine, critical care nursing or disaster relief.

If you own a Mac (or any other modern contraption subject to entropy), Seth Godin has sixteen very useful tips in Working with Apple Tech Support.

His list may be specific to Apple, but I think it’s got practical advice that shows us how to take responsibility for customer service. Customer service is about more than consumer satisfaction. It’s about bringing forth the best in us all. Customer service is also a mutual experience. Pay attention to step #14 if the list still doesn’t work for you.

Go to Seth’s blog, blookmark his post, and do yourself a big favor: buy The Dip. It just might save your life or help you get through the next disaster in your life, big or small.

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Tags: Business, technology by Phil Baumann

Many business leaders and consumers are concerned about an economic recession. Regardless of what’s happening, here’s a question for you to work on:

Which of these is the only way to deal with Hell?

1. Around
2. Over
3. Under
4. Through

Please put your answer in the comments.

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Tags: Business, life by Phil Baumann