I’d like to make a request: please be quiet. Don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything at all to the people you’re trying to reach, and especially don’t try to do it with social media tools. Don’t even think about starting a blog or creating a YouTube channel or signing up for Twitter. Please don’t begin a Facebook group, Flickr page or launch a podcast. Don’t do any of these. Just be quiet, unless of course, you really have something to say.

Sure, a lot of people are using social media. According to Forrester’s early 2008 data, 90% of Americans between 18-24 years old, 84% between 25-34 years old, 76% between 35-44 years old, and 72% of 45-54 year olds are using some kind of social media. Clearly, most Americans are online and using social media technology, but please don’t let these numbers encourage you to begin engaging them in social media unless you actually have something to say.

So how will you know if you have something to say? Start with these:

• If you have truth to share, you have something to say.
• If you have an experience to draw from, you have something to say.
• If you know something I should know, you have something to say.
• If you can tell me about someone I should meet, you have something to say.
• If you have perspective where I am lacking, you have something to say.

The biggest misconception about social media tools is that they fix communication issues. They don’t. They merely extend the reach of what you already have to say. Therefore, if you don’t have anything to say already, you now have the opportunity to be equally ineffective to a larger number of people.

Social media doesn’t consist of magic beans and pixie dust. It doesn’t create something for you that wasn’t there to begin with. If you’re saying nothing today, you will say nothing in more places with social media. Your silence will be amplified and resound with a great hollowness that would echo for eternity if not for the absence of anything there in the first place.

My advice to anyone interested in social media tools is that they immediately forget about it. First, figure out what you actually have to say. What is the message? What compelling content do you have to offer? To what degree are you willing to engage in conversation openly and candidly with people who may want to talk to you?

These are the types of questions that are appropriate to get started. The wrong questions begin with choosing technology. The technology should fit the content, not the other way around.

Content, then, becomes your focus rather than the technology. Content is the basis on which people will measure you in social media. Good blogs have good content. Bad blogs have bad content. The content is not good because the blog is good. The blog is good because the content made it so.

As you consider social media as a means of reaching people, don’t neglect the more important task of focusing on great content. Yes, you can reach far and wide with social media tools. Social media has become a useful and persuasive force. It’s wide access and ease of use have created more opportunities for more people than media has ever provided in history. The case is compelling and seemingly irresistible, but if we want to reach people with these great tools and we don’t do it with compelling content, then what are we really doing? We might as well just be quiet.

I have said before that the average American is targeted with an average of 4,000 advertising messages everyday. We can’t remember even ten of the 4,000 ads from yesterday because we have great filters in place to keep them out but that doesn’t seem to stop advertisers from putting all those ads out there.

Now, despite what you may think, advertisers and marketers are people too. The problem is when a marketer is in his/her job it’s easy to forget about the things they know don’t even work on them. So while a marketer for a local car dealership knows he changes the channel when commercials come on TV, he keeps pushing those ads for his own company. It doesn’t make any sense but it’s happening today in virtually every industry.

A Marketer’s Toughest Question
The hardest question for a marketer (or advertiser or public relations person) to ask is this: is it better to say and do nothing than to create another one of those 4,000 messages that get filtered out everyday? The short answer is, yes, but that’s a tough pill to swallow. The fact of the matter is that marketers are paid to do stuff, even things that don’t work. In many organizations it’s better to do the same old marketing that doesn’t work than to try something new.

The Necessary Shift for Marketers
It’s necessary that traditional marketers shift their thinking. Rather than talking about yourself, your company, your product, or something else we probably don’t care about, try adding value to the people you want to reach. When you add value to someone’s life they may decide to give you the opportunity to talk with them again. The more value you add, the more opportunities you earn. That’s what social media can do and why it works. It gives anyone the chance to add value to people you want to reach. It’s the reason a guy in his garage with no marketing budget can compete with a multi-million dollar company. It’s exactly the opposite of the 4,000 ads that get filtered out. Instead of being blocked, valuable content is grabbed. There’s no worry about filters. The filters are down and the content is willingly taken and even passed along to other people who will find it valuable.

Though I’ve said this many times (so this is my apology to longtime readers) the best way to position yourself mentally for creating valuable content is to remember five things:

• Be entertaining
• Be inspiring
• Be educational
• Be informative
• Be outrageous

When you speak to these ideas rather than telling people why you’re so great, you’ll see they can figure that out for themselves…and then they’ll tell some people for you. Or, just keep doing things the way you’ve been doing them…we don’t want all those good filters going to waste.

Last week I reviewed Josh Oakhurst’s free e-book called Viral Marketing Saladr. If you or someone you know is relatively new to web 2.0/social media/new media scene you’ll be interested in getting a copy for yourself. Josh does a good job of giving an overview of social media marketing rules, myths, and many of the websites that are leading the way in social media. If you’re familiar with social media tools and strategy this e-book may be largely a review for you, but if you’re new or still unconvinced about the benefits of all that social media marketing has to offer your organization, you’ll certainly want to check it out.

Last week I celebrated the one year anniversary for MicroExplosion Media and after doing social media marketing consulting for a year on my own and almost a year prior to that for another company one thing I’ve heard marketing directors, company executives, and small business owners ask about most is how to budget for social media marketing. This question usually comes once they’re convinced social media marketing will work for them and they’re trying to figure out how to put financial resources toward it.

Many companies are accustomed to creating marketing plans and budgets many months before they plan to execute the plan. They need the time to get bids on the campaign projects and begin the creative development. That’s how traditional marketing budgeting has worked for a long time and it was easy for it to work that way because everything was done in print or a broadcast medium that had long lead times and buying cycles.

People Are Your Marketing Budget

Social media marketing is different and requires a different budgeting mindset. In traditional marketing you spend most of you money on projects and physical deliverables or ad buys. The shift in social media marketing is to put the money into people. The money has to be put into people because social media marketing requires time and only people have time to give. Whereas in a traditional marketing campaign you may set aside $50,000 in your budget for a large direct mail campaign, in social media you may take that same money and put it toward hiring another person dedicated to the social media space for the brand/product. In time, the marketing budget may decrease but that same money will be going into people who have a focus on social media and can then extend the growth of your brand with content, community, and conversation.

People Can React, Respond, and Rethink

The other reason to put the money into people is that the world of social media marketing allows you to move very quickly. If the market changes or a window of opportunity is available you need the human resources to respond and react quickly. This also means that you give yourself time to have great ideas later on. One of the biggest drawbacks to a long range marketing plan is that it doesn’t give you the flexibility to come up with a better, more relevant idea later on. You can get stuck with something you know isn’t going to be as effective because the environment you planned for nine months ago isn’t the reality of the market today.

We all know business changes rapidly today so why would you still create your marketing plans the old way? It just doesn’t make sense. Decide what you should stop doing, then start putting that financial resource into people who can really help you build relationships and create content that has value for the people you most want to reach.

“All right stop, collaborate and listen…”

Vanilla Ice in “Ice Ice Baby”

Ever think Vanilla Ice had anything to teach you? Me either…but my friend Scott Mills jokingly pointed out at lunch recently that Vanilla Ice had a few things to say about social media marketing when he said to stop, collaborate, and listen. Scott was joking. I’m not.

Vanilla’s advice is actually pretty good for social media marketers. We have to stop, collaborate, and listen if we’re going to be good social media marketers. Checking out the hook while his DJ revolves it is optional.

Stop: If you’re dabbling in social media marketing you need to stop. Do you have a plan or are you playing around with social media because it seems like the thing everybody is doing these days? Do you have measurable goals? Do you even have goals? The worst thing you can do is not stop and figure out how social media will work for you and then how best to move forward within it. If you don’t stop first you’re probably going to create a meatball sundae…and nobody wants that…so stop first. Once you stop I recommend you begin to think about a content strategy to really take full advantage of the new marketing tools.

Collaborate: In some form or fashion collaboration is at the heart of every good social media initiative. It may be the type of collaboration that involves a wiki (which Google spreadsheets even does now) or simply allowing comments, tags, trackbacks, and other forms of feedback to your social media. Collaboration is both active and attitudinal. You must convey that you actually care what other people think…and not just that you care, but allow them to participate and contribute in some form. Mitch Joel does a great job of this by allowing audio comments on his podcast, Six Pixels of Separation. Mitch actively allows people to collaborate and also has an attitude that reflects this. Collaboration is one of the biggest shifts from web 1.0 to web 2.0. It was a shift in technology that enables collaboration and it was a shift is tone and attitude toward collaboration.

Listen: Social media is as much about conversation as it is collaboration. The two go hand in hand really, but did you ever talk to someone who was more interested in talking than having true conversation? The missing piece of course was that they weren’t listening. They were just looking for an opportunity to talk. Social media marketing isn’t about one way communication or disruption tactics. That was the old way to do marketing. True conversation, like true social media marketing, doesn’t interrupt. Rather, it engages and listens. The fact of the matter is these conversations are already happening. You just have to decide whether you’re going to join the conversation or not.

So there it is…wisdom from Mr. Ice. Word to your mother.

I loved playing baseball as a kid and especially enjoyed batting practice. The great thing about batting practice was that it allowed you to work on your hitting outside of the pressure of the game. I’d like to invite you to some social media batting practice with me and here’s how it will work…

I believe there are no businesses or organizations that cannot benefit from social media marketing but for probably many reasons, social media marketing is still considered something that only quick, young, startup types of companies can utilize.

Social media batting practice will be our way to show that social media marketing can, in fact, work for any type of business or organization and this is where we’ll share those ideas. My hope is that this will be a way to stretch those of us interested in social media marketing (without the pressure of the pitch from a prospective client) and hopefully prove its worth to some doubters or skeptics. So…we need pitchers and batters (and those who want to do both.)

Pitchers will throw out an idea of a type of business or organization we might not think could or would use social media and it’s up to a batter to give some specific ideas of how that business would implement social media marketing. The batter can think about it like being temporarily hired as a social media marketer for the business or work. The only request for the “pitches” here is that they be real or at least plausible. For instance, a pitcher might say, “how would a gunsmith use social media? Or maybe, “how would a dog grooming store use social media marketing?” That’s more the spirit we’re going for here…businesses that people might think could benefit from social media marketing.

If you want to be a pitcher or batter just let me know in the comments or shoot me an email (Bill@MicroExplosion.com) All pitchers and batters will get credit and links to their respective blogs or websites. The pitchers really have the easy job here…just throw out a type of business and give some parameters so the batter can give a good answer. The batters are the ones who have to come up with a couple of things they could do and give some specifics. It’s not enough to say, “Start a Facebook group , create a blog, and post some video to YouTube. There, have a nice day.” That won’t cut it. You need to be more specific. This post might help if you need it.

Who knows how long we’ll play. Maybe through the summer. Let’s see how it goes. So, who’s ready for some batting practice? Here’s a pitch if someone wants to be the batter (email me if you do and I’ll have a full post with your response):

How would a weekend fly fishing guide and instructor use social media to grow his business? Assume the guide works a job during the week but would love to be a fly fishing guide full time if possible. He knows the best spots for good fishing in the region and is a great instructor as well. He’s only booked one weekend a month right now, but wants to be full every weekend. What should he do?

By the way…I totally made that up but that’s the kind of information a pitcher will need to provide for a batter.