Social Media -- You Bet

Few things have revolutionized marketing communications more in recent years than the advent of Social Media. While the verdict is still out on whether this "emerging media" is truly useful in business-to-business communications, it's role in business-to-consumer communications is being demonstrated daily.

Just ask Dell, KFC, and numerous other brick-and-mortar businesses. Twittering, in particular, is creating new online purchase points and driving customers to websites where they can download coupons, discounts and other benefits.

If your marcom team manages multiple social media tools, here are a few pointers:

1) Use a social bookmarkigng tool like Dingo or Delicious to index and promote your most interesting content. Social bookmarking accelerates your inbound marketing, which is to say how your content attracts people to your website (the hub on which you hang all Social Media).

2) Your Social Media (sometimes call outposts) should be used to support your overall communication goals. Even though posting has to be brief, in many cases 140 characters or less, it must fit with your overall strategy.
And all posts must be kept up-to-date.

3) There are tools to automate how you manage your content. Ping.fm helps you post a message to multiple channels at the same time. HootSuite is a Twitter tool that your team can use to manage multiple accounts and group followers. It can even schedule Tweets in advance.

4) To monitor and measure your Social Media impact, start with standards like Google Alerts, Google Analystics, and Technorati. While these tools aren't perfect, they are evolving foward as Social Media itself advances.

Last but not least, launch these new tools fearlessly and create checkpoints along the way. By assessing your progress every three-to-four months, simple and quick adjustments to your plan can accelerate your Social Media success.