He relates a story of a small business owner who went to a conference and the social media expert who spoke advised attendees use all of the social media networks because “you never know where your customer is going to be, so you need to be in all of the places.”

This makes my blood boil. Clearly the speaker does not run a small business or have to make payroll or deal with HR issues or make rain or report to stakeholders. If he or she did, they would never advise this.

Play Where Your Customers Play

One of the things we do, when we begin work with clients, is put them through a five-step process. It’s also the process I use when teaching business leaders how to get started on the social web.

It’s not complicated. You start by listening, then move to assessing the conversations, then engage, then measure your results, then tweak and improve, and then you start all over again.

And, if you have time for only one thing, listening is the most important of the process. It’s the foundation for any communication program, not just for using the social web. It allows you to understand where your customers are participating online, the conversations they’re having, and what matters to them most.

Listen

The easiest way to listen is to use Google alerts.

It always surprises me how few people use this free tool from Google. You can set up alerts for your name, the company name, your competition, and the industry…at the very least. If you do those four things, you’ll receive four emails each day. In that email, it will outline where conversations about your search topics are happening online: The web, blogs, comments, discussion groups, social networks, videos, and books.

After a week or so you begin to see a trend. You’ll notice whether people are talking about your search topics on blogs or on the social networks. This begins to give you some intelligent information about which one platform you should use.

Of course, if you have the budget or receive more than 500-1,000 mentions per day (my Google alerts usually have no more than 10 each day), you’ll want to pay for a listening program. Tools such as Spiral16, Radian6, or Sysomos are the best.

Assess

Then you can begin to assess those conversations.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, your Google alerts show you a lot of chatter is happening on Twitter. You note that in your brain as one of the tools to consider.

Now you can assess where the people you’re already connected with are participating online.

There are four tools you can use to do this:

1. Fliptop. Fliptop is a tool that will let you upload email contacts from your computer, an email marketing platform, social media, or Salesforce. It will give you 100 free social profiles; anything beyond that is a paid option. It’s an easy way to test the software to see if it’s something you’d like to consider paying for and using. It returns demographics, title, company, all of the social platforms the person uses, and their Klout score.
2. Qwerly. Qwerly is a little more sophisticated and should be used by someone who understands APIs and how to insert a key into your Web properties. This is a paid tool that takes the person’s name and location, and returns their bio, social networking profiles, usernames, and influence score (such as Klout).
3. Gist. Gist is a tool you insert into your email server (such as Outlook or Gmail). Every time you email someone, it returns information such as their most recent blog post, what they’re reading, their shared photos, and their social networks.
4. Xobni. Xobni is the Batman of email. When installed in your email server, it returns so much information it’s almost scary. It gives you the social platforms, just like the other tools, but it also shows you which attachments you’ve exchanged with that person, what time they’re typically on email and responding, how many emails they’ve sent you or haven’t responded to, and more.

Engage

So now you have Google alerts that show (for sake of this blog post) there is a lot of chatter about your company, brand, competition, or industry on Twitter.

Then you find, once you upload your contacts into Fliptop, that most of your existing contacts are participating on Twitter.

It probably makes sense for you to start with Twitter. Not to be on every platform, but based on your research, to start there.

But, of course, you have to have content to use on Twitter. Content that is housed on something you own: Your website and/or blog.

Jay Baer offers the best image I’ve seen on how to begin to engage online.

In the days of old, we would use written customer testimonials on our websites. Now you can take that same philosophy to create videos of your customers telling your company story. Those videos are uploaded to YouTube (which helps with your search) and embedded on your website and/or blog.

Then that link is used to build engagement through content on the one social network (Twitter in this case) where you’ve decided to participate.

Measure

Now it’s time to pay attention to whether or not your efforts are working. We use both Google analytics and Clicky at Arment Dietrich, but use InfusionSoft for Spin Sucks Pro and Hubspot for clients to generate leads, measure results, and figure out what’s working and what’s not.

You want to have a benchmark as you’re starting out. Your benchmark may be zero and you may be guessing at what you should measure (hint: It’s not web traffic) and that’s OK. Start somewhere, give it 75-90 days, and move to improve from there.

If you need help in setting up a measurement program, pick up Marketing in the Round. The last three chapters focus on how to do this.

Improve

And then you’re going to improve. You now know where your customers and prospects are participating. You’re creating stories and content that allow you to engage online. You’re measuring your results. And now you know where you need to improve.

We always recommend clients (and conference attendees) start by crawling, then walking, then running, and then flying.

There is no reason on earth you need to be everywhere at once or start with more than one thing.

Start small and grow.

Lindsay Bell is one of a kind and you’re about to learn why.

I first got to know Lindsay when she was working with Radian6. As you probably know, their community is everywhere and they do a fantastic job of spreading the word and adding value.

Lindsay is no different. She got to know me on Twitter, read the blog, and built a relationship in a way that is very human.

She is a former television producer – she worked at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – so she’s had an entire career of building relationships with human beings. And she’s really, really good at it.

Top that with her ability to write and you have a PR professional’s dream. Heck, she’s a client’s dream.

Take, for instance, the blog post she wrote earlier this week about the things her dad says, including, “You can s**t  in one hand and wish in the other and see which one you fill first.”

We’ve talked a bit this week about storytelling and she does that brilliantly in this blog post (if you’re in need of storytelling help, read her blog!). She starts off by relaying her dad’s sayings, which are, in and of themselves, awesome. And then she goes on to applying those sayings she learned as a kid to business life. It’s a talent and one you can mirror if you read her carefully.

Hey Lindsay! They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. You don’t mind my telling people to mirror you, do you?

Lindsay is on the job hunt and is one of the best content creators I know. If you’re in need of a content creator or know someone who is, I suggest you give her a call (or tweet or Facebook message or Google+ circle or email). She knows how to determine what your audience wants and how to deliver it in the most valuable way.

And if you’re looking for someone exceptionally cool to know, check out her blog, follow her on Twitter, or circle her on Google+. YWRI.

I’m a big fan of theirs so I was ecstatic when they asked me to guest blog for them.

And then they changed their minds and asked me to do a video instead.

I asked if they were sure. I mean, it’s one thing to do goofy videos for you guys. It’s totally a different thing to do it for a big, grown-up business.

But they were sure. They had two requirements: 1) I discuss the future of analytics and 2) I send them the script beforehand.

The future of analytics is an easy one. I clearly have opinions about that and about PR pros learning some marketing skills so they can measure their efforts. I’m a big believer in what we do becoming an investment vs. an expense.

So check that off the list.

But the script ahead of time proved to be a little more difficult.

One wouldn’t think that would be difficult, but I never script myself (which is why the videos are always goofy), but I did as they asked.

When I sent the script, I asked if I could also use props. They said yes. I don’t think they realized what kind of props I would use.

So the video below is the result of what I did for them (if you can’t see it in your Reader, click here and it’ll magically appear). I, personally, think it’s worth watching for the props alone.

But you tell me. And also tell me what you think about the future of analytics. Where are we going? What else do we need to be considering.

And one more thing before you watch the video: Head over to Facebook and leave me a question on the wall, will ya?

P.S. Special thanks to Lindsay Bell and Amanda Nelson. They were SUPER easy to with…and fun, too!

This first ran over at The Whale Hunters. It’s written with the business leader in mind, but the process outlined below works for anyone responsible for using the web.

Hell has frozen over!

Oh wait. The Cubs haven’t won the World Series yet. Never mind.

But it does seem that way, doesn’t it, with all the changes in technology? You run a business. You don’t have time to keep up. Does it feel like, somedays, you’re being left behind?

You’ve always been responsible for payroll and HR and legal issues and tax laws and retention customer service and innovation and managing debt. Now you also have to be responsible for Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Yelp and Flickr and Quora and blogging and Foursquare.

Where does it begin? Better, where does it end?

I’m a big believer in using the web for business growth ONLY where your customers and prospects are participating. If they’re on Twitter, you should be on Twitter. If they heavy blog readers, you should have a blog. If they consume videos, you should be on YouTube. But for crying out loud! You don’t have to use every single tool and be good at all of them.

This is not the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will not come. So, before you determine how and if you should include the social web in your communication, marketing, advertising, HR, customer service, and sales strategies, first figure out where it makes sense to do so.

Following are the five steps we recommend you use in determining if and where you should be participating online.

1. Listen. The number one thing every business leader should have is Google alerts. If you don’t already have them set up to search the web for your name, the company name, the industry, any competitors, any key clients, and key employees or stakeholders, this is a must have. Stop reading now and set them up. Go on. I’ll wait. This one is non-negotiable. If you want to delegate it, do so, but do not delegate the alerts set up for your name and the company name. If someone says something negative online about you or the company, you don’t want to wait to hear it. You want those alerts as soon as Google sends them. As you begin to grow on the web, you’ll eventually want to pay a monitoring service, such as Spiral16, Radian6, or Sysomos.
2. Assess. From there, you begin to assess where pe0ple are participating online and where it makes sense for you to do the same. The tools we recommend here are Flowtown, Gist, and Xobni. Each have their own particular advantages, but we like Flowtown for your existing customer relationship database (even if it’s not sophisticated and just sitting in Excel). You import the database and it shows you, by percentage, where your customers and prospects have social accounts. For instance, ours shows us that 21 percent of our customers use Twitter. Which means it makes total sense for us to have a presence on Twitter.
3. Engage. Jay Baer explains this process the best. He shows that you begin by harvesting customer stories. Storytelling humanizes the company. Humanization encourages kinship. And kinship encourages sales. Because, after all, we buy from people we like and trust. And more sales equals more stories to be able to tell so you are able to repeat the process. Your customers want to know the people who work within your proverbial four walls so tell stories in order to engage them.
4. Measure. There is a lot of discussion around the ROI with the social web. We recommend not trying to figure out how to monetize your Twitter followers or Facebook fans. Rather, determine what you want to accomplish by using the web. Is it increased awareness? Is it thought leadership? Is it a higher percentage of qualified leads? Is it helping your sales team convert those leads? It is more traffic to your website or blog? Whatever it is, the social web can help you with all of those things. What it can’t do is guarantee that if you have 20,000 Twitter followers, you’ll be making a gazillion dollars.
5. Improve. This last step really is to take time, every 60 to 90 days, to review what’s working and what isn’t working so you can refine and improve. Gone are the days of planning every year. Now you must plan, refine, and improve every couple of months.

The last thing to consider: This is not a sprint. It is a marathon. It may be easy to look around and see all of the assuming overnight successes from using the web, but I’m here to tell you, those people have been refining their process online way before Twitter or Facebook were even ideas in their founder’s heads.

Choose one tool, implement it into your overall business strategy, get good at using it, refine its use, and move on to the next one. And be patient. It does take time. After all, you’re building relationships online. Online or off, relationships don’t happen overnight.

At the time I said, “Sure!” without really thinking it through. All I thought was, “Great! I won’t have to prepare a speech two weeks before we launch Spin Sucks Pro.”

But taking questions from an audience, for an entire hour, is pretty nerve-wracking because you have NO idea what is coming and you have zero time to prepare. It’s completely on the fly and, I learned yesterday, that you have to have a whole bunch of confidence (which began to diminish the closer to 12:30 we got) in order to do that.

Afterwards, I was scrolling through the Twitter feed to see what people tweeted the most, in order to give you some of the key points. I don’t know what we did before Twitter. I guess we didn’t blog about it the next day!

The Q&A

Q: There are many different agencies a business can hire, and they all seem to be converging on this concept of digital marketing and social media. When should a business hire a PR agency to handle digital marketing or social media rather than a more specialized digital agency that specializes in the digital space?

A: If you’re looking to hire an agency that focuses solely on social media, you won’t have an agency to work with in two years. My reasoning being that social media is a TOOL and agencies should not be specializing in tools. Social media should be a part of what they offer, including traditional communication, some basic search, some marketing communication, and reputation management.

Q: How do I know how much I can promote myself online?

A: We have the 80/20 rule: Eighty percent of what we distribute online is about someone else (their blog posts, their videos, their content, etc.) and only 20 percent is about us. We liken this to going to a networking event and meeting, what Lisa Gerber calls, Type OO (output only). Just like you’re searching for someone else to talk to when Type OO is chatting your ear off about how great they are, the same thing happens online. The companies who use the tools only to promote themselves will fail.

Q: How many tweets should you send in a day?

A: I don’t think there is a one-size fits all for how many tweets you send in a day. For instance, I schedule my tweets to go out once an hour, from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m., every day. Those tweets fit the 80/20 rule. Then, when I’m on Twitter, I’m engaging, I’m reading, and I’m having conversations. So I could easily send 200 tweets in a day. Or more.

Q: What’s the difference between social media for consumer or B2B brands?

A: Consumer brands are much easier to promote, using the social tools, because the audience is everyone. There is a lot of talk about it not working for B2B brands, which is baloney. If you know where your customer is participating online (and they are participating online), you can know which online tools to use to reach them. Free tools such as Google Alerts and Socialmention will give you a good understanding of where they are participating. Then you can move to paid tools such as Engage 121, Spiral16, Radian6 for monitoring where your prospects are and what they’re saying and Flowtown (which is my favorite), Gist, and Xobni for your current customers habits.

Q: There was an article a couple of months ago about blogs trending downwards and seemingly going away. What do you think about that?

I think blogs are trending downwards because a whole bunch of people jumped on the blogging bandwagon when it was the shiny, new penny. But they are hard work. Super hard work. And people don’t have the time or patience to put into a blog what it takes to have some semblance of success. For instance, between Lisa and me, we spend a good 40 hours or more on Spin Sucks a week. It’s a full-time job and it’s not something you an say, “Oh, I don’t really want to do that today” if you’ve built the expectation that you ARE going to blog every day. So I don’t think blogs are trending downwards because they’re going out of style, so to speak. Rather, it’s because they take a lot of care to maintain.

Q: How often should you blog?

If I’d been asked that question three years ago, I would have said three times a week, definitively. But now I think it’s more about consistency. If you are going to blog every Monday at 9 a.m., but darn, you’d better blog every Monday at 9 a.m. Just set the expectation and deliver…consistently.

There were a ton more questions, but those are the ones I can remember from reading the Twitter stream. And, I’m getting dangerously close to a blog the length that Ingrid Abboud writes so I’ll stop now.

How would you have answered these questions? Do my answers lead to more questions? The comments are yours.

Of course, the east coast got snow today, but like I told Ken Mueller, that means allergies are at bay a few more days (it also means that cycling season hasn’t begun yet, but I’m trying to stay positive!).

Are you ready for your Gin and Topics? Let’s do it!

5. Google Wants to Be Your +1. Google now shows a “+1″ next to URLs that allows you to share sites with your networks. Sounds vaguely familiar. Hmmm…kind of like a Facebook like? I wonder how it feels to offer a “me too” product after ruling the world for so long?

4. Tablets: Publish or Perish. We talk a lot internally about skipping the web entirely and going straight to the tablet, but fully realize not everyone has one yet. This article talks about how quickly tablets will scale…and they think it’ll be in the next six to 12 months.

3. GoDaddy.com CEO Shoots Elephant. I can’t figure out why people are so enraged with this video. Bob Parsons explains that, by killing an elephant, villagers (most of whom are starving) get very much needed protein, not to mention saving a farmer’s crops (which also feed the village) from being trampled. I get animal rights. Heck, I tell Jack Bauer all the time it’s not human nature to love an animal as much as I love him. But what about the human beings who get to eat? Would people be as enraged to see them starving?

2. In Salesforce.com’s Deal for Radian6, a Nod to Facebook’s Rise. Big news in the social space this week when Salesforce announced they’ve acquired Radian6. The company says nothing changes (which is good for my friends at Radian6), but I can’t help but wonder if companies like Arment Dietrich, who use the tool for many clients, will be left in the dust because we don’t use Salesforce?

1. Twitter Founder Wants to Make Twitter More Mainstream. So Jack Dorsey co-founds Twitter. Then he leaves and begins to build Square. Now he’s coming back? Dude! Make up your mind! He’s back as product chief and his main goal is to create more value for you.

Have a story I missed? Leave it in the comments!

Always big thanks to Jennifer Hallowes for the image we use every week!

The B2B Blogging eBook from Mark Schaefer offers a look at basics, best practices, and blunders. If you want to begin blogging, but don’t know where to start, this book is for you.

From Stats to Strats is the eBook from Danny Brown at Bonsai Interactive. These guys (Danny and his partner Troy Claus) are really smart when it comes to building a strategy for ALL marketing and communication tools (not just social media). I recommend it if you’re stuck in planning hell and need some inspiration.

I’m a big fan of the content that Radian6 produces…and they have a free eBook every month (we aspire to that level). My favorite of the dozen or so they have (you can find them all here), is Building and Sustaining Brand Communities, which talks about not only how to build a community, but how to keep it engaged and moving toward one vision.

The king of the New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott, has a free eBook called The New Rules of Viral Marketing. It’s probably the most intense free book I’ve come across…and that’s saying a lot. The information shared in here is easily worth the price of a hardcover book.

And…our own that accompanies my Social Media Bootcamp keynote. This one is more than a year old, though. And it’s overly simple. So if you already have a good handle on social media, it won’t be worth your time.  But if you or someone you know hasn’t yet figured out how to use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any of the other myriad of social networks, this book will be super helpful in that it gives you step-by-step instructions on how to get started.

If you want any others, or don’t see a topic here that you’re interested in reading about, Ingrid Abboud did a nice countdown of 16 (!!!) free eBooks around the web.

Now it’s your turn. Which free eBooks are you loving right now?

Thanks to Beth Harte for pointing me to Bookshelf Porn, which is where I found the image.

Guest post by Ann Manion, president of Hotel Advantage.

I would not describe the hospitality industry as a community of early adopters when it comes to social media.

As a specialist in hotel reputation management, I’ve watched hoteliers confront companies such as Trip Advisor and request the removal of unfavorable reviews from their profiles.

Too many hotels have no track record for responding to online guest reviews. And not enough of my colleagues have dipped their toes into Twitter and LinkedIn.

A general manager once described Yelp to me as being like his neighbor’s barking dog.

But things are moving forward, and hoteliers are growing more interested in hearing about social media success stories beyond The Roger Smith Hotel.

That’s why I wrote a Twitter Case Study that describes Hotel 71 Chicago’s elegant handling of a sticky customer complaint – from Amber Nasland, VP of Social Strategy for Radian6 – that was broadcast to the world.

Followers asked me to dig deeper. So I did.

A Conversation with Hotel 71 Chicago’s director of operations, Steve Ellingsen:

What was your big “take away” from the incident?

Customer comments reach us from more places than ever before. We read everything and respond to concerns within 24 hours.

Amber’s remarks were received through two channels:  Twitter and Unifocus. It’s not uncommon for today’s sophisticated traveler to post feedback in multiple places. Because we monitor Twitter, we were able to respond to Amber in record time.

The lesson here is that monitoring social media channels can help hotels respond more quickly to the guest.

Has social media changed the way Hotel 71 Chicago operates?

Yes, here are a few examples:

• Our marketing budget now has a line item for social media.
• We’ve hired an intern to help support social media activities.
• We’re using our YouTube channel more. For example, we posted a video clip of “Transformers 3” that was filmed here at the hotel.
• We advertise special room rates directly to our Twitter followers.

What’s helped Hotel 71 Chicago take advantage of social media?

Our hotel management company, West Paces Hotel Group, gives us great flexibility and autonomy to manage our social media program. This helps us respond quickly to opportunities here in Chicago, a highly competitive hotel market.

Will Hotel 71 Chicago use social media more or less down the road?

Definitely more.

Our general manager, Steve Shern, started out at Four Seasons, and I began my career at Ritz-Carlton. We’re both classically trained hoteliers, but enthusiastic about trying less traditional ways for getting the word out on Hotel 71 Chicago’s specialness.

For example, a comedian visited the hotel and afterwards posted two videos showing off our prime Magnificent Mile location and spectacular water views of the Chicago River. Together these videos got more than 10,000 views on YouTube!

The floor is now yours. What advice do you have for other industries that aren’t embracing technology for communication and customer service?

Ann Manion believes the most important thing is what the customer thinks. Her company, Hotel Advantage, shows hotels how to build a strong online reputation that attracts more guests.

We talked a lot about both monitoring and measuring social media, but one of the points that kept coming up was “how do I sell this to my executive team, including our general counsel?”

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post about that very topic and you can read it here, but I thought yesterday had some great material to add to the conversation.

* Do an analysis of what your competition is doing and show that to your executive team. It’s pretty amazing what happens when you show the CEO that his/her competition is using social media successfully. Suddenly you no longer have to sell the idea!

* Create not just share of voice or volume share charts, but also share of conversation to show the c-suite that social media is not only driving traffic (eyeballs) but also that it’s contributing to the conversation, in terms of referrals or recommendations. Companies such as Radian6 can help you with this, pretty inexpensively.

* Go to the Arment Dietrich Delicious page, where we’ve bookmarked social media policies for all types of businesses. Download the ones most like your company and share them with your general counsel.

* Demonstrate your knowledge of how social media affects the entire company, including human resources, customer service, marketing, communication, sales, and the executive team. Show case studies on how each department, even if they’re not using social media directly, benefit from the company’s use of it…from a dollars and cents position.

* Provide the executive team with a real analysis of how social media will increase sales. This happens through increased online sales, better and qualified leads, a referral network from your community, and/or sampling.

* Know which buttons make your executives excited and use those to your advantage. Some CEOs are egomaniacs (did I say some? I mean most!) and think seeing their name in lights is going to help increase sales. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But if you can help create an expert of your chief executive through the social media channels, show him/her how it will benefit the business, as well as stroke their ego.

* Be prepared. Have a plan. Develop a strategy. And don’t forget the benchmarks. It’s OK if your benchmark is zero or if you have to create a new benchmark that has never been there before. Just make sure you have something, with goals for increasing in 30 days, 90 days, six months, and a year.

What other ideas do you have? What has/has not worked for you?