But it is more than a mere perception of being out of touch. There is constant buzz in your marketplace no matter what industry you’re involved in. A great deal of that buzz is generated, and repeated, via social media platforms. If you are not participating in generating, monitoring and influencing that buzz, you are not only missing out on a great opportunity, you risk being buried by your competitors who know how to finesse the social media system. Social Media for Business is the hottest topic as a means of advertising right now.

Successful organizations look to social media solutions to create brand awareness and extend their marketing initiatives and as a two-way communication device between employees, management, and the general public.

Social media is also a big player in corporate reputation management, especially when negative events occur and the organization needs to respond in a down-to-earth believable way.

Social media in business provides a consumer-accepted way to acquire and disseminate organizational information while simultaneously being able to receive near real-time feedback from the people receiving that message.

Large and mid-sized organizations also turn to social media solutions to facilitate inter- and intra-company communications between management and staff.

Top 10 Ways to Use Social Media in Your Organization

1. Put links to the social media services your organization uses on all of your key website pages.
2. Develop blogs (blog marketing) and have your staff engage in meaningful dialog with blog readers.
3. Create web videos of your broadcast media commercials and post them on YouTube and other social media sites. Consider doing the same with your annual report and stockholder meetings if appropriate.
4. Designate someone to learn the ins and outs of tagging and how to utilize tags to raise your online visibility.
5. Create podcasts that focus on the market to which your products or services cater rather than simply on your products or services.
6. Participate in community discussion platforms that are related to the market you serve.
7. Partner with vendors, suppliers and organizations that sell your products or services to form social media platforms and contribute content.
8. Learn how to leverage sites like Twitter to extend your corporate personality to the masses.
9. Repurpose company newsletter articles as blog material.
10. Utilize sentiment measurement tools to analyze your corporate reputation and to track your market’s feelings about you overall.

Don’t Let Social Media Simply Become a Buzzword

In order to reap the benefits of social media marketing, blog marketing and more, it is important to have a social media expert either on-staff or available as an outsourcing partner. Once begun, your social media efforts have to be maintained and extended in order to derive the benefits you seek.

Today, you’re a Luddite if you don’t have a web site and a dinosaur if all your web site does is showcase your products or services and provide an online ordering mechanism.

Building a web site is no longer a newsworthy event. But having one, even a tricked out one with all the bells and whistles, may be a non-event if you aren’t working hard to raise your site’s visibility in a crowded marketplace.

The Top 3 Things Web Sites Are ‘About’ These Days

1. Visibility

2. Visibility

3. Visibility

It’s not enough to have a web site loaded with all the must-have features if no one knows it’s there.
The Advertising World has Changed
A friend of mine relayed a story to me that should send a chill up the spine of any organization that isn’t fully invested in raising its website’s visibility.

My friend’s father-in-law was in the hospital. A nurse made a terrible error and hooked up the wrong medicine to his IV tube. It nearly killed him. After the doctors pulled him back from the brink of death, the hospital’s Risk Manager came to the room with a waiver offering the patient some relatively small amount of money in return for releasing the hospital from all claims over the “unfortunate incident.”

My friend’s mother-in-law, a 69 year-old woman who doesn’t even have an email address, turned to my friend and said “Go on the Internet and find one of those medical malpractice lawyers and make an appointment for me and you to visit him.”

That’s what she said; but it’s what she didn’t say that is so chilling.

She didn’t say “Go to the Yellow Pages and find a lawyer.”

She didn’t say “What’s the name of that big law firm that advertises on TV every day.”

She instinctively knew that the Internet was the preferred source for solving her immediate problem.

My friend used Google to search on the term “medical malpractice” and the name of the city the hospital was in. He took the results and googled each firm’s name to find more information not only from the firm, but from people who had used the firm and had written about their experiences in blogs and other social media sites.

What if you had a law firm serving that market? Would your firm’s name have come up in the top 10 Google results? Would you have had satisfied clients writing about you or your firm on social media sites?

You don’t have to be a lawyer to see that the world around you is changing.

If you don’t have top search engine placement and a strong social media network working on your behalf, you are invisible.

The good news is: It’s never too late to start.

The bad news is: Nothing will happen until you make it happen.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is part science and part magic. Blend both parts together and you instantly raise your chances of survival in an increasingly hostile market where SEO-savvy competitors are all too willing to use the Internet against you.

First signup for Twitter, it.s fast and easy. When you choose a user name try to keep it short since it takes up some of your 140 characters allowed. While you are at it, signup for a personal account as well. Twitter’s blog

More tips coming soon.

Follow me at Twitter for updates on useful links for Twitter and business in general. Twitter:IdWeb