Recently, more than 230 business leaders attended the region’s first social media conference, Social Fresh, in Uptown Charlotte. Representatives from major companies including Walmart, Best Buy, Lowe’s Home Improvement, Duke Energy, Bank of America, Family Dollar, Ruby Tuesday, IBM and Rubbermaid took part in the sold-out event, which addressed the benefits, pitfalls and future of social media.

It should come as no surprise that the conference itself yielded some impressive social media results: more than 4,000 Tweets as well as 100 press mentions and blog posts. More than 1,000 photos and comments were posted to Flickr, Facebook and YouTube.

While topics ranged from the technical to the visionary, the consensus was clear: social media is here to stay. For businesses, social media’s ability to share timely and valuable information, help establish leadership, support customer relationships, create dialogue and protect brands is hard to dispute.

The following 12 suggestions are culled from dozens of thoughts and ideas conveyed during the conference.

1. Approach social media as a give-and-take with your customers and prospects. Conversational and engaging in nature, content is more powerful when it is a two-way dialogue and not based on a one-sided agenda whose content is clearly generated by a business.
2. Reach out without being too commercial by giving away information that people can use. This allows you to focus on the needs of customers and prospects while connecting information and messages back to your brand.
3. Use social media to gain valuable market research (blog searches, requesting feedback, conducting surveys, etc.). You can instantly gain insights into your customers’ needs, reactions to new products, desired improvements, etc.
4. Set measureable objectives and adjust as needed. Soft social media metrics like number of fans, quality of Twitter followers, number of conversations about your company, etc, can and should often be tracked back to hard business ROI (redemption of promotional offers, new customer inquiries, etc.); new metrics are being created constantly for social media monitoring and measurement.
5. Grow your social presence faster by promoting sites through traditional communications such as advertising and public relations. You can grow organically and virally, but it is likely to happen more slowly than with the aid of conventional communications.
6. Identify and cultivate advocates for your brand. Particularly engage with bloggers who share common interests and passions. Consider promotional offers such as coupons, which are often welcomed by bloggers as a perk for their readers.
7. Integrate social media into the way your company does business. Most social media programs require some one-to-one relationship tracking and building. It is not all about mass communications. Therefore, there are inherent challenges in its scale (so many people!) and accountability (who is in charge and how are results measured?), which can only be resolved when social strategies are integrated with the business’ organization and its plans.
8. Allow social media to become a part of the design of a business. Bring your customers, partners and workforce together to optimize, engage and collaborate, but be sure that your tactics flow from your objectives – not the other way around.
9. Approach social media realistically. Successful social media efforts typically require ongoing time, money and expertise, which means someone must not only speak fluently in social spaces but be able to translate messages back to the boardroom.
10. Encourage a corporate structure and culture that will succeed with social media. A top-down, command-and-control organization is not likely to be successful with social media; a more open and collaborative culture is more likely to reap benefits.
11. Understand how challenger brands can use social media to level the playing field. The cost of entry is small, and with creativity some challenger brands have seen their messages resonate with prospects and sometimes go viral.
12. Recognize that employees can and do commit gaffes such as giving away company secrets or projecting an offensive corporate image. Engage and guide rather than give employees orders in regard to social media. They can be your best social messengers.

Filed under: Social Media

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