The world has changed, and the old ways of running a business rarely apply anymore. Your employees could be working halfway across the country or halfway across the world! It’s hard to keep tabs on everything that’s happening, and even harder to ensure your team is working efficiently. But, by learning about and taking advantage of a few key apps, you can bring your team closer together and ensure everyone is working on the same page.

1. Get more time face to face, virtually.

It isn’t always feasible, financially or otherwise, to bring your whole team together in one place. That doesn’t mean getting valuable face time is unattainable. Skype is a popular standard for video calling; many people have an account, it’s easy to use, and available on a variety of devices. So while the weekly phone conference may be the best way for your team to get things done, it’s even better to see your coworkers face from time to time.

But the free version of Skype is only good for one-on-one video calls. To have multiple people on a video call you’ll have to opt into Skype’s premium service for $4.99 a month. However, there are other free options like Google Hangouts or one of my favorites, Spreecast. Spreecast enables you to have up to four people at once, with no need to download software because it works right in the browser. You can make your meetings private and record them for playback later. Whether you’re having free-flowing strategy meetings or just relaxing with your coworkers and enjoying a  VoIP happy hour, video makes your team feel like they’re really a part of something, even when they’re working remotely.

2. Use cloud apps to share data.

When managing employees in geographically diverse locations, it can be hard to manage what should be simple tasks, like making sure everyone has the latest version of a document or spreadsheet before a meeting. This is a perfect opportunity to use the cloud. Cloud storage apps like Dropbox or Box.net (which I’ve discussed in a previous post) are great if your employees take full advantage of shared folders and collaboration tools.

For larger files, we use cloud storage to share files to great effect, but when it comes to actually collaborating on documents or presentations, I find Google Drive to be the best solution. Combining cloud file storage with a web-based office suite of document, spreadsheet, and presentation software, Google Drive is the perfect way to ensure everyone is literally on the same page. The best features are the collaboration tools—when I’m working on something, my editor or publicist can jump right in to the document with me. We can edit files together, and chat about what we’re doing at the same time, all from the Google Drive interface.

There are so many ways to put Drive to work for your business, but I’ll tell you a few of my favorites. During a meeting, multiple people can collaborate together typing the notes to ensure that every action item or brainstormed idea is properly captured. While compiling a spreadsheet, my team often takes to the chat to ensure everyone working together is on the same page about formatting, what values go where, and how the formulas work. When my producer is working on a segment for TV, I don’t have to ask her how it’s coming along—instead, I can jump straight into Drive and see her progress on the pitch in real-time.

Drive is powerful software, and will take your small business straight into the 21st century.

3. Organize your team with project management apps.

So your team is meeting face-to-face, building awesome presentations together, and everything is going great, right? Wrong. How are you making sure every one is staying on task? How do you get a status update from a team member who’s halfway around the world and in a different time zone, or unreachable because they’re underground on the subway? There are a million different situations where you need some little bit of information, but in today’s workforce, you can’t just walk down the hall and pester someone in their office. What’s the best way to get that same experience online?

Enter project management software. My team uses Basecamp, which is practically the industry standard, but you might want to check out some alternatives. One worth checking out is Siasto which integrates seamlessly with Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box.net. Another is Trello, which uses cards to let you see the big picture of how projects are moving, or allows you to drill down quickly into the nitty-gritty details.

Whatever you choose, the important thing is making sure you get your whole team on board, trained, and excited about the possibilities of managing their projects with an app. From giving management the ability to quickly scan deadlines, due dates, and progress on a variety of tasks to enabling employees to collaborate, discuss, and share ideas, inspirations, and help on all of their tasks, project management software makes it simple for everyone to stay on track with their work.

Those are my ideas for how to take advantage of the latest tech to build a better business. Your business might struggle with different stumbling blocks, so let me know what problems you’re trying to solve in the comments below, and I’ll try to find apps that can help you work better!

Mario Armstrong, Digital Lifestyle Expert, is an Emmy Award winning, tech commentator for the TODAY show, CNN, HLN and Fuse. An entrepreneur by nature, Mario made his passion his career by quitting his day job and founding Mario Armstrong Media. Follow Mario at @MarioArmstrong. AT&T has sponsored this blog post.

• “Lots of followers” doesn’t necessarily equal “lots of engagement.” The list of the top 100 most-followed brands differs quite a bit from the list of the 25 most-engaged brands.
• “Posting a lot” doesn’t necessarily equal “lots of engagement,” either. The 25 brands with the greatest volume of tweets were not the same as the 25 most-engaged brands.
• What does lead to lots of engagement? Posting consistently. The two brands with the most consistent volume of content, #1 Notebook of Love and #2 Disneywords, were also the two most-engaged brands.
• Another factor in engagement is the type of content you tweet. Visuals rule the day here: more than three-fourths of the most-engaged brands’ content was photos. The second most popular type of content? Videos. Links and status updates made up a miniscule portion of their tweets.
• The day that the most-engaged brands were most likely to tweet was Wednesday, and the time of day when they were most likely to tweet was 4 p.m.

What do these findings mean to you? Should you start tweeting Wednesdays at 4 p.m. religiously? Not necessarily. What works on Twitter varies depending on your industry. However, this report provides lots of data you can use to compare yourself to your competition. In fact, if you go to smo.infinigraph.com, you can look up competitors in your industry and run a report to see what they’re doing on Twitter.

Ask yourself:

• What kinds of content are they tweeting, retweeting and sharing?
• What kinds of responses are they getting?
• How are they responding to followers’ tweets?
• What are they doing that you’re not doing?

As with most things in life, it’s not the quantity but the quality that counts. A well-planned, well-executed Twitter strategy works better than throwing a ton of tweets out in a frantic effort to be heard above the noise.

Part of quality is consistency. Your followers need to know what to expect, and that they can rely on you. Have you ever followed a Twitterer who started out strong and then disappeared? It’s better to start small and build from there than to start with a volume of tweets that you can’t maintain.

Keep in mind, too, that what works on Twitter will change over time, so following your competition and learning from what they do is the best way to stay on top of trends—and to modify your strategy so you can continue to grow your customer engagement.

What can you learn from the most engaged brands on Twitter? How can you improve your social media strategy to more successfully engage your customers?

Here we are five years later. While the number of women-owned businesses continues to grow, nearly two-thirds are struggling with annual revenues of $50,000 or less.

Why do female entrepreneurs lag behind?

Why do female entrepreneurs continue to lag significantly behind men?  In my opinion, it’s all about money.  First, when women start businesses they typically use their personal funds, credit cards, or loans from family or friends.  Only a small percentage of female entrepreneurs seek start-up capital.

More importantly, women business owners tend not to seek growth capital for their businesses.  When they do, their success rate falls well below men.  According to a recent survey from Biz2Credit, women-owned firms have higher operating costs, slimmer margins, and lower credit scores than businesses owned by men. Therefore, it makes it difficult for them to find the capital they need to grow their businesses. The Biz2Credit research shows that loan approvals for women owned firms are 15 – 20 percent lower than male-owned companies.

3 strategies for getting ahead

So what do women business owners need to do to build million-dollar plus organizations?  Here are a few suggestions.

Focus on the money

Despite the strides women have made in business, there is an underlying sense that it’s unfeminine for women to aggressively strive to make money.  When I’ve worked with aspiring female entrepreneurs, they often tell me they aren’t interested in the money.  Really?  Then why go into business, I ask.  Women need to be more focused on growing their bottom line profits without feeling ashamed to admit it.

Be a business leader, not a den mother

Women tend not to think of themselves as a CEO, but more like a hands-on member of the team that should be involved in every aspect of their business.  Their employees become like family members to them, and therefore decisions are frequently made based on emotions as opposed to business needs.  A growth focused organization must have a leader that can step back from the day-to-day details and engage other people to do the work.  You have to let go to grow.  Growth organizations need leadership that can build a dynamic team.

Educate yourself on funding options

Women aren’t seeking equity capital at the same rate as men.  Various expert calculations find women receive less than 10 percent of all equity financing.  In part, that number has to do with bias, but also it’s the result of a lack of understanding of this type of financing.  Organizations such as Springboard Enterprises and Goldenseeds are working to change this scenario by educating women on how to position their businesses to attract equity capital.  It’s often this type of funding that allows a smaller company to accelerate growth.

What other advice could you offer to women-owned businesses to help them succeed?  What strategies have worked for you?

This perception needs to change. For many small business owners, social media is still largely an unknown quantity. Here are a few basic reasons that businesses of every size should invest their marketing resources in social media.

Five reasons social media marketing is important

1. It’s cheap.

Ultimately, the concern of all small businesses is getting the most bang for their marketing buck. Depending on how you approach it and what platforms you use, marketing through social media will either be free or very cheap. The biggest expense, at least initially, is likely to be time. Establishing a social presence doesn’t happen overnight, but it can create a wealth of opportunities for your business once it gets rolling.

2. It builds community.

Much more so than large, nationally recognized companies, small- to mid-size businesses are often deeply connected to the communities in which they’re located. Consumers like to add local businesses to their social media feeds, and platforms like Facebook continue to make it easier to filter news feed results by location-based criteria.

3. It expands your reach.

While your primary consumer base will inevitably be close by, social media offers ways for any business to broaden its borders and sell its products in the online marketplace. In social media, your community members double as your brand ambassadors. All they have to do is share some kind words about one of your products, and all of a sudden, you’re getting interest everywhere from Albuquerque to Dubuque.

4. It builds thought leadership.

One primary duty of businesses using social media marketing is sharing relevant content. Part of this process involves passing along useful content from others in your field, and part of it means creating your own content, whether it’s a blog, video, podcast, etc. By constantly sharing information, you will demonstrate that you are aware of the trends in your industry, connected to other important minds within that industry, and contributing new ideas to the conversation.

5. It gives customers a voice.

Every business owner at one time or another wants to know what their customers think of their company. Aside from things like surveys and comment cards, however, small businesses didn’t really have an affordable option to get customer feedback. Your customers will freely volunteer details of their experience through social channels—often without even being prompted. Sometimes negative feedback will sprout up as a result of this process, but the good news is that you will have a direct line to your customer to try and sort the issue out.

Is your small-to mid-size business engaging customers on social media? Share your experiences in the comments.

Cheryl Burgess (@ckburgess) is a digital and social brand consultant, blogger, and speaker. Her knowledge of business strategy, passion for creative expression, and marketing technology helps businesses achieve the remarkable. AT&T has sponsored this blog post.

Now, I’m not a gambler, but my team liked to hit the casinos after a long day on the trade show floor.  Wanting to build camaraderie with the team, I’d usually tag a long for a little while.  Typically, I’d find a video poker machine where I’d invest $20 that would usually entertain me for a couple of hours. Once the money was gone — so was I.

One evening, one of my team members decided to join me.  He watched as I bet the minimum — 25 cents — on each hand.  Finally, he said, “You’re getting some good hands. You should really bet the maximum, so if you hit you’ll win big.”

“Nope. I’m happy with my quarter bets,” I explained.

A few hands later I hit a Royal Flush.

“Oh man. You should have been betting the max,” he said.

If you aren’t willing to take big risks in business, you won’t reap the big rewards.  If I’d been betting the max, instead of $250, I would have walked away with $2,500.

Of course, betting on video poker is much different than betting on your business. Risk is a part of doing business, but it’s not a game of chance.  As a smart business owner, you learn to take calculated risks. Yet many entrepreneurs are paralyzed by the fear of failure. The bigger the risk, the greater the fall, they fear.  But should they be afraid?

No one likes to fail, but failure is an opportunity to learn and grow.  The key is to fail fast and to move forward with renewed energy.  As one of my favorite celebrities, Julie Andrews, said, “Success to me is failing 19 times and succeeding on the 20th try.”

While there’s no need to fear failure, it’s important to remember a couple of things.

1.  Do Your Homework.

As I noted gambling is a game of chance, but in business you need to do more than guess.  Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of following their gut instinct which by itself isn’t much better than playing a guessing game.  Savvy business owners understand that before they gamble on their success, they need to do their homework.  Make sure you research every opportunity and analyze the risk and reward potential.

2.  Set a limit on your losses. 

Just as I noted above, I limited myself to $20 in Las Vegas.  If I’d lost that amount, I would have walked away.  You need to do the same with your business risk.  Determine how much you can financially risk without winding up in the poor house.  Never make the mistake of throwing good money after bad.  While there’s no hard and fast rule to help you make this assessment, if you do your homework you should be able to have an estimate of a reasonable amount of risk for the return you’ll get on your investment.

Playing it safe — always following the tried and true path — won’t help you build a wildly successful business.  So if you’re wondering why your small business is struggling, think about your strategy.  Are you playing it safe or are you willing to take a big risk?

What are you doing to move past fear and take calculated risks? Tell us in the comments below!

Susan Wilson Solovic is an award-winning entrepreneur and journalist, author of three best-selling books, multi-media personality and contributor to ABC News and other outlets, public speaker and attorney. AT&T has sponsored this blog post.

Perhaps the blame lies in the times. We’re doing business at a time of change as fundamental as the move to the Internet. Many businesses are being run by people who remember a time without it, who had to be convinced to that the Internet would help their businesses. The compelling story we tell has to be in a language they can understand. Two key pain points in the cloud narrative are in making sure that customers understand what cloud does and how it works, and that they get what they pay for.

Know thy cloud—and thy neighbor

Picking your first apartment probably didn’t include a thorough inspection of the plumbing or wiring, and certainly didn’t include a walk-through of the rooms of other tenants. You had to trust the building wouldn’t burn or flood or expose you to theft. Admittedly, I only thought about whether or not the sofa would fit up the stairs and if my cool loft bed would be too close to the ceiling. Was water was included? In the end I bought on price and availability, much the way many small businesses once settled on managed services. To be honest, not much has changed, and it turns out buying into the cloud is much like this process.

Multi-tenancy services must act as if the term is more than tech-speak. It has to be the norm. Consider the humble apartment building, provider of shelter and basic amenities. Like me, did you choose your first apartment based on factors that seem laughable now? Sure, a bathroom is a necessity, but what if you were forced to share it with someone you didn’t know or never met? Like some bad sitcom, you find yourself sharing an apartment with someone you never knew was there until you notice your toothbrush is wet.

Some multitenant services fail to disclose just how close you’ll be living with your neighbors. Every customer should have thick, soundproof walls between himself and his neighbor’s rockabilly collection. In fact, he shouldn’t even notice his neighbors unless they see each other at the grocery store. Small businesses have it worse. What if a patient in an examination room discusses her health with her doctor, while her words pass through the thin walls into the next room? As a business owner, you recognize that mixing your records with the dentist down the hall makes as much sense as two surgeons using the same table for operations.

The point is that vendors must adequately explain how their cloud services provide a safe, secure, and separate experience. More importantly, they need to know their data is properly segmented via software, access controls, and where possible, encrypted. And when the time comes to pull that data, it has to return quickly with no indication the guy down in 3C has been in the shower for 30 minutes. Governors should assure every customer a similar experience.

Don’t hide behind contract language

When I was explaining a service level agreement (SLA) to a customer once he replied, “Don’t tell me how much you’re going to pay me when it fails. Tell me it isn’t going to fail.” SLAs are worth as much as the digital paper that holds it. Actually they’re only worth the payout they promise. In truth, all systems experience outages. The differentiator is how easily and quickly a vendor recovers and how affected the customer base will be before full restoral of service.

Often times, cloud services are a quilt made up of many intricate and exotic fabrics, hopefully sewn together with strong thread. But a blanket with two or three squares missing is less a blanket and more like a net. A good cloud provider should be able to explain to a customer how each square connects to the one beside it, or how each service makes up the whole. It’s great to know all the fancy features of a product and how it differentiates from the competition, but be sure to set proper expectations for the experience.

Cloud providers must continue to push the bar and educate sales teams on what a platform or service can do and what it cannot. Cloud services are often priced lower than traditional big iron installations, making profit margins much slimmer and the need to keep an eye on costs imperative. A disgruntled cloud customer who realizes the service lacks documentation and support leaves, making proper forecasting impossible. And if that happens, we all lose.

How can we, as cloud marketers, come up with a better way to sell our wares? How can we do it in a way that not only sells our product, but educates the customer at the same time? Otherwise, we won’t have enough informed customers who know it’s time to make the leap.

1.      Cloud file storage

No matter what line of business you’re in, there are surely dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of files you need to manage. Wouldn’t it be great to have access to them everywhere you go? Thankfully, the prices of cloud storage are falling every year, and it’s becoming simpler than ever to point an app to your documents folder and let it sync to the cloud and across your devices.

Stop carrying around flash drives and never be caught in a meeting without access to a crucial document ever again!

If you’re a small business or entrepreneur, one great solution I like is to switch your business over to Google Drive, which provides both document storage and editing of all your docs, spreadsheets, and presentations in one place. Fully compatible with other office suites but available on every device you can think of, Drive is a great way to promote team collaboration on important documents and make sure your company has all of their important docs in one place.

But larger companies that may be more resistant to switching over to Google for all their document needs, either Dropbox  or Box.net  can help. You can get several gigabytes of storage on either service for free so you can try them out, and since both offer apps for every mobile device out there, you can have your documents, pictures, and more easily synced across all your devices and never be caught without a crucial file again!

2.      Cloud backups

Okay, quick show of hands: how many of you regularly back up all of your data to an external hard drive? Now, keep your hand up if you use multiple hard drives. Okay, finally, keep those hands up if you store those multiple hard drives in geographically disperse, secure locations.

Any hands still up? I didn’t think so.

While at a minimum you should have backup drives locked up at least at home and at the office, in the event of disaster like a hurricane or earthquake, both of those locations could be inaccessible. At the very least, a secure backup out of the state will mean you’ll still have your files if you need them. But accomplishing that is tough—are you prepared to mail or drive backup drives to a remote location once a month? Wouldn’t it be great if you could have that same level of security without the hassle?

Enter cloud backups, where you can cheaply encrypt and copy the entire contents of your hard drive to a remote location and let someone else worry about keeping it up-to-date and safe. Two apps I like here are Carbonite  and BackBlaze  and they both start at under $5/month for unlimited data! Compared to the trouble you’d have to go to for the same level of protection for your data, it’s a steal! But don’t think that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still back your data up to drives locally—you never know!

3. Cloud storage of ideas

If you’re anything like me, you’ve always got lots of ideas and nowhere for them to go. When you’re on a mobile device and the light bulb goes off, what do you do? Put that idea in the cloud! Apps like Evernote  let you put text, pictures, and audio recordings in the cloud, so you can search them and access them on every device you own, from your smartphone to your tablet and even the PC on your desk or the laptop you carry everywhere. Plus, Evernote is a great place to work on documents when you’re on the go. After all, how many times do you actually need a fully-fledged word processor to flush out a proposal or meeting notes? Evernote let’s you do that from any device you have handy, and with the cloud powering the back-end you can be sure you never lose a note and can get to it anywhere you are.

What if your needs are simpler, and you just need an app to jot down some ideas? For that, I recommend Simplenote, which does just what you think. Simplenote makes it dead simple to store notes, ideas, lists and more as well as make it easy to search and find exactly what you’re looking for. Plus, just like Evernote, it syncs to the cloud and is accessible from every mobile device out there. My recommendation is to give them both a shot, and then see what works best for you!

No app can fill everyone’s needs, but these apps are basic utilities everyone should have. What parts of your workflow would be easier to manage with the cloud? Leave me a message in the comments below, and I’ll see if I can find a solution that fits your needs!

Mario Armstrong, Digital Lifestyle Expert, is an Emmy Award winning, tech commentator for the TODAY show, CNN, HLN and Fuse. An entrepreneur by nature, Mario made his passion his career by quitting his day job and founding Mario Armstrong Media. Follow Mario at @MarioArmstrong. AT&T has sponsored this blog post.

Let’s take a look at some of these features, and how brands of any size can unleash their power.

Boosting your presence with Google+ Communities

The objective behind Communities was to create a platform within Google+ where individuals, organizations, and businesses could meet and engage based on shared interests and passions.  The 235 million active users on Google+ have quickly shown an affinity for the Communities platform, using it to discuss topics of all kinds—from hobbies to pop culture, politics to business, and everything in between.  This video perfectly demonstrates its ability to connect large groups around common interests.

Communities is ideally suited as a virtual space for meeting and engaging customers and prospects.  Aside from offering an accessible front-facing platform where you can join in dynamic conversations with your client base, Communities makes it easy to share multimedia content as well.  Sharing a new video tutorial about your products or how your brand is positioned in the industry has never been easier.

Of course, the other great benefit of Communities is that it offers users a two-way street for engagement.  The most proactive small businesses will take advantage of this knowledge by asking questions, creating polls, and finding other innovative ways to get their community members off of the bench and into the game.

Narrowing your focus with Hangouts

While Communities are excellent for facilitating public exchange, sharing ideas over a broad network, and meeting new prospects, Hangouts is more of an invitation-only gathering.  As such, Hangouts allows small business owners the opportunity to make more direct, customer-specific contact.  With this feature, your brand can host online video chats with as many as 10 people. This tool is invaluable for hosting meetings with associates, clients, or prospects spread across the globe, and it’s easy to set up.  Just get your webcam ready and pick your participants from your Circles.  If Communities is the best place for a business meet-and-greet, Hangouts is where deals get done.

Targeting your content with Circles

No platform makes narrowcasting as easy and part of the experience as Google+.  Let’s face it: social platforms have become busy, crowded places.  While it’s important for you to get your message out, it’s equally important not to intrude.  By targeting your posts to specific Circles, you avoid crowding others’ newsfeeds with useless information.  Circles perfectly demonstrate the new maxim that one-size-fits-all marketing simply doesn’t have a place in social media.  By segmenting your message to prospects and clients at different levels of the buying cycle, you will sustain a higher level of interest in your brand by always presenting the right kinds of content to the right kinds of people at the right time.

Please share your experience using Google+.  Are you using Communities, Hangouts, and Circles to connect with your customers?

Mark is a digital marketer, social brand strategist, speaker, blogger and educator. AT&T has sponsored this blog post.

Today, I see a lot of social media activity that looks like a sledge hammer going through butter.  Is your program one of them?  In my opinion, here are a few elements of a social media sledge hammer at work:

1. Extreme cross-linking automation:

A tweet or post on one platform automatically sends the same message across several platforms.  Yes, some automation can be helpful, but when you take it to the extreme it looks and feels like spam.  If you want to improve your strokes turn off some of the automation.  After all, how many different ways do you intend to pound your social audience with the same update?

2. Direct message automation:

This can also lead to problems.  Yes, it’s tempting to send an automated message that thanks someone for following you.  It’s also tempting to suggest they check out your blog, “like” you on Facebook, or connect on LinkedIn.  As tempting as it is to declare total efficiency by throwing your social media program into marketing automation mode, don’t do it.  Automated messages that thank people for following may seem like the polite thing to do, but it’s really just a non-value-add annoyance.  In addition, think hard about whether or not services that generate automated direct messages such as TrueTwit are worth the splashing they give your audience.

3. Extreme posting automation: 

This is another marketing automation temptation.  Preloading canned tweets and sending them out on a scheduled basis definitely lets you check the efficiency box.  You might even argue that it allows you to check the effectiveness box because you can send out tweets based on time zones across the world.  But what happens when someone replies with a question or comment to your tweet and you’re not there to respond?  The answer? You get dunked by losing the opportunity to engage your audience in real time conversation.

When a great swimmer is moving quickly through the water they seem smooth and powerful—almost effortlessly.  During Plebe Summer, I eventually learned that rhythm, timing, and stroke rate are critical to becoming a proficient swimmer.  If you’re not careful, automation in relation to your social media program will actually create drag and slow you down.

Now, at this point you may believe I have it out for the marketing automation folks.  I really don’t.  I use automation tools like TweetAdder to help me target, follow and unfollow profiles on Twitter, and I’ve been happy with the results.  The key is to find a balance between efficiency and effectiveness that doesn’t leave you exhausted and your audience soaked.

Have you experimented with social marketing automation? Have you gone back to some manual practices based on results? Share your experience in comments.

Alan See is the Chief Marketing Officer at Alan See CMO Temps, LLC. He has written this guest post for the Networking Exchange Blog.

Answer: Stop talking about social media.

Type “social media” into a Google search bar and you’ll find roughly about 4.7 billion results in .30 seconds. Next, try “social media conference.” You’ll see something along the lines of 1.2 billion results in .25 seconds. Social media is important but I’d argue we aren’t celebrating it for the reasons we should. Instead, we are forcing social media to conform to traditional thinking and processes rather than adapting business philosophies and supporting methodologies to meet new opportunities.

Every day, I hear about how social media strategists and managers are frustrated with the lack of executive support. Yet, many aren’t doing themselves any favors. Executives don’t speak the language of social media. They speak the language of the C-Suite and their audience are shareholders and stakeholders…not necessarily customers or employees or “people” in its most human sense.

So, in the face of skepticism or fear, the best advice that I can offer you is to learn the language of the C-Suite when making the case for what it is you believe is the right thing to do. Making the case for social media has less to do Facebook or Twitter or “likes,” views or “retweets” and more to do with using these networks to glean or introduce value. To earn the attention and respect of the C-Suite and ultimately customers is the ability to connect the dots to the very things that every stakeholder values and communicating it in a way that is approachable and appreciated. This takes a thoughtful approach to rendering value in a contextual means that hits home with different people their way.

Social media alignment

Altimeter colleague Charlene Li and I conducted a series of research interviews and surveys over the last year on this very topic…how social today’s social media strategies align (or do not align) with business goals. We shared our findings in a newly released report, “The Evolution of Social Business Six Stages of Social Media Transformation.” Needless to say, we found a significant gap And, it is this gap that makes communicating value to executives difficult if not impossible.

Charlene and I found the following interesting results:

• Only 34% of businesses felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes.
• Just 28% felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision.
• A mere 12% were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year. Perhaps most astonishing was that only one-half of companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”

The value of take-aways

In the early days of social media, emergent networks changed how people connect to one another and the information that’s important to them. With each update, shared experience, and event, the world shrank. People were and are becoming increasingly connected and as a result they are more informed. With information and connectedness comes the reality of increased customer expectations. Value, engagement, entertainment, personalization, people must take away something meaningful from the exchange otherwise there can be no relationship. A relationship is after all a mutual exchange where all parties believe that connectedness is beneficial.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and every network thereafter are merely communities, ecosystems, and platforms where information is exchanged and relationships are formed and abandoned. How you make the case for engagement and how to deliver or extract value isn’t directly tied to the nature of the environment as much as it is the facilitator of the way and the weight that value is defined, expressed, and measured.

If we’re not providing solutions we may in fact be contributing to the problem. See, social technology isn’t the answer; it’s part of the answer. Yet social strategists are often caught up in a socialized ecosystem of catch-up and that’s part of the challenge and the test. There’s always going to be a new network or another shiny object. There are always new case studies or expert theories flooding blogs, conferences, and books.

Again, the best advice I can give you is to stop talking about social media as a means to an end and start thinking about how social media becomes a means toward triggering meaningful activities or outcomes that align with business priorities or objectives and customer expectations.

This is the time to get back to basics. This is the time to take a step back.

Social media is not the crux of you argument. It is an enabler.

What are you doing to lift the conversation from tools to value? Are you prepared to translate the promise and opportunity of social into customer engagement that aligns business goal, social media strategies and customer value?

Brian Solis is the author of the book, The End of Business as Usual. He is also a principal analyst at Altimeter Group. AT&T has sponsored this blog post.