When I got home Thursday, I had a package waiting. It was from Andy Sernovitz, the Word-Of-Mouth guru. Andy has invited me to speak at a one day event he’s putting on in Chicago Dec. 16 called, “Word of Mouth Supergeniuses.” You can learn more on the event website, but keep reading first.

The package contained a yellow T-shirt. I unfolded it and read the front. It’s a shirt customized for me, saying I’m speaking at the event and giving out my event discount code, “JASONISMYHERO,” which gets you $101 off the price of admission. This is an outstanding example of why you should consider coming to the event. Andy knows how to make people talk about a product or service. He’s called upon other experts in various categories, including several major brands, to teach similar techniques.

I’m probably not going to wear this shirt anywhere but around the house. But that’s not the point. Andy knows the people he sends the shirts to will think they’re clever, take pictures of them and post them online for people to see. They also give the recipient a feel-good benefit by letting their audiences know how to save some money on the event by using the discount code.

There’s no way I was going to ignore this little nudge to talk about Supergeniuses. Andy is brilliant. You can learn from him, me and several others, including by former boss, Todd Spencer of Doe-Anderson, who will be telling the Maker’s Mark Ambassador’s story. Other speakers include Paul Gillin, Olivier Blanchard, Rick Murray, Spike Jones, Saul Colt and more.

Register for Word-of-Mouth Supergeniuses online and be sure to use the “JASONISMYHERO” discount code. See you in Chicago on Dec. 16!

I’ve been pondering the value and validity of the term “friend” lately. Until a few years ago, we all probably had a couple hundred friends, give or take. Social networking not only incrementalized that number, but changed the definition of the word for many people.

I have 1,300 or more “friends” on Facebook. I’ve probably met and spoken with more than you think, but not all of them. There are 18,000 or so people who follow me on Twitter. I follow most of them back. We are “friends” in a sense, too.

But online friendships are very different than those we recall from childhood. A dear friend of mine, in the offline sense, was betrayed by some of her online “friends” recently. I guess this has made me ponder the depth and nature of the friendships I have with people, both online and off.

As I was thinking about this the other night, an email appeared in my inbox. It was a forward of one of those silly chains where you’re supposed to drop dead if you don’t immediately forward it to everyone you know named Joe or something. I glanced at the meme to see if it was at least interesting. It was.

Though this is supposed to be a statement of differential pride in West Virginia, my original home state and location of my Mountaineer-proud cousin Mark who sent me the email, I think you can see the comparisons that hit home with me.

Keep this in mind the next time you need to know the difference between a friend and a virtual friend:

Friends vs. West Virginia Friends

FRIENDS:
Never ask for food.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Bring the food.

FRIENDS:
Say “hello.”

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Give you a hug and a kiss.

FRIENDS:
Call your parents Mr. and Mrs.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Call your parents Mom and Dad.

FRIENDS:
Have never seen you cry.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Cry with you.

FRIENDS:
Will eat at your dinner table and leave.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Will spend hours there, talking, laughing, playing dominoes or cards and just being together.

FRIENDS:
Know a few things about you.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Could write a book with direct quotes from you.

FRIENDS:
Will leave you behind if that’s what the crowd is doing.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Will track down those who left you and kick their asses.

FRIENDS:
Would knock on your door.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Walk right in and say, ‘I’m home!’

FRIENDS:
Will visit you in the hospital when you’re sick.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Will cut your grass and clean your house then come spend the night with you in the hospital and cook for you when you come home.

FRIENDS:
Have you on speed dial.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Have your number memorized.

FRIENDS:
Are for a while.

WEST VIRGINIA FRIENDS:
Are for life.

Which are your favorites? What examples can you add? The comments are yours.

IMAGE: By Matt Antonio on Shutterstock.com. Used with permission.

When businesses are looking for social media monitoring services these days, they normally hone in on two or three capabilities. Because Facebook is this year’s blog, monitoring messages on the platform is a big one. While all social media monitoring services have the same access to Facebook data (it’s all dependent upon what Facebook makes public which is dictated by their terms of service), more creative ways to position Facebook data are surfacing.

Social media monitoring service Sysomos launches a new version of their Heartbeat product today which has a unique Facebook monitoring spin as its headline feature. In Sysomos’s new platform, you can click on a Facebook tab and see statistics and analysis for public Facebook pages and groups. The additional bell and whistle feature, though, is the ability to authorize Sysomos to access pages and groups you administer that you wish to set as private pages. So you can guard your brand’s page from public searches (relevant in few, but some instances) but still monitor and measure those interactions.

If you want Facebook to monitor a private fan group, you can now do that so long as you have administrative access or can get cooperation (and access) from the group owner for monitoring purposes.

Sysomos Heartbeat Video from Sysomos on Vimeo.

The development isn’t earth shattering, but is another step in advancing the social media monitoring industry. Congratulations to Sysomos and CEO Nick Koudas for the step.

The new Heartbeat features make Sysomos’s entry level offering mightily attractive for those looking for a solid social media monitoring solution. They like to sell their geo-targeting capabilities which other social media monitoring solutions steer clear of. It’s an interesting play since geo-targeting is largely based on IP addresses. If you’re using DirecTV’s satellite service at your home in Montana, your IP might show up as Los Angeles (for instance). This makes geo-targeting by more than country almost impossible. However, if you do get results for some states, say Montana, they’re probably people in Montana (as a guess) and that gives you a representative sample. Happy to have some technologists jump in here and correct my thinking on that.

What I do like about Sysomos’s Hearbeat offering is the pricing. The entry point is $500 per month plus a set-up fee and that gets you a certain number of queries and topics. There’s no volume pricing or add on fees for more users, etc. The prices double for twice as many queries and topics, but starting at $500 makes that still a relatively reasonable cost for most folks looking to monitor the social web.

And since we’ve not really covered Sysomos on SME to date, it’s probably good to tell our agency friends out there they have a very attractive monitoring solution for you. Sysomos MAP, the company’s core product, is positioned as a market research tool. Honestly, it didn’t seem to be all that different from Heartbeat to me except for the price. It starts at $2500 per month, but gives the subscriber unlimited access. So, if you’re an agency handling 10-15 clients, the MAP tool does the same stuff and can save you a bunch of money on your monitoring costs.

Sysomos was the first tool I’d seen in a while that impressed me with their drill down capabilities and graphics for charts and reports. I like their influencer graph which shows blogs and subsequent blogs influenced by them in a sort of planet-satellite view. They do have automated sentiment and tone scoring (a plus) and have the added bonus of translating anything in the tool into more languages that I thought existed.

Overall, it’s a solid offering at a competitive price. I’m only disappointed I didn’t review the tool before now. It’s well worth looking into if you’re looking for a social media monitoring solution.

Check out Sysomos’s website and blog. And watch the video above to see a mini demo of the new Heartbeat.

A crowd of 80 or so attended yesterday’s social media boot camp hosted by the Kentucky chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and the Social Media Club Louisville. I was honored to serve as one of the presenters along with the undisputed queen of measurement, Katie Paine, and The Bad Pitch Blog man himself, Kevin Dugan. Rest assured, lots of learning was had, even if you just count my experience.

Part of my presentation, which was focused on developing strategic plans for social media marketing, included my Four Spheres of Social Media Strategy. Until now, I’ve not shared this theory and graphic with you and thought it would be a good time to share and solicit your feedback on it.

What this image represents is the four areas of expertise a person needs to have in order to develop a successful social media strategy. Those four areas include:

1. Brand Intelligence
2. Consumer Insights
3. Community Behavior
4. Tools & Platforms

Brand intelligence refers to knowledge and understanding of the brand, product or service, competitive set, industry and business factors that effect how the product or service in question is positioned in the market place. A brand manager or chief marketing officer would likely be the most qualified and informed person here. For many advertising and public relations account managers, this is the easy part. You live and breathe the brand everyday. This part, you’ve got down.

Consumer insights is the combination of audience research, profiling and various graphics (demo, psycho and techno) the brand or market research teams compile to direct the marketing efforts. Admittedly, this area is often either overlooked or underfunded by most brands. Good research isn’t cheap.

If you don’t have a target audience profile from the brand team before starting your social media work, do as much audience profiling and homework as you can with social media resources like Pew Internet Project, eMarketer or Forrester Research, plus any audience research you can get out of the brand team you’re working with.

Community behavior is the understanding of how people interact, share and communicate both broadly on social media sites and narrowly within individual communities. This is having a working knowledge of the differences in sharing information on Twitter versus Digg or Facebook and how brands and companies can do so without appearing to be spammers, which varies from community to community.

Finally, tools and platforms refers to having an understanding of what social tools and platforms are out there you can recommend to a brand. This doesn’t mean you have to know everything there is to know about every tool out there. If you’re company or client has a need for photo sharing in their strategy, you go study the various tools available before making your recommendations. But you do need to be a little bit of a technologist and understand the possibilities the technology affords you.

As I developed the graphic to go along with the thinking, I thought about the cross over areas in the Venn diagram. The center overlap of all four is, of course, representative of the sweet spot for social media strategic success. The overlap between Brand Intelligence and Consumer Insight is where most good marketing professionals lie. If you know your brand and your consumer you’re going to be pretty strong as a marketer.

The overlap of Brand Intelligence and Community Behavior is where you’ll find many public relations professionals, event management professionals and those who understand activating communications around the brand. They may not have a deep understanding of online communities, but are communicators.

The overlap of Consumer Insight and Tools & Platforms is where the consumer advocates and customer service professionals may fall. They’re in touch with the consumers but know a bit of the tools that are out there to share and communicate.

And the Community Behavior-Tools & Platforms overlap is where many social media professionals can be found. They know the tool set and know how people communicate and interact using the tools. Various social media pros have different levels of understanding of the brands they work with and exposure to the consumer insights.

Obviously as you get closer to the middle and have three or four areas overlapping, you have a better chance of being able to offer solid social media strategies.

It would be remiss of me to not say I feel strongly that the Consumer Insight is the driver behind most good social media strategies. Social media done well is consumer centric, so fulfilling a social need for the consumer is the starting point for a brand’s participation in social media marketing. Each area has a level of importance, however, and good strategy cannot be had without a deference to each.

This is one man’s view of the world, however. I’m interested to know what you think, what you’ve experienced, if this diagram make sense and holds true for you and what, if anything you would do to change or adjust it.

As always, the comments are yours.

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We’re starting to see an interesting by-product of cool social media tools emerge: Research pulled from user data. One such effort, a new study released by SocialTwist, makers of the content share widget Tell-A-Friend, reveals some interesting facts about how people share information online. You can see the report in its entirety on the SocialTwist website.

First, let’s set the expectations appropriately. The data behind the study is collected from anonymized user data for people who click on the Tell-A-Friend widget where it is used on blog posts, newspaper websites and more. That widget represented just below this paragraph, is similar in functionality to ShareThis, AddThis and others. While the design, functionality and placement of the widgets do skew the data in various ways, the widget has served almost two million billion (yeah … with a “b”) impressions to date, so there’s a lot of data there.

The Tell-A-Friend Widget

The parts of the report that caught my eye included the following:

• People still share via email and instant messenger more than via social networks. An astounding 59% of all shares on the widget were done via email, 25% via instant messenger and just 14% were passed along on networks like Facebook and Twitter.
• Twitter, which has recently emerged as the share site du jour for those in the social media world, accounts for only one percent of all shares. Facebook is 11%. Yahoo mail is the highest individual share channel at 26%.
• Yahoo (44%) and MSN (25%) mail are way ahead of Gmail (19%) as the email provider used by Tell-A-Friend users.
• Facebook accounts for 79% of all shares via social networks. MySpace is second at 15%. Twitter is just 5% of all social network shares via the widget.

While I do think there is a separation between what I would call hyper-tech users (those who owe their soul to Google, defer to other bookmarklets and other methods rather than clicking on the share widgets provided) and the average Joe or Jane, the statistics are significant. They show us how wide of a gap there is between those two crowds. When we as Internet marketers are making recommendations and building functionality for the mainstream, we have to remember that WE are not the mainstream.

Another insight I get out of this data is that one-to-one communications – email and instant messenger – are still enormously powerful. Most people either don’t realize they can share with more folks via social networks or are not comfortable doing so. It might just be that sharing the information with one or two people is the methodology of choice for the rest of the world. That can change how we approach social media strategies for some products and services. Design programs and products that inspire more one-to-one pass alongs rather than “LOOK WHAT I FOUND!” messages on social networks.

To gather some comparative data, I asked Tell-A-Friend competitor ShareThis if they minded sharing some cursory data. For the month of October, their users also shared more via email (46.4%). Twitter was higher than Tell-A-Friend’s results, but also surprisingly low (5.82% of all shares). Facebook accounted for 33.32% of all share paths for ShareThis in October, higher than Tell-A-Friend. If you’re wondering about ShareThis’s IM numbers, they don’t offer instant messenger clients as share options, sans AOL Instant Messenger, which is buried on the third tab of their full icon set option.

I spoke with SocialTwist president Vijay Pullur on Friday about his company’s report. He was just as surprised at some of the data as I was, namely the low share number for Google’s channels and Twitter.

“Twitter is so popular and has been growing like crazy,” Pullur said. “But if you look at the data, the usage is extremely low. It has been picking up a little bit lately, but not much.”

Pullur agreed the numbers may indicate that the “normal” social media user may not be as tech savvy as those of us in the social media marketing world think.

“We have a very wide cross-section of users and the data is a general aggregate using a data sample of 10 million messages,” he said. “What appears to me is that the world of Internet users is a lot bigger than the tech savvy world you and I live in.”

Pullur and I both agree these conclusions are anecdotal and assumptions. But they are indications that may very well help us all shape more sound strategies for social media programs and initiatives in the near future.

Please do check out the full report for yourself. Let us know in the comments what insights you were able to glean and what you think of those discussed here. Are the assumptions you made about how people share using social media tools right? Different? Tell us in the comments.

Forrester Research has released a new report forecasting interactive marketing spend in the U.S. for the next five years. The report, authored by Shar VanBoskirk, is available in its entirety on the Forrester Research website.

The report details how certain industries currently spend, and projects how they will spend, on interactive marketing. It also offers some interesting insights for businesses trying to ensure they are either catching, or keeping up with the Joneses. VanBoskirk talks more about it on the Forrester Research blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals.

Current Interactive Marketing Spend - Courtesy of Forrester Research, Inc. (Click for larger version)

The chart above shows what Forrester estimates brands are currently spending on Interactive Marketing. Display advertising is banner ads and similar, standard ads on websites. The numbers aren’t all that surprising, but think about where the industry is when you think of these insights:

• Display ads continue to dominate consumer goods and media and entertainment, among other categories. This despite the fact consumer trends indicate ads simply don’t work as well as other interactive areas.
• The industries that have been using the web the longest – travel and hospitality – spend three times as much on search marketing as display ads and almost 30 percent of their overall budget on Interactive. That’s 10 percent more than any other industry.
• Social media spend is last or second to last in all categories except business services. Social media consultants and agencies selling social media fall into that category.
• Email marketing, the interactive version of cash cow direct marketing, appears to be almost an afterthought across the board.

It doesn’t surprise me that media and entertainment and consumer goods industries continue to buy display ads more than other Interactive media. They’re not only conditioned to buy ads to communicate their message and under the influence of media planning and buying firms who only make money when they buy them, but they’re the final bastion of people who don’t understand consumers have flocked to arenas like social media to get away from the bull horns of traditional marketing. Are they getting better? Probably. Do they have a way to go? Yep.

Travel and hospitality industries have a few years experience on these others and are spending a ton more on search marketing and a ton more total dollars. I’ll give you a hint, GPG folks … they’re onto something.

While the cost of social media essentially equates to labor costs, there should still be more dollars devoted to it across the board. I say this not because I want to make more money (though I won’t turn it away) but because social media — building relationships with your consumers — is the one interactive marketing method that is sustainable and cost efficient in being such. You’re investing in the lifetime of your consumers here. The dollars will go a lot farther.

And if you aren’t taking advantage of good email marketing, you need to stop what you’re doing and figure that piece out fast. Email marketing done right, delivered to the right audience and with the right message is still the best way to consistently reach people in the interactive space.

These are my ideas on how companies and industries should look to change some of these numbers. You’ll have to go purchase the Forrester Report to see if their predictions match up with what I’m recommending. (Warning: Forrester Reports aren’t cheap, but do come with a three-week, money-back guarantee.)

In the meantime, what do the numbers tell you? What surprises you? What seems odd? A penny for your comments …

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Bing and Google recently announced partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to provide elements of real-time and social search to their respective search engine results. On the surface, this probably blew past most business owners and marketers as not much in the way of being important. If the information is online, aren’t Bing and Google supposed to find it?

And, frankly, the partnership has some interesting implications, but isn’t phenomenally noteworthy … yet.

Keep in mind that I am not a search expert. I don’t have coffee with Matt Cutts … or his cats. Nor do I have insider information about what search engines are doing. But I know what’s possible and think this is what we as social media thinkers and marketers need to be thinking about moving forward. For more of an industry analyst view, Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li have some great ideas that partially contributed to my ideas here.

What Bing and Google are tapping into are the message we post on social media sites. Those messages, at their core, are not Wikipedia pages or articles on newspaper websites, blogs or company sites. They are little pieces of social capital we trade with one another. Bing and Google are saying these little innocuous tidbits are relevant, to some degree, in results for certain keywords.

In other words, a popular Tweet about Ford Mustangs (Retweeted, linked to, etc.) could rank (and thus rank high) in search engine results for “Ford Mustang.”

Couple that thought with the fact that most search engines prioritize results based on recency and in-bound links (or how many third party people think that piece of content is good) and you start to see an indication that social search may be emerging as more relevant than we think. Quite frankly, it may be becoming more relevant than it should be.

The future of search seems to indicate that the most relevant content presented by the search engines will include, and perhaps prioritize, recommendations and referrals from our social graph. So when you search for “cheap hotel Chicago” the No. 1 result may not be the hotel that wins a search result for the term like you would see today, but the cheapest hotel in Chicago that someone you know has reviewed online. Or perhaps the top result will be a Tweet a friend sent out about a “good, cheap hotel in Chicago” just 10 minutes ago.

This is both promising and problematic. Promising because we care about our friend’s recommendations more than strangers. Problematic because for many, social media has changed our definition of “friend.” Promising because real-time and socially powered search has the potential to deliver more relevant results. Problematic because it also has the potential to deliver user-generated blather as opposed to qualified, quality information.

What social search means for marketers now, however, is this: If you do not start now building a network of fans, followers and friends who trust you, your company or your brand, you may quickly become irrelevant in not just social media, but in search too. Tell your curmudgeonly CEO if your company doesn’t participate in or prioritize social media, you’ll soon lose your search standing and see if that doesn’t help.

I could be wrong. The search engineers at Bing, Google and others may have a more (in my opinion) responsible way of incorporating social graph data points into our search results than this premise indicates. But if I’m even close to correct and the wisdom of crowds mentality of the Google world we live in prevails, your lack of participation and prioritization of social media may just bite you in the SERP. And that’s gonna hurt.

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Last month, Social Media Explorer’s first report, Customer Twervice: Exploring Best Practices and Case Studies In Customer Service Efforts Using Twitter, gave us a look at how many brands are turning to social media for customer service and service recovery efforts. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person interested in the topic.

My friends at the University of Louisville and Murray State University, namely Professors David Faulds and Tom Peterson (marketing professors, UofL) and Glynn Mangold (marketing professor, Murray State University) have started an interesting academic research project around service recovery via social media. Specifically, the professors are looking into companies using the social space for the specific reason of correcting failures in service to retain a customer’s good standing or good will. (And yeah, I’ve already told them about half a dozen case studies off the top of my head.)

According to Professor Faulds, “The objective of the research is to investigate how social media venues can be used by both consumers and organizations in correcting service failures. We are exploring the use of social media across a variety of environments including profit and non-profit organizations, as well as producers of services and manufacturers of consumer products.”

What the professors need is your help.

If you know of a service recovery example, case study or company practicing the active pursuit of service recovery using any social media method (not just Twitter), please let us know. And we would love personal stories and anecdotes, not just the name of a company doing it. If you’ve personally Tweeted your disgust in service at a restaurant or store and someone reached out to you, tell us about it. All your stories are important in this project.

Please reach out to us with the information by any of the following methods:

• Post a comment with the name of the company and explanation of what they are doing below.
• Email Professor Faulds with the information at djfaul01– at — louisville.edu.
• Email me at jason — at — socialmediaexplorer.com and I’ll forward the information.

Any and all information you can provide will be appreciated. We’ll do the follow up calls and work to gather the information. We just need to cast a wide net and find as many examples as possible for the research. And don’t limit your suggestions to the big names. (We know many of them.) Give us small businesses, too. And don’t forget email marketing, blogs, Facebook and other methods besides Twitter. Any and all points in these directions will help.

While we’re not 100-percent certain, we suspect this research project will wind up being one of, if not the first of its kind from the academic perspective. And I’ve been promised I can share the results here when they’re ready, so we can all benefit from the knowledge.

Thanks for your help. Now tell us your service recovery story in the comments.

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There are few things more fulfilling than finding someone doing something for a good cause or raising money or awareness for something important. I’m participating in Movember, which is a male cancer awareness effort to follow October, which has a breast cancer awareness focus, mostly for women. (You can help shave my goatee by donating to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. See my previous post about it for more information.)

Social media for social good is rampant these days, which is somehow satisfying, even if the impact isn’t huge or the reach isn’t massive. I know my friends Beth Kanter, Susan Reynolds, Connie Reece, Geoff Livingston, Drew Olanoff (Still clapping for you beating cancer, my man) and more have leveraged social media to do all sorts of warm and fuzzy things for great people and tough issues.

This is why I find it hard to say, “no,” when someone pitches me on a charitable effort or product. I have to most of the time or SME would turn into the X charity using social media blog. That’s not what most of you come here for and so I have to sometimes play the bad guy there. But once in a while a pitch comes by that makes me think, “Now there’s something worth telling folks about.”

Enter StreamThatCause.com. Instead of getting people to pledge a dollar for every lap you walk or hour you jump rope, you can flex your social media muscles and get them to pledge for every view of a video you post in support of a good cause. This does a couple of compelling things: First, it puts the power of fundraising in the hands of people who, if creative enough, can blow it out of the water.

Think about that fun wedding video that went viral a few months back. What if the person who figured out that choreography could do something as inspired around a good cause? A dollar per view? Thank you Mr. Banker person. I drove $4 million views. Will that be cash or check?

Certainly, that’s a bit of a stretch, but still.

StreamThatCause.com also gives the smallest of causes or non-profits (i.e. little league teams) the ability to leverage a new medium that’s fun and share-able to not just raise money, but spread the word in compelling ways. You’d be surprised what a smart kid with a web cam can do. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this tool as people discover it and start having fun creating.

The site launched Nov. 1. It take a few bucks ($39 for one web-a-thon) but unifies all the videos for one effort under a single umbrella, essentially giving your cause it’s own video home on the web. All the relevant social tools are there as well. For a church fund-raiser, 40 bucks is nothing to throw down for your own video-enabled website with full sharing functionality.

It’s cool. It’s scalable (down and up) and it allows for a ton of creativity. Now that’s worth telling folks about.

(And yes, StreamThatCause.com is yet another product of the Silicon Holler – Louisville, Kentucky’s vibrant tech community. And no, I had nothing to do with it. A friend of mine just told me about it.)

So tell me, what cause are you connected to that can use this site? Tell us in the comments.

I sat across the lunch table talking to Craig Bruenderman and Sam Gracie of ResonantVibes.com yesterday, talking about their community of electronic mix music producers and fans, smiling at what I heard. These are young, tech-oriented entrepreneurs, immersed in all the code and programming most of us fear. They use social tools to build their business around. They’re digital natives. What did they say that made me smile?

“How do you choose which social networks and channels to focus on?”

I heard the same thing from a small business owner in LaGrange, Ky., last week. I heard it the week before from the brand manager of a major consumer products company and the day before that from a marketing manager for a bank.

There are three main focal points you need to concentrate on in order to manage the volume of it all. And they’re not nearly as foreign as you might think.

1. Play Where Your Audience Plays

Think of your ideal customer or conversation partner online. Who do you want to connect with? Now find out where they are. Is Facebook their thing? Twitter? Are they more apt to dive into more granular communities like forums or message boards? No matter who your ideal consumer is, be they for your blog or your product, there are places where they and people like them congregate online. Find out where by doing some cursory research which can certainly start with asking them.

It turns out Craig and Sam need to keep a finger on the pulse of the Ruby On Rails development community since they develop in that language. Ruby users are Twitter freaks. Those guys need to be on Twitter to accomplish that connection.

Ask around. You’ll find out quickly where your ideal audience is. Prioritize based on which networks can show you the biggest impact and develop content and participation there. Sure, having a home, or at least a place holder, on as many social outposts as possible is probably not a bad idea. The notion you have to be there to participate 100-percent of the time, however is ludicrous. Fortunately, your audience will understand that so long as you tell them. Just drop a little note on your MySpace page saying, “Thanks for visiting. To connect to us faster, find us on Twitter,” and you’re probably set.

2. Do What You’re Comfortable With

No matter how hard you try, you may just not get Twitter. That’s okay. If you can find a strategic reason to use it for your business, great. If Facebook is more native to you, then focus your efforts there. Obviously, prioritize the networks where your audience is most often, but don’t force yourself into an uncomfortable role. Not everyone is cut out to star in their own TV commercials (namely any car dealer ever). You may not be cut out for off the cuff conversations on Twitter. And that’s okay.

The good news is that if you tell your customers where they can find you, they’ll find you. If they discover they can get you on Twitter quicker than commenting on your blog or website, they may even go sign up for an account just to get to you. Find a network or two where you’re comfortable then let folks know that’s where you’ll be.

3. Find Tools To Help

There are a number of social tools that can help you communicate across several networks. Broadcast options like Ping.fm have been around a while. I don’t advocate their use because the temptation to blast the same message out to multiple networks is high with these platforms. If you do that regularly, you’re spamming the communities in which you don’t participate often.

However, there are ways to go about using these tools that protect you from being a spammer while also helping you communicate in multiple places with relevant messages. The biggest rule of thumb is to be sure to jump into Facebook and participate there when you can, don’t just auto post your Tweets there.

A new tool I really like is one called Minggl. This makes communicating on the big six (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg and Flickr) super easy by giving you a browser sidebar tool complete with tabs for notifications, an in box and people tabs. You can broadcast a message to all six (or any number) at once by checking a few boxes. Or you can filter messages by network and concentrate on one at a time. It also allows you to post Google Sidewiki-type annotations on pages your friends can see if they’re also using Minggl.

Just be sure you don’t blast to certain networks and forget to participate in them genuinely and you should be okay.

There are a number of other thoughts here. You need to monitor all of the social web to not miss out on conversational opportunities to defend or promote your brand. Google “social media monitoring” to find more articles on that. You’ll probably also want to learn to use RSS feeds to your advantage. But the three tips above can help you participate in social networks for yourself or your company in a more efficient manner.

I’m sure you have more ideas. Drop yours in the comments and help your fellow readers manage their social networks.

Now go download some funky techno tunes on ResonantVibes and have a great weekend.

IMAGE: By Doruk on Shutterstock.com. Used with permission.