I had the pleasure of contributing content to an excellent report released yesterday by email/direct marketing company, ExactTarget. The report is called Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Social Media. Here is the breakdown:

You know social media is a big deal and that you brand should be engaged. But you still find yourself questioning how to monetize social media and where it fits with your other marketing activities. Sound familiar? Here is what is covered:

1. The importance of planning and implementing a social media strategy

2. How to build stronger customer relationships using social media outlets
3. Operationalization of social media marketing and how it directly impacts your bottom line
4. The value of social media testing and optimization efforts

I was joined by eleven other consultants in the report. Please check out their sites and join in the conversation:

Jay Baer – Convince and Convert

David Baker – Razorfish

Sergio Balegno - MarketingSherpa

Olivier Blanchard – The Brand Builder

Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer

Ann Handley – MarketingProfs

Joseph Jaffe - Powered/Flip the Funnel

Valeria Maltoni – Conversation Agent

Shelly Palmer - Advanced Media Ventures Group

Trey Pennington – Spitball Marketing

Jeffrey K. Rohrs – ExactTarget

It is all about navigating through the wonderful world of social media. If you would like to download the report please click the follow link and enjoy > Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Social Media.

– Caity Kauffman is a 20-year-old, social media-obsessed journalism student dabbling in sports writing, news writing and broadcast. Follow her on twitter at @caitykauffman.

As technology is filtering down to younger and younger generations (I have a friend who gave his three-year-old niece his iPhone when he upgraded to the 3G. No joke.) there is a rise in the concern of its effects on the developing brain.

Being born in the late-1980s, I’m the first generation to literally grow up in a digital world. Somewhere in the depths of a scrapbook, there’s baby picture of me poking away at an IBM computer the size of mini-fridge. When I was 10-years-old, my parents gave me my first desktop Gateway. I filmed and digitally edited my 13th birthday party, and the same year I got my first cell phone – a silver Motorola flip phone the size of a brick. I don’t have veins, I have wires.

Question is: is the digital world helping the Internet generation utilize our brains, or are we just distracting it with multitasking overload?

There are times, I’ll admit, my digital savvy has been more distracting than productive. I’ve fiddled away hours clicking through Facebook statuses or played mindless hours of Guitar Hero until my thumb nearly cracks off.

Last week, my honors reading class at Florida Gulf Coast University discussed of Don Tapscott’s “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World.” Our class of seven (plus one journalism professor to keep us on track) seemed to all agree that the baby boomers’ implications that NetGen-ers lack concentration, productivity and retain less information aren’t all true.

Tapscott wrote about interactive technology, and how regularly playing an action video game can change how the brain processes information.

John, an outspoken, bearded philosophy major can vouch for video games, using Halo as an example. “You notice your radar, how much ammo you have, where your teammates are, how much life you have left all while you’re having a conversation with your team on a headset,” he says.  “We are able to instantly compartmentalize every aspect of the game.”

I guess it’s no surprise teenage boys lock themselves into their bedrooms for hours at a time, committing virtual massacres inside their TV screen: there’s a hell of a lot to process simultaneously.

Audrey, a soft spoken 21-year-old from Malaysia, takes multitasking to an entirely new realm. She says in order to concentrate, she listens to Chinese music (one of four languages she speaks) as she reads her textbooks that are written in English, writes her blog in English all while switching back and forth from Facebook.

She does admit the the United States’ reliance on technology has made her a little lazy since moving to the states to attend college. “I grew up in Malaysia, and we had to memorize a lot,” she says. “Here, we copy and paste. I think it has to do with culture.”

But why memorize when we carry around Google on our iPhones?

As much as my generation is reliant on our BlackBerrys to help us find the nearest coffee shop, I think it has to be more with efficiency than laziness. The world moves faster than ever, and there’s an increasing urgency for productivity. If Merriam-Webster says “google” is a legitimate verb, then Google I will.

We are proud to announce three new seminars for the month of April. Check out the follow below

APRIL 7th – Twitter 101 : The Power Behind the Bird

This the beginning. Learn from the author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies on how to fully maximize Twitter to create customer relationships that will actually… last.
We will be breaking down the common uses of Twitter as well as the following points:

• The Twitter Basics
• Setting up and maximizing your profile
• The importance of re-tweeting
• Sharing content that matters
• Time productivity tools Is quantity better than quality?
• Using Twitter to grow your business
• The secrets to maximizing Twitter search
• And much.. much.. much.. more!

This seminar is for both the beginner and the intermediate user.

APRIL 14th – Building Your Personal Brand Through Social Media

Your personal brand is what sells your product. We are all building personal relationships and our networks to strive to be better professionals. Are you doing the most to make your online brand impressive and true? Your personal brand drives everything in life.

This seminar will show you the top ten ways to use social media to build your personal brand. You will learn how to improve your online persona when communicating to others. As a business owner, it’s essential for you to demonstrate your knowledge. Your knowledge builds trust – and the best place to start is with your own personal brand.

• How to create your “story”
• What to do if people are talking about you (good or bad)
• Creating a leveraging a blog
• How to leverage LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
• The “Six Ps” for improving your online brand
• The Must Do’s and Dont’s to building your personal brand

APRIL 21st – Creating a Social Media Policy for Your Employees

It is probably not a secret that social media is scaring the CRAP out of your company. Do you have a policy in place to teach your employees the right and wrong ways to use social media? Have you offered training to help ease the change into the new world of communication?

In Building a Social Media Policy for Your Company, we examine how to draft a companywide policy to share with your employees on what they can and can not do on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. You will be taught exactly what should be in a social media policy, update your knowledge on the perils of social media for your company, and be able to discuss the topic with key executives at your company.

We will also be emailing you a social media policy in Microsoft Word to help in your editing process.

There are random times throughout my life where I have the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Baggott. Chris is co-founder of ExactTarget and now co-founder and CEO of Compendium Blogware. Our meetings always consist with some type of beverage and spirited discussion around the world of direct/internet marketing. Yesterday, we were talking about the future of online marketing and where social media, email, blogging, podcasting, search and mobile fit into the discussion. After arguing about a few things here and there we came to the conclusion that everything is about content. Now, it does matter what type of tools you use and how you use them… but that more important thing in marketing is about creating content that moves.

Chris made the comment:

Above all, it is about taking your story… your company stories… your client stories… your employee stories… and humanizing content. It is about telling your story to improve search and the sharing of the content. Simply put… get other people to tell the story for you.

This is a conversation that happens (quite a bit) on this blog. I say it all the time… I don’t care about your clients. I care about their friends. Your clients are already your friends! Leave customer service and client retention programs to keep them in the loop.

Create content and marketing strategies that encourage your clients to talk to their friends.

Because the truth of the matter is…

The only people who can truly humanize your content are the people you have already served. They are also the only people (and marketing voice) that will cause potential clients to act… and buy.

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Peter Preksto is a co-founder of image-recognition company Alta Data Solutions, Inc.

My business is pretty esoteric–we scrape petrified information off of paper or microfiche at super high speed and make it machine readable, useful for lawsuits and electronic benefits claims, among other things. Our customers are a relatively small number of service bureaus that process billions of such documents per year. I hadn’t thought of my use of social media as a marketing tool because we’re not really expecting to grow through word of mouth but by providing more functionality and speed at a lower cost to those who care about such things. My peers are in their 50’s and 60’s. Most of us started on mainframes, helped invent document-processing technology on intervening platforms, and have ended up in the cloud. In 1983, we first started inter-office chatting to each other using a utility in Novell Netware, and we mostly haven’t shut up online since. Twitter ultimately didn’t pass muster except as a novelty, but Facebook was a natural adoption. We tend to clamp our privacy down perhaps more than our younger colleagues, but we’re using and like the service a lot.

I’ve long believed that you cannot conceal who you really are if you use Facebook regularly–people can really get your number by looking through your books, music, quotations, links, videos, smart-ass remarks, notes of sympathy, whatever. In this big country, you stay closer to friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, and folks who you might otherwise have let drift (and a few who have come drifting back against the tide). If you work it, you stand exposed.

A couple days ago, I was friended by a really important business colleague, president of one of the big service bureaus whom we serve. While we don’t need to network to grow, if you screw up in our small community, it has a big impact. He joked on the phone about my Facebook content, saying it was really “out there,” lots of “personality,” very “young at heart.” I froze. At that moment, I realized the double-edge sword of Facebook. Even if you practice a policy of avoiding writing about politics, religion, creationism, diet, immunization and handguns (and boy don’t we all have opinions we’d love to share on those!), you still stand exposed–in a way even Rotary didn’t do to you in the old style of networking.

I seriously considered un-friending all of my business colleagues and leaving it strictly social and family. Fortunately, I probed the guy a few days later, joked about his comments, and found out that I had it backwards–what he saw, he liked, and it brought us closer together–Facebook shortened the learning curve he would have climbed to learn who he’s dealing with.

A life on Facebook is no place to hide. So maybe letting whoever the heck it is that you’ve turned out to be shine through that medium might be good for business–even if you’re not using it exactly as the pros would suggest for viral growth.

Speaking of pros, many thanks and much respect to Kyle Lacy and Brandon Coon for the company they’re building, and thanks for sharing so generously their insights and experience in their blogs.

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My day job is to manage communications for a tiny program in a tiny non-profit. For those of you familiar with the non-profit world, you read into that exactly what I meant to imply—small budget. In my experience with corporate and private sector communications, it’s not unrealistic to expect a budget of several thousands of dollars per project. If you work for a non-profit, you’re lucky to get that much for all of your communications projects for an entire year.
If I was being honest, I like the challenge. Every day I am tasked with effectively communicating important messages both internally and to the masses in a way that is engaging, exciting, and essentially, well, free.

This is why I am shocked at how few non-profits are utilizing social media. When it comes to my organization, I’m not updating Twitter and Facebook daily—but hourly. We also have a blog and are putting time and a portion of our budget into redeveloping a website. Has it been effective for us? Absolutely. And better yet—it completely fits my budget.

Since beefing up our project’s web presence, there has been an increase in clients, public awareness, and media interaction. In an organization that grows by reputation, typically an increase in one or more of those categories yields something: A BIGGER increase in clients, public awareness, and media interaction.
Even though non-profits are organizations not all of them are always organized. Utilizing the web has also helped me streamline messaging and collateral. Because my project is so tied into Colorado’s non-profit network, it’s important that I can easily send messages and materials to other partners, sponsors, funders, etc.
And let’s face it: Not only are non-profits not organized, they can also be living in the dark ages. Still, current and potential funders love to see new, innovative systems in place that will effectively maximize the dollars they’re granting. I’m pretty sure we all want happy funders.

Here’s the other thing that all those groups are seeing: the same thing. Regardless of the medium, an online presence allows you to create a voice, or a brand, that can be communicated consistently to a broader group through different resources. Constituents reading our blog might not follow us on Twitter, but they’re receiving the same messages overall. And I bet they like choosing how they receive those messages.

So, to recap, I have found a way to effectively streamline messaging, brand the project, and communicate to the public, the media, internal groups, statewide partners, and current and potential funders for free.

Did you get that?

Therefore, non-profit or not, my question to you is, “Are you utilizing social media to further your company’s mission?” If the answer to that question is no, I have to ask, “WHY NOT?”

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I had a great time over at Monarch Beverage yesterday with a ton of different breweries and individuals in the alcohol industry. We were talking about social media… plain and simple. How does the alcohol industry utilize social media to drive interaction as well as purchases… or foot traffic?

Our main focus throughout the entire presentation was focusing on the story. I read an excerpt from Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in A Thousand Years:

If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.

I know that is sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to you as a business owner but the truth of the matter is simply this… you have to tell a story to gain the attention of any individual on the face of the planet. You have to tell a story worth reading and more importantly… worth sharing.

Before you venture out into the world of social media… plan your story.

Here is the presentation:

We finished up our Increasing Donations through Social Media seminar yesterday and it was great to meet individuals from the not-for-profit world in Indianapolis. We had some awesome conversations surrounding the idea of telling YOUR story to the world… the story that drives emotion through each and every donor. I wanted to upload the Powerpoint presentation I used yesterday and give a couple of pointers on increasing donations through social media.

5 Ways to Increase Donations through Social Media

1. Message Boards. Create a message board or central location for your supporters and their friends to communicate with each other and your organization. For a great example check out the Lupus Foundation of America’s message boards. It is so important to create a comfortable place for your supporters to chat. It is up to your supporters to decide where they want to host the conversation. If it ends up on Facebook then… it ends up on Facebook.

2. Start a Blog and Communicate. This really should be number one on your priority list. You should be writing your story… every second of every day. You do not need to be sitting down and typing out each story but (at the very least) you should be thinking about how to form the story of your organization. People buy into stories… period. For a great example of story telling check out the organization > Charity + Water.

3. Start an Affiliate Group on Facebook and LinkedIn. Create groups of Facebook and LinkedIn that connect your supporters to each other in activities outside of your organization. An example of an affiliate group would be a Facebook Fan Page for your local youth soccer league or a LinkedIn group for your local Kiwanis club. Why does this matter? You are creating touch points with an audience that is not expecting you (the organization) to be at that place…. at that moment.

4. Start a Facebook Cause and Encourage Supporters to Join and Share!

5. Use Your Email List to Drive Growth on Social Networks. Every supporter who has given you permission to market to them through email… could still be utilized to support your cause on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Search for your email subscribers in the social networking world… the chance is… they are using the same email to support their social networks. The more times you can connect with a prospect or supporter… the better.

I came to a conclusion about lead generation and customer service while I was reading through “The State of Small Business Report” from Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business. The report focuses on the development of small business and a section of the report talked about social media adoption. Social media adoption has actually doubled for small business over 2009 from 12% to 24%. However, that is not the interesting stat.

Based on the performance of Social Media image to the left it was rare when social media actually met the expectations of the business owner. This could be chalked up to higher expectations but there is an interesting dynamic that I recognized in the stats. The one stat that actually received higher than expected results was the collaborating more externally with vendors and customers.

This further supports thoughts I have had with Jason Baer and Brandon Prebynski... we talked about the concept of people laughing about social media being used for lead generation. The true value of social media is ingrained in communication through stories and customer service. We are talking about a communication medium where sharing, customer retention, and customer communication are absolutely… positively… king.

This also supports the concept of enterprise systems developing more social capabilities in the software helping corporate cultures market and communicate. Every facet of customer communication needs to be looking towards social as another way to speak values across a subset of people.

It is hard to imagine a world where every social media consultant is NOT talking about lead generation. However, we may be experiencing another shift in the way we look at social media.

By the way… small business is still increasing spending in social media. Let the games begin.

Christen Wegner is a former journalist turned resident Gen Yer on the communications team at Intuit. When not on Twitter, she is usually texting, on Facebook, or writing for various blogs like Small Business United and TurboTax.

One of the hottest topics for any business, from the small to the large is social. So my first thought when Kyle Lacy sent me a tweet asking me to write a guest blog post I was like “Oh cool, Intuit is doing so much, yay, let’s share.”

So I started collecting info regarding all out campaigns, events, and information and started sharing that with friends and family. But what floored me was what I would find out after talking with a couple former coworkers. Companies are actually still banning their employees from social media – things like Facebook, Twitter, and gasp, personal blogs.

I guess I live in a little bubble and take for granted the fact that at Intuit, we are trusted that we will do what is right as THE voice of Intuit on social channels. And without those social channels there is no way Intuit could have done anything fun, interesting or relevant to what small businesses want and need.

One of those conversations was with a former colleague who told me her company has just blocked Facebook and MySpace from their computers stating employees were “wasting too much time on the social networks.” Of course, her IT department didn’t account for the mobile applications and now employees are frequently seen gripping their Blackberry’s and iPhones.

Thriving with social

When I joined Intuit, social media wasn’t new but it was this undiscovered territory. We were trying to find the right balance between keeping our employees happy and keeping them productive. Happily three years later I can sit here, write this article, have TweetDeck running in the background, and occasionally check out Facebook.

In fact, Intuit encourages employees to do just that. We have employees who train customer service reps, engineers and developers how to start interacting in such social channels. On our Intuit Community dozens of different employees interact every day answering questions, solving problems and simply act as a sounding board for our customers. And what is even better is the Community is where customers go to talk to other customers as well.

And our Small Business team was one of the first teams at Intuit on Twitter. Today we have more than 50 teams and individuals out there. What they learned early on meant a change in strategy for Intuit and insights into how we can help small businesses succeed.

Much of that success led to a desire for other social networking events like town halls, small business events, and a blog where regular experts discuss their tips and tricks (http://smallbusiness.intuit.com/blog/). All of this to help small businesses succeed in business and thrive in the social realm.

Over the last eight months we have managed the Love a Local Business Campaign in which Intuit is putting small businesses on the map. The idea is that fans, including customers, vendors, employees, and the community, determine what small businesses deserve some love with winners receiving small business grants.

That’s right, free money for doing what these small business do every day – take care of their customers and being social.

A big part of our strategy reflects a changing world where people and businesses are increasingly connected. We want to arm all small businesses and employees with tools , ways to listen, and create strong customer engagement as one small business community.

I don’t think any of this could have been done without access to our social channels. So thanks Intuit for letting me and my team stay relevant. And the hope is that our work helps small businesses stay relevant as well.