Undeniably, the Internet era is in full swing and marketers evangelize the role of social media whenever the opportunity presents itself…which it often does, especially online, but the reality of it all is that most of us do just fine with the “business as usual” approach.

A staggering number of us don’t need to “join the conversation”, simply because a conversation relevant to us doesn’t exist. The reason is simple: Our businesses aren’t ‘big enough’ or ‘remarkable enough’ to matter to any significant groups of people. So we dismiss it, at least “for now”.

And that’s where we get it wrong. A conversation does exist. No, probably not about our brand, but an alarmingly huge group of real people do flock to social networking sites at a staggering rate every single day, literally spending hours communicating with one another. And here-in lies the peach: If a conversation about you or your brand does not exist online, why not initiate it?

Social media propagandists often points to the Internet as a platform where consumers run rampant, uncontrollably perpetuating damaging slurs about brands. And while these do exist, the larger part of the audience is really just in it for their friends and themselves.

And that’s the bottom line. Social media is not (just) about brand reputation management and damage control. It’s not only about connecting with clusters of consumers and hoarding new clients. It is about building a brand that actually means something to your customers. It’s about a lasting legacy that extends beyond the exchange of money and products. Real, measurable value that makes you, and your business, remarkable in the eyes and minds of the people that supports you.

Friendship and a sense of community is important to people. And social networks have provided us with a platform to sustain that in a more effective manner than before. As it happens, business and customer relations will reform around these values.

And that is what social media is all about.

While marketing- and internet trends move at lightning speed, I do feel that it’s important to slow down a bit and focus on the most important things businesses can do today to gain strides in marketing, requiring minimal budget.

Blogs continue to be highly rated, although of late, much less hyped. It has become a mainstream practice now. Where once the early adopters were marveling at the droves of traffic their blogs generated, the hype has flattened out, reinstating normality. Now it’s not as cool anymore to have blog, but rather accepted by the user that you would.

So let’s focus on 6 critical reasons I found why your blog is important and then if still thirsty for opinion, enjoy my 4 additional reasons.

1. To have meaningful social media impact, you must provide a critical mass of content that will position you and your organization as thought leaders within your market niche. Nothing works better than a blog to achieve that objective. The more content, the more findable by those customers you need to attract.

2. You can provide an unlimited amount of vital information in a single location. Because Web visitors are desperately seeking answers to their most pressing questions, you have the opportunity to provide just the right answers for your ideal target customers.

3. Content aside, the structure of a blog enables you to organize your information almost effortlessly to the benefit of your visitors.

4. Unlike other social media tools, such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, your blog is open to the entire world. This enables you to achieve potentially infinite reach for your critical mass of content.

5. You can be both timely and comprehensive. Although Twitter couldn’t be more timely, the information, opinions, and advice you tweet can never be comprehensive. Your blog can be just as timely as Twitter because you can post information instantaneously. But you can also make each post as comprehensive as necessary and integrate that post with lots of other relevant information on your blog.

6. Your blog posts, far from being isolated from other great tools such as Facebook and Twitter, can be automatically pulled into each one.

My 4 additional reasons:

7. Above being able to pull your blog content into your Facebook & Twitter account, you can also feed it to your e-mail branding. The more channels you use to distribute your content, the better the reach.

8. Blog content can and should be used to add credibility and opinion to your electronic newsletters.

9. Blogs are RSS capable, which simply means your content could be syndicated across multiple platforms.

10. It also means that people on the move can feed your content to their mobile phones. As mobile usage increases, the demand for content on the mobile phone will increase too.

Rather than keeping up with the current trends, trying in vain to understand, implement and execute with immediacy, you should rather try and focus on a single social media component first, do it well, and then move onto incorporating other.

I was one of the many that warned against social media, the manner and speed with which negative brand impressions can proliferate online. The online community, mostly moms of course, were outraged. They spoke of disrespect toward the truly humbling job of raising a child while pursuing a normal (professional) life. Pain is not funny.

Well here’s a pickle, it seems it is. Thanks to PR Squared, I’ve now found that (because of the outrage?) there was a Lightspeed research survey done and according to the results…not many people really seemed to care.

“(Almost) 90% of women had never seen the ad. Once they saw it, about 45% liked the video, 41% had no feelings about it, and 15% didn’t like it. Even fewer, 8%, said it negatively affected their feelings of the brand, compared with the 32% who said it made them like the brand more.”

Now I can think of at least 10 people (undoubtedly there are thousands) that would be grimacing gleefully at this piece of information and with a sarcastic hand on the shoulder share their “I told-you-so” sympathy shrug. I am after all making a living doing exactly this.

So now what? There are tons of these examples of social media gone bad floating around on the internet, but not many research surveys done to support any side of the matter. Do we take the Lightspeed survey as proof and go find a job selling insurance?

Well, no. I think it was Mike Stopforth who once said that if 10% of your target audience is online, then you should spend 10% of your marketing budget online. That to me also means that you should roughly spend 10% of your time managing your online profile (or brand as we call it these days). If 90% of the people then react negatively to your online campaigns, then it simply equates to 9% of your total brand audience (I think. You do the math). Handle the issue quickly and efficiently and move on.

The trouble with this is the following:

1. Few companies employ the (right) tools to quickly and efficiently monitor their online presence.
2. Many companies have no clue who their target audience really is and therefore simply cannot measure their online brand equity.
3. There are too many “jack of all trades” net experts making very fast bucks by doing way too much of the wrong work. Get someone willing to assess your business before he launches his sales pitch.
4. Companies get stuck on the idea of using external channels (other websites, Google etc) to market from when they have a perfectly viable, personal and loyal communications (pdf) channel they could target.

When it comes to online it seems there are no set rules, people abuse their newfound status as content creators and thought leaders and you can very easily be sucked into a digital mud slinging when you could well have spent your time more constructively.

From the Church of the Customer Blog:
“Amazon recently deleted the sales rankings of hundreds of gay- and lesbian-themed books. Writer Mark Probst blogged about the de-ranking and was told by an Amazon representative that the company will no longer include sales ranks for “adult” material on the site.”

Word soon spread across the Twitterverse (Don’t you just find these Twitterisms annoying?) and virtually within hours a global online community sang in unison: It is time to teach the big guns a lesson.

Probst’s blog post was dated Sunday, April 12 at 2:08 am. In 24 hours, here’s a quick look at how things developed:

Twitter: Users begin using the hashtag #AmazonFAIL. It was the number-one trending topic on Twitter search all day. After an Amazon spokesperson told CNET news that the de-ranking was “a glitch in our system and is being fixed,” Twitterers responded with a new hashtag: #glitchmyass.

Blogs: Over 5000 15 000 blog posts about the news. It was the top story on the widely read Techmeme.
Facebook. The AmazonFail Group launched, quickly gathering 1,200 3700 members out of the gate.
Online petitions.

Online petitions sprang up protesting the “adult” policy. One gathered more than 9,000 25 663 signatures in a few hours’ time.

Google bomb: A blogger launched a campaign to redefine “Amazon rank” on Google. It’s working. This page is #2 in the search rankings.

Hacking: Protesters started tagging the de-ranked books on Amazon site with #AmazonFAIL. At last count, 882 1500 books were tagged.

Logos: People created logos for the protest.

Merchandise: #glitchmyass boxer shorts, t-shirts and other apparel are for sale!

Complaint templates: Customers wanting to complain and who need writing help can use this pre-crafted complaint letter.

Boycotts: Customers on Twitter and blogs are talking boycott.

Over 335 885 mainstream media articles related to this story, including Wall Street Journal, Wired, and NPR.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says that the “cataloging error” was the result of a single Amazon employee in France who flipped the wrong switch, causing over 50,000 books to be flagged as “adult.” This is according to an anonymous source inside the company.

But Amazon’s customers are having none of it. It’s not difficult to see why so many businesses long back to the days before the internet considering that an alleged “mistake” could get you punished in a very unceremonious and indeed costly manner.

It also seems rather time consuming to go to these sort of lengths to have your voice heard, doesn’t it? Just when did the human become so annoyingly spiteful? I’ll tell you when…

When the opportunity arose to jump on a bandwagon. There’s a smarter saying for that: “Monkey see, monkey do.” Unfortunately, as always, word of mouth carries exceptional credibility. Only these days, one idiot’s opinion has the ability to reach so many more idiots on such a frequent basis that it has become critical to keep an eye on them.

So when was the last time you had a look at the conversations around your brand?

It is actually so common that bloggers often create new articles by linking various other bloggers’ opinions and predictions of the New Year into a single article of their own to either support his predictions or rubbish the predictions of others who are in disagreement. (Mouthful, isn’t it?)

The reason for this is simple: it creates the perfect platform three months down the line for when their own ideas start drying up (commonly known as writer’s blog) to publish a number of “I-told-you-so” articles.

I didn’t do that this year. Not because I’m clever, arrogant, special or different, but simply because I’m mostly still enjoying my holidays back then and only by the time people start debating the various predictions I come out of hibernation and start getting into gear for the New Year. I’m a bit slow that way – it prevents midyear burnout

So now that the dust has settled, let’s go and have a look at some of the predictions that were made for the year of 2009.

People in the know reckon:

1. …crowd sourcing will be huge in 2009!
Crowd sourcing is pretty much when you throw an idea into the public and the masses then come up with a solution. In business terms, it is quite an effective and cheap way to garner the best strategies. We have seen some good examples of this locally too.
2. …leveraging offline connections with online will be big too.
Yes, it does make sense. In 2006 and 2007 online were still in its infancy and tried its best to establish itself as a channel able to hold its own. Of course we’ve all grown up and became a little bit smarter and realized that it is convergence that is key.
3. …mobile, and the dreaded iPhone, will continue to make massive strides in user numbers and application growth.
It has taken developers eight months since the launch of the iPhone to create more applications for the iPhone than for any other phone in history (roughly 9 years). With super phones being released left, right and centre, we really did see that coming.
4. …video driven communities will take off in 2009.
Quite frankly, video has been huge in the US pretty much the whole of 2008 already, but from personal experience I have witnessed a dramatic increase in intent locally. We also do have a number of players doing a sterling job with hosting, but I fear we have yet to see the creativity of a Gary Vaynerchuk who has made wine video his own. (If you know of any, please post a link in the comments section below)
5. …monetization will aim to alleviate some pressing headaches that have been clouding the sensational rise of social media will stop companies such as five-year all Facebook and the titillating Twitter.
These companies have enormous valuations and have all enjoyed a couple of rounds of multi-million-dollar investments. Sooner or later someone will probably want to see a return on investment.
6. …e-mail as we know it will die!
Nah, just kidding. In 2009 we will send more e-mails, waste more time working through spam and see more dough drop on the floor because of that. Technology companies will however find more meaningful ways to utilize e-mail to deliver critical communications and permission-based marketing messages to its recipient base.

It is time, if you haven’t already, to figure out what the role of these predictions is inside of your business.

If you’re a social network, how will you go about securing revenue?

If you’re a regular run-of-the-mill business, how will you leverage social media to gain the competitive advantage in a very crowded and opinionated market?

So what is it then? Let’s see…I’d say about 235 342 followers on Twitter (now on 277 509), 458 412 views on your own personal Internet video channel, 5,102,468 views on someone else’s video channel (huh???), 66 567 subscribers to your Youtube channel, the maximum allowed amount of 5000 friends on Facebook and a modest 49 568 friends on MySpace.

Add to that a profile on Wikipedia, a couple of hundred thousand views on revver.com, another couple of hundred thousand views on vimeo.com, thousands of friends / subscribers / stalkers / perverts on social network sites I’ve never even heard of, a couple of fan sites dedicated to you and finally, 1 020 000 search results on Google for your name. Statement not that bold anymore, now is it? (Of course, having a pretty face and being a bit loony helps too)

Thing is, if you don’t know Justine Ezarik, aka iJustine aka iJ, you probably don’t know all that much about the internet. Her famous signature “I am the Internet” is now about as popular as the video clip that catapulted her into stardom…and into the hearts of Steve Jobs and the entire Apple fraternity.

You see, during the launch of the biggest publicity sensation ever, the Apple iPhone, iJustine produced a single 1 minute video when she received her first (itemized) AT&T mobile phone bill. All 300 pages of it (Yes, there’s a Wikipedia page for this). The viral video earned her international attention and celebrity. The bad publicity (because she cleverly added an environmental twist to it) that AT&T earned as a result of her video featuring her reviewing the bill and similar stories coincided with the announcement that detailed billing would become optional for iPhone users.

The 300 page iPhone bill video (covered by Forbes among other) had been viewed more than 3 million times on the Internet a mere ten days after it was published, so it is obvious why iJustine never took the time to look back after that (and why Steve Jobs probably dreams about her at night). These days, capturing a video of iJ wanting to order a cheeseburger accumulates 600 000 views on Youtube in a week. Seriously… (Currently on 1 228 286 views)

So, from a business perspective, you may deem all this information entirely useless. Well, except for the fact that she’s very easy on the eyes and if you’re a male, there’s plenty of her all over the internet. (Not business related? Fine…)

Well, there’s just one more thing. iJustine has a borderline obsession with Apple, owner Steve Jobs and anything Mac in between…except for MacDonalds I think. In fact, a Google search for “iJustine” and “iPhone” returns a mammoth 156 000 search results and a search for “iJustine” and “Apple” returns close to 100 000. Actually, her videos are about Apple so often that many people rightly wonder just how much ol’ Steve forks out on this chick. Of course, iJ denies pocketing a cent.

So, in business terms imagine you had someone that cares so much about your brand willing to go to these sorts of lengths to promote your products and services, just because she likes too…for free apparently.

She’s out there methinks.