About 230 packed the conference at the Holiday Inn, including reps from Bank of America, Duke Energy and Piedmont Natural Gas. Walmart sent three from its Arkansas headquarters.

Keynote speaker David Armano told a spillover crowd that businesses on social media today are like teenagers experimenting with sex: They don’t know what to do, but they really want to do it. Then they’re disappointed when they finally get to do it.

Armano is with Dachis Corp., a new social media consulting firm in Texas founded with $50 million in venture capital. He closed his talk by telling businesses to look beyond this teenage phase.

“It’s time to grow up,” Armano said. “Social media is here to stay. In five to 10 years we won’t even be talking about this stuff.”

He compared the change happening now to when e-mail became commonplace.

He cited Best Buy’s use of social media to allow sales employees to share expertise and best serve customers in all of its stores. So if a customer in one state has a question about a computer modem, a sales rep in another can help. Representatives from utilities Duke and Piedmont said they are looking at using social media for a variety of customer service needs rather than just alerting them in emergencies.

Charlotte’s Kathleen Hessert – famous for teaching Shaquille O’Neal to tweet – told a crowd that knowing how to post on social media and knowing the right way to represent your company are two entirely different things. Social media have boomed, and many businesses must play catch up, she said. “It took 50 years for TV to build the audience social media has in five,” said Hessert, who runs the consulting firm Sports Media Challenge from her six-person office at N.C. 51 and Carmel Road.

Bank of America vice president Sidney Echevarria, one of several BofA managers at the conference, said he believes social media can help in “flattening the organization,” so expertise can be shared throughout. Many people know how to use Twitter and Facebook personally, but using them within an organization requires new strategies, he said.

Jason Keath, who organized the conference, plans a follow-up event in Charlotte, and is planning events in Nashville and St. Louis.

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A recent survey of 172 marketeers found that 66 percent of respondents were utilizing social media in 2009, up from 20 percent in 2007, according to the New York-based Association of National Advertisers, which conducted the survey with BtoB Magazine and mktg., a marketing communications firm.

While the numbers keep growing, it’s important for companies to understand how to effectively optimize social media platforms and avoid some of the more common mistakes in order to best maximize their online branding efforts, experts say.

“It isn’t enough just to have an account,” explains Denise Wakeman of DeniseWakeman.com, a Los Angeles-based online marketing/blogging consultancy.

“The key is participation.”

If you’re not interacting and communicating with your audience, then you’re wasting your time, she notes.

With that said, here are a few social media marketing mistakes to avoid if you want to make the greatest impact:

INCONSISTENCY: If you commit to a social network, then stay visible to your audience by regularly tweeting, updating your Facebook page, etc., says Debbie Weil, a Washington, D.C.-based corporate social media consultant and author of “The Corporate Blogging Book” (Portfolio; $23.95). If you’re not consistently providing useful and/or relevant information to your audience, they’ll lose interest, she says.

BEING TOO ELUSIVE: Make sure when people go to your social networking page they see more than just a company logo. Attach a name and a face to your profile/description, Weil says. “Be a person,” she says, noting that even cable giant Comcast ties a face to its Twitter site, @comcastcares, by posting a photo and contact information for its twitterer-customer service manager, Frank Eliason.

BEING TOO SELF-PROMOTIONAL: Too often, companies use social networking sites to just tout themselves, says Hilary Topper, author of “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Social Media, But Were Afraid To Ask” (iUniverse; $27.95) and president of HJMT Communications, a public relations and social media firm in Westbury. It’s OK to promote your company, but it shouldn’t be the main focus, Topper says. “If I tweet five times a day, one in five might be promotional,” she says.
connections

* Facebook Inc. Facebook Inc.
* National Collegiate Athletic Association National Collegiate Athletic Association
* Google Inc. Google Inc.
* LiveJournal
* John Quincy Adams John Quincy Adams

MAKING IT ALL ABOUT BUSINESS: You’re trying to use social media to create conversations and relationships, so don’t be afraid to get a bit personal, Topper says. “There’s a balance,” she notes, adding that there’s nothing wrong with showing your human side with some personal posts.

FAILING TO ENGAGE: Spark conversations by posting relevant links, articles, commenting on other people’s sites, etc., recommends Arthur Germain of Communication Strategy Group, an East Northport-based brand marketing agency. “Listen to your prospects and customers and have a conversation,” he says. Posting photos can be a great way to engage your audience, too. The Inn At Fox Hollow understands this and has a photo gallery on its Facebook page, as well as links back to photos on its main Web site through specials it posts on Twitter. The Woodbury hotel launched a new Web site last year and also has a blog, general manager Franklin Manchester says.

COLLECTING FOLLOWERS & “FRIENDS”:Some businesses base their success on the number of friends or followers they have in their social networks, Germain says. It’s less about numbers than about trying to build a relevant community and having good conversations with people, he says.

HAVING NO BLOG: A blog can be a great place to direct social media traffic since it’s more conversational than a corporate site. “Your blog is your home base,” Wakeman says.

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The hyperbole (and the frenzied buzz it creates) is confusing and many businesses could use a practical guide on how to evaluate social media and how to engage – if it’s appropriate.

It’s amusing to think that “Word of Mouth” marketing (which, essentially, is what Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are) is a new phenomenon. Back in the day of low technology and small town America, the only way to pass information was by word of mouth. Neighbors depended on each other for news, including, one can imagine, new products on sale at the local market.

Social communication by “word of mouth” is a fundamental human characteristic and taking advantage of that is fundamental to all marketing because (let’s face it) consumer to consumer (C2C) communication is free.

So the first benefit of using social media in your marketing efforts (and the first thing to keep in mind) is that social media systems are designed to facilitate person-to-person communication, as opposed to traditional media and most first generation web efforts, which are predominately one-way communication.

Social media marketing enables businesses to hear from their customers, observe interaction between customers, enhance trust and build credibility by expanding beyond traditional marketing messages and participate in “communities” with customers.

Small town inhabitants are similar people. Their word of mouth communication is effective for marketers precisely because they have similar tastes and share those tastes with each other. (Usually.)

In other words, they belong to the same market segment.

Market segments are a widely misunderstood concept, frequently equated with verticals, as in “my market segment is the health care industry;” or shared pain (“I am targeting those companies who suffer from email spam”) or a buyer profile (“I am going after college-age kids.”) These criteria may be necessary for a segment, but do not comprise a segment.

Market segments are comprised of like people, who share a common interest, who look to one another as a trusted reference and who have access to each other. If customer in California is just the same as a customer in New York, but they have no means to communicate, they are in separate segments. Your marketing and sales efforts will be developed to reach both geographies.

From a marketing perspective, one of the primary benefits of technological advances has been simplifying communication between like buyers, thereby expanding the reach of market segments. TV, radio, telephone and the Internet have all provided this benefit.

And so it is with social media. Since dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS) first appeared in the late 1970s, users have been “going online” to share common interests.

While early BBS’s were geography-based, today’s descendants, Internet forums, are typically concentrated around a specific hobby or topic independent of geography. Businesses who sell products within these niche markets have long known about these sites, and where welcome, have helped sustain them through advertising dollars.

With North American Internet usage now at 74 percent of the population and the recent proliferation of super-social sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, social media has gone mainstream. A broad spectrum of users participates in some Internet social networking activity.

So the second primary benefit of social media is that it can provide a captured audience of customers in your particular target segment.

There are myriad ways of participating in the social media marketing phenomenon. So how can you determine if you should participate and if so, how?

Current activity -First, you should be actively monitoring your brand. Are people talking about you online? Software products exist designed specifically to help you track company and product branding and PR firms often offer this as a service. Minimally, set up Google Alerts to track mentions.

Does online behavior influence purchasing? -Some of your customers may participate in social networking, but their activity may have nothing to do with your product. Tread carefully so as to not intrude on their purpose of participation. (For example, you may wish to advertise on Facebook since you know your customers visit the site, but whether or not to invite them to your fan page requires a more nuanced decision.)

Which social media venues? -As with most things marketing, the answers are with your customers. Where will you find them online? Who influences their buying decisions? Would they find company provided social tools such as online feedback, feature request voting or peer supported forums valuable? Would a company blog enhance credibility, increase trust or loyalty?

Rules of Engagement -Since by and large, consumer participants in online communities determine the rules of engagement for businesses, it’s important that you follow the rules. Your social media activities should not be advertising per se, but rather your participation should provide value to the community. In other words, as a business participant, you are there to share knowledge and expertise to the benefit of the consumer. This is true, by the way, even when you have developed the community.

Social media marketing can be a boon to your company, giving you insight into customers and letting you interact with them in a way few other marketing channels do. Just remember it’s a different world with different rules – and it’s best to be crystal clear on those before you jump in.

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People sometimes criticize the Internet as a colossal time waster. But it also has a role in releasing people’s creative and social energies, as a new report from Forrester Research points out.

Nearly a quarter of American adults who use the Internet are “creators,” Forrester says, which means that they “write blogs, upload original audio or video, or post stories online.”

On the social side, “half of online adults now belong to social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, a 46 percent growth rate year-over-year,” Forrester says. It attributes this to friends’ encouragement (in other words, peer pressure?) and to news coverage.

Most growth in social networking is occurring among adults 35 and older, Forrester says. Four of five adults of all ages now use social media, including blogs, social networks and review sites, in some form at least monthly; half visit social networking sites. Time waster or not, social media are a phenomenon that is now nearly impossible to ignore.

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Tax evaders looking to dodge hefty bills from Uncle Sam may want to think twice about posting personal information on the Internet, especially social websites where some of the information is out in the open. According to the Wall Street Journal, state revenue agents are mining websites such as Facebook and MySpace for information leading to tax evaders.

The WSJ describes several scenarios used by the government: one deejay in Nebraska said on his MySpace page that he was working at a big public party, and now must shell out $2,000. A tax evader from Minnesota announced on his MySpace page that he would be returning to the state as a real-estate broker– even provided the employer’s name–and was caught by authorities and forced to pay thousands.

Typically searches for tax evaders begin with examinations of bank, employment, tax, and motor-vehicle records, the WSJ reports. When the evader isn’t found using that method, tax collectors head online and search for the culprits on Google. If the search isn’t productive, they head to Facebook, MySpace and other social networks and chat rooms.

Not to worry: not all state tax departments are trolling social websites… at least, not yet. Many state tax authorities actually block social sites on workplace computers to keep employees off Facebook and MySpace during working hours. Jim Eads, director of the Federation of Tax Administrators, said that may eventually change.

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There’s a few other aspects of internet privacy you may want to take into account, however, and we’ll try and push you in the right direction.

Consider the quote above. Days later, after posting that quote on his Facebook page (and after he removed it, as well), Dan Leone was fired from his position that he held with the Eagles organization for six years. It’s just one of many stories floating around on the Internet involving employees getting firec for their online activities, and it bears repeating.

The anonymity the internet provides and the lack of understanding some people have with various social networking sites can give people the feeling that they can say or do anything. After all, it’s online, it’s not real life.

How can it possibly hurt me? Well, Dan Leone found out the hard way. With more and more people getting online, posting a message on your Facebook or Twitter has become less sending an email to your friends saying “my employer sucks” (although, that’s a bad idea, too) and more standing in front of their offices with a megaphone and saying the same thing.

It’s not just posting offending Facebook statuses towards your employer that’s a bad idea. Employers are actually actively looking at their employees’ social media pages and checking up on them. Sometimes, people save their employers the trouble. Sometimes, you don’t do anything incriminating, but your blogging can cause a conflict of interest at work, like it did with PittGirl.

Let’s also not forget the personal side of this whole thing. It’s one thing to have your boss see your drunken antic pictures on Facebook. How about having your mom or grandma see it?

Which brings me to a good rule of thumb. Before posting anything – anything – online under your own name, you should ask yourself: “How would this affect me if my coworkers or family saw this? Granted, it’s kind of like the old rule of thumb don’t do anything that would make your mother cry (although if I followed that rule, I’d never leave the house except to go to work).

(Just kidding, mom.)

The internet isn’t the Electronic Wild West it used to be – more and more companies are becoming web savvy, not only using the internet to promote their business, but also to communicate with and weed out potential and existing employees. With that in mind, here’s some suggestions.

Learn How To Use The Privacy Settings on Facebook and MySpace.

This is especially important once Facebook implements their Twitter-style real-time search of status updates. This is a great article on different privacy settings available on Facebook, and there’s one about MySpace as well. It’s not going to be 100% foolproof, but it can reduce your chances of someone seeing your posts when you don’t want them to.

Just keep in mind that it might not be 100% possible to keep someone who you haven’t “friended” from seeing what you’ve put on Facebook.

LiveJournal Is An Interesting Alternative.

If you are looking for a good place to post your thoughts and feelings and drunken pictures, Livejournal isn’t a bad idea. One of the original blogging communities, Livejournal gives you the option of only allowing your Livejournal “friends” from seeing your posts. So far, I haven’t found a way to see any of these nonfriend-proof entries so it would appear to be pretty secure. Just make sure you keep in mind who you have on your friends list.

Don’t Use Twitter If You’re Paranoid

By paranoid, I pretty much am referring to everything we’ve talked about so far. While Twitter doesn’t ask for nearly as much personal information as Facebook or MySpace does (essentially name and website – the web’s version of “name, rank and serial number”), it also doesn’t offer nearly as much privacy options as some of the other social networking sites.

Yes, you CAN choose to have only selected people read your Tweets. That sort of defeats the purpose of Twitter, though.

A Little Bit Of Common Sense Goes A Long Way

What’s important to remember is that whatever you do online, you need to keep in mind who is going to be reading it. Because, let’s face it, the only thing worse than being an Eagles fan is being an unemployed Eagles fan.

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More than a half billion people use online social networks, posting vast amounts of information about themselves to share with online friends and colleagues. A new study co-authored by a researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has found that the practices of many popular social networking sites typically make that personal information available to companies that track Web users’ browsing habits and allow them to link anonymous browsing habits to specific people. The study, presented recently in Barcelona at the Workshop on Online Social Networks, part of the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications, is the first to describe a mechanism that tracking sites could use to directly link browsing habits to specific individuals.

“When you sign up with a social networking site, you are assigned a unique identifier,” says Craig Wills, professor of computer science at WPI, who conducted the study with an industry colleague. “This is a string of numbers or characters that points to your profile. We found that when social networking sites pass information to tracking sites about your activities, they often include this unique identifier. So now a tracking site not only has a profile of your Web browsing activities, it can link that profile to the personal information you post on the social networking site. Now your browsing profile is not just of somebody, it is of you.”

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by Andy Williams, If you aren’t using Facebook, YouTube, MySpace or some of the other so-called social networking sites, you may be missing out on a prime opportunity to market your campus card or other university program.

The University of Minnesota uses Facebook, YouTube and sometimes Twitter to keep its students in the know and coming soon will be an ambitious video about the day in the life of a U Card user, said Alison Bloomster, marketing and operations manager, U Card Office, at the university. “This is where your students are, and this is where you need to be,” she said.

Bloomster showed attendees at the NACCU conference in March ways to use these sites and did a repeat performance during a NACCU-sponsored Webinar in June.

“Social media is a huge evolving topic which you can use to augment your current marketing plan. It’s a great way to get in touch with students as well as faculty,” said Bloomster. More importantly, today’s students, sometimes labeled millennials, or Gen Y, expect this, she said.

To develop the best strategy for using social media, universities need to understand what the core users of this technology want, said Bloomster. Play to some of the traits the generation exhibits. They feel they are special because they have been treated with kid gloves and have had high parental involvement in their upbringing. They also are confident, team oriented, believe social rules are good because they provide order, have been pushed by their parents, faculty and peers to work and study hard, and are achievement oriented, she adds.

And they’re technology natives. They are part of a generation that has always had access to cell phones and computers.

Non-traditional channels

The choices available for marketing are infinite, she said. “You have the Web, email, blogs, instant messaging, picture sharing and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, a system that enables phone calls via the Internet).” None of these choices existed even a few years ago. “I really believe that social media fits best with promotion. It gives you another way to be visible on campus,” said Bloomster.

“What makes social media different is that it’s interactive. You don’t have to know html to post pictures anymore. It’s a way for people and for you to connect to your customers, your cardholders. When you’re moving into the realm of interactivity, you’re creating channels of social media, where you and other users are connecting with each other,” she explained.

Still Bloomster views social sites as simply an extension of a university’s overall marketing and promotion program.

“Social Media the noun can refer to all the Internet and mobile-based channels and applications that people use for sharing and interacting around text, photo and video based information,” she added. “It’s a channel of communication in which the audience can participate by adding comments, instant messaging, or editing the story themselves.”

The university has its own Facebook site. You have to be a member to view the pages which means you’re either a university employee or a student. “We decided to use Facebook because it’s very user friendly. We’ve uploaded photos, we do wall postings, and we have used Facebook for promotions.”

Another site used by the university is a popular video-sharing site. “YouTube is amazing,” she said. “You can create your own channels. We have a channel there and we’ll be posting our video blog (a day in the life of a U Card) there once it’s finished.”

Regardless of the social media you’re using, don’t be afraid to experiment, she suggested. That’s the only way you’ll learn what will work best for your institution. “There is no magic bullet here. Some will make sense, like wall postings on Facebook.”

The university also started using Twitter, sending out, in Twitter parlance, “tweets,” little messages your Internet-capable phone can capture or you view on your computer. This works really well during peak enrollment periods or recarding. “You could check to see, hey there’s an hour wait right now,” said Bloomster. A tweet is limited to 140 characters and it’s not used “so much by students, but it is by staff and faculty,” she added.

The media, at least for now, is free and paperless, which also makes it environmentally friendly.

Bloomster supplied some suggestions about using social media:

* Keep it fresh
* Be consistent in your postings
* Be creative, inventive
* Play into the tastes of your audience
* Invite students to participate
* Cross promote to build usage
* Use contemporary type faces, bright colors, post a link to your Facebook site at the bottom of your emails
* Solicit questions on your site
* Post customer stories and testimonials
* Keep postings current and relevant
* Inform, don’t advertise
* Use caution when using txt spk

“Think about all that we know about the millennial generation, all the workshops we’ve been to and apply that to using social media,” she said.

Remember that interaction is key. “Information should be interesting and useful. Play into the tastes of your audience, the millennial generation and their parents,” she said.

Promote your social media, whether it’s your Facebook page or Web site, via email. “Millennials are content providers and will want to post their comments on your site, such as their experiences with the campus card,” said Bloomster.

To millennials social media is a life style. “It’s really important you recognize that,” she added.

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MySpace is acquiring online music service iLike, as the social-networking site faces a drop-off in visitors and tries to remake itself as a destination for music, videos, games and other entertainment content.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but a person familiar with the situation said it’s valued at nearly $20 million.

ILike, started by tech industry veterans and brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, lets users on social-networking sites share music. It was created in 2006 to retool GarageBand.com, which had sought to create an independent music community for recording artists to promote themselves. iLike is popular on social-networking sites, including Facebook, Orkut and hi5, and says it has more than 55 million registered users.
Digits

* Live-Blogging MySpace’s iLike Press Conference

The iLike acquisition serves MySpace’s “need to create new social experience in music and beyond,” MySpace’s CEO, Owen Van Natta, said during his first news conference since he arrived four months ago. Mr. Van Natta is charged with resuscitating the site, which is facing intense competition from rival Facebook Inc. and upstarts like Twitter Inc.

MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

The acquisition is the first on Mr. Van Natta’s watch and comes as MySpace seeks to build on its popularity among recording artists and bands, to showcase their music and to help consumers find the bands and videos they like. Mr. Van Natta noted that MySpace plans to extend iLike’s technologies beyond music to other features on the site, so that users can share entertainment content such as video and games.

Mr. Van Natta said the acquisition is part of a broader effort to “bring world-class talent” to MySpace. iLike’s management team, which will stay with the company after the deal closes, has had a string of successes in the technology business. Ali Partovi founded and sold online-ad company LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998. Hadi Partovi co-founded and sold TellMe Networks Inc. to Microsoft for $800 million in 2007.

Traffic to MySpace continues to drop quickly. The site attracted 68.3 million unique U.S. visitors in July, down 9% from the same period last year. Meanwhile, Facebook drew 87.7 million unique U.S. visitors in July, more than double the number a year earlier.

Ad revenue at Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. business unit that is made up mostly of MySpace, dropped 22% in the quarter ended June 30 from a year earlier. News Corp. took $680 million in noncash charges in the quarter, in part to write down the value of Fox Interactive Media.

ILike has raised a total of about $16.5 million. Ticketmaster invested $13.3 million and took a 25% stake in 2006. Other investors include Khosla Ventures, Messrs. Partovi and former AOL and MTV executive Bob Pittman. The company has 26 employees and will remain in Seattle.

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A woman has become the first person charged under a new harassment law written in response to the MySpace suicide case. Police say Elizabeth A. Thrasher, 40, posted a fake, sexually suggestive ad under the “casual encounters” section of Craigslist in an attempt to humiliate a 17-year-old girl.

Thrasher, of St. Peters, is charged with felony harassment in a case with echoes of the nationally publicized case that happened just down the road.

Police say Thrasher posted the teen’s picture and the girl’s place of employment, e-mail address and cell phone number.

Prosecutors say the ad was in retaliation for a message the girl sent to Thrasher regarding Thrasher’s deteriorating relationship with the girl’s mother.
Missouri’s cyber-harassment law came in response to the MySpace suicide case, which happened just miles from where Thrasher lives.

In that case, 13-year-old Megan Meier hanged herself after receiving hurtful messages from a fake MySpace account. The case received national headlines after an adult neighbor, Lori Drew, was accused of being linked to the fake account.

A Los Angeles federal jury found Drew guilty of four misdemeanors, but a judge acquitted her.

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