THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

Okay, so you want to get into social media? Here are some emerging best practices to help you get started.

Step 1: See where your fans are already. Just go to Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr, and search for your company name and product names. These four basic sites will give you a quick overview of what people are saying about you, what kinds of media they are tagging with your company and product names, and the overall level of activity that centers around your brands. If you find thousands of photos on Flickr, hundreds of video on YouTube, and dozens of MySpace or Facebook groups, you know that people not only talking about you and your products, but also creating media around them. The amount of media, and types of conversation give you a quick read of your potential in the social space.

Step 2: If you have a lot of fans, reach out to them first. Let’s say you’ve searched through those four sites (or others) and found a whole lot of interested folks. The first step to an effective social media presence is to create your company or brand pages and groups, then contact your fans and ask them to share their media. Don’t be surprised if they’re skeptical and ask you who you really are. Be ready with a fully-fleshed-out profile page for a real person. Remember, people don’t talk to brands, they talk to people.

Step 3: Don’t compete with your fans! Okay. So you have a basic presence, some fans have signed up to share media with you, and now legal has stepped in, and they’re asking about some of the images the fans have shared with you. Resist the urge to send in the lawyers, except for the most egregious cases. Efforts to squash your fans spread quickly in social media, and the feedback is never positive.

Step 4: Be honest and keep the conversation open. Remember how people talk to people, not to brands? Treat your fans like people who really are your friends—and, by sharing their media with you, they are giving you quite a bit—and you will reap great rewards. If you’d like to use one of their photos or videos, don’t just take it, even if they’ve tagged it as OK for commercial use. Ask them. Consider giving them something in exchange.

Step 5: Don’t wear out your welcome. Even if your fans seem genuinely happy to meet you and help you with your marketing, be careful of having them help you too much. Not only can sour your fan on your brand, it can also make them a less effective brand evangelist. The more they stump for you, the less effective they will be.

If social media is a home, then social media interaction is like meeting in a bar.

Social media is a place where people get together to talk to their friends. It’s a place to find new friends. It’s a place to share stories—in the form of words, photos, and video—and discover new friends.

So, let me repeat that: social media interaction is like meeting in a bar.

A bar is not a store. People do not go to a bar to shop. They aren’t there to look for a new pair of shoes, a flat-panel TV, or even to find the best price on a bottle of Macallan. Nor are they there to find the sports scores or to learn how to re-roof their house.

And this is what separates social media from commerce sites like Amazon and Ebay, and from functional sites like Yahoo and Google.

Thinking of social media interaction as meeting in a bar can help shape an effective social media program. Think of your presence as the bar, and create a great place where people can relax with friends and discover new ones, and you’ll reap great rewards.

Treat it like a program designed to sell stuff, and don’t be surprised when everyone gets together and throws you out of the bar.