I work with a ton of marketing and sales teams.  Often, their contacts and leads are referred to as "potential" clients.  There's no such thing.

In what once seemed like a disconnected world, this may have been the case (though, not entirely).  However, in a social world, everyone is a client. While a contact or lead may not buy your product or service, they will still buy into (and sell, for that matter) your reputation.  That's what makes reputation management so crucial for today's business - it is just as important as sales and marketing for client acquisition and retention.

Not to toot my own horn, but just to prove a point...

As I meet with many business executives to discuss Social Media, many still don't entirely grasp the concept and, so therefore, their buy-in is often postponed.  However, those leaders still call me or e-mail with questions or concerns because I've been able to establish a great reputation.

We often just "potential" clients by what they can contribute to our bottom lines.  Perhaps, we ought to examine what they can contribute to (or take away from) our reputation.

In my previous post, I shined a little light on the repercussions Facebook platform apps can have on the productivity and performance on an individual.  But, how does Facebook apps create sluggish, under-performing companies?

Again noted, Facebook can be an incredible contributor to a company’s bottom line.  It’s a fantastic resource for generating leads and promoting brands, goods and services.  Companies need to define acceptable usage policies for social media so that the incorporation of social media is effective within the overarching marketing strategy.

Occasionally, Google will introduce an enhancement to its search engine allowing users to “opt-in” for use prior to releasing the addition live.  These enhancements are found in Google Labs (www.googlelabs.com). One current feature in the labs is Google’s Social Search.

Supposedly, Google offers subscribers the ability to search their own networks for relevant results to their query. Those results, in turn, may be given higher precedence than those results returned from outside the user’s network.  Notice the word “may.”  I’ve yet to see any such results.  Perhaps, my network isn’t big enough.  However, I would have thought with a few thousand friends, someone’s got to be talking about the same thing(s) for which I am looking.  Maybe, we’re just not compatible and I should find new friends.

Or, maybe Google has yet to penetrate the social community for the same issue with which it has always struggled. Furthermore, Google now introduces its own hurdle.

Website Magazine’s November issue lists 50 leading web sites for marketing and business development professionals. As one could imagine, the list paints a different picture than that which would have been constructed only a few years ago.

As Website Magazine points out, the use of social sites has increased among top enterprises.  Among the listed social sites are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning and Yelp.

Blogging sites have also become increasingly popular with enterprise trend setters.  Of course, the two most well-known, free blogging platforms, WordPress and Blogger, were ranked high in the list – #’s 9 and 11, respectively.  And, blogs could not receive nearly as much customer attraction if it wasn’t for the aggregators that push their content to subscribers and increase the blogs’ visibility.  A few aggregators, namely, Digg and Technorati, were included in Website Magazine’s list.

Finally, any company seeking to solidify their online presence, must now syndicate video content.  YouTube is now the second-largest search engine, following only its parent, Google, and provides easy and rapid traffic generation through professional and grass-roots video creation and delivery.  It’s no wonder that YouTube was #4 on the list.  Other video platforms like Blinkx, MetaCafe and Ustream.tv were included in the top 50, as well.

In conclusion, I must agree with Website’s disclaimer, “Keep in mind that the sites on this Top 50 are not an acknowledgement of their effectiveness but rather their popularity.” Website Magazine asserts that the effectiveness of the given sites still highly depends on the manner in which they are used.  Again, I completely agree.

On a previous post, I discussed the importance of diversifying your social media marketing channels due to the attacks on the social network Twitter.

As these attacks were taking place, marketers rushed to other channels such as Facebook and FriendFeed.  This, in turn, brought heavy stressed upon the infrastructure of these two servers making their responses to traffic requests quite sluggish, as well.

Over the past few days, we’ve witnessed some of Facebook’s own growing pains. 

If you think back to your first car (and if it was like mine), it might not have been your dream car or even the coolest car on the block, but at least it got you from point A to point B.  In comparison to riding your bicycle or riding the bus to school, however, your car was the best.

Your first car may not have have been a Mercedes or BMW, but, plain and simple, it worked.

Unfortunately, many companies have the same philosophy when engaging in Internet Marketing, “It may not be the best, but it works.”  Or, “I don’t care what it looks like as long as its something.” 

Personally, I have been instilled with the belief, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”  The Social Media community follows this belief, as well.  The community can immediately determine the quality of the brand or product by its deliverance through Social Media channels.

Also, please don’t confuse quality with “high dollar”.  Not all quality has to be expensive – and in most cases concerning Social Media, it’s very inexpensive.  Most of what I, personally, do for myself costs next-to-nothing and 80% of my revenue is generated from Social Media.

Concerning quality, I’m referring to clear, concise deliverance; orderly, fresh presentation; and, of course, remember the audience you are targeting. Flat, basic landing pages may be great for older demographics, but the Social Media community is, for the most part, familiar with technology – its okay to use Flash, video and other Web 2.0 medias in your Internet marketing collateral.  Interestingly enough, the older demographics (55+) are now Facebook’s fastest growing demographic compared to only 4 months ago (which was 45+).  Familiarity with Web 2.0 collateral is rapidly expanding to the retirees.

One final note…

Your type of quality may not be considered Social Media quality.  In other words, what you may find exceptional, could be completely bland to a member of the Social Media community.  If you don’t know how to reach the Social Media crowd, hire someone who does. Furthermore, remember to take their advice.  After all, that is why you hired them.

Just because your company may have incorporated Social Media into it’s marketing strategy – it may have even gone as far as creating a Social Media team – doesn’t mean your management has adapted to Social Media trends or adopted its philosophies in the marketplace.

If you've ever sat in my seminars, you found very quickly that I love statistics.  As rapid as the Social Media horizon changes, so is the rate at which these statistics change.

Socialnomics, this past week, released some staggering statistics on the current impact of Social Media. Erik Qualman has done a fine job of compiling the data and its presentation.  I think you'd agree with me how amazing some of these statistics are. A few of these include:

1. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
2. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
3. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia

Also, a few interesting facts concerning education:

1. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
2. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
3. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

Erik has posted the list of statistics along with their sources on his blog, just below the video.

Twitter was completely unavailable this morning for approximately 2 hours.  The microblogging platform that allows its users to post status and news updates in 140 characters or less was the victim of a DDoS attack. 

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an instance in which the perpetrator consistently floods the victim with multiple, bogus requests and, in turn, overloads the server preventing it from answering good requests.  Apparently the load balancing system also failed.

In turn, many of Twitter's users turned to Facebook for distribution and sharing information.  Facebook, as a result, became sluggish this morning, as well.

There are two lessons we can learn from this morning's events:

1. While we are quickly approaching, social media is not fully ready to be the primary news source.  While it can assist in sharing information quickly across a broad audience, there are a few "kinks" that still need to resolved.
2. Have a backup.  Many of these social media platforms are developed and operated by individuals and small startups that simply do not have the capital to prevent downtime.  Instead of relying on one social media channel, incorporate multiple networks as you develop your marketing strategy.

As of the writing of this post, Twitter's "Replies" and "Direct Messages" feeds are still down.

A few weeks ago, I walk into a meeting expecting to put a bid in on a web development job.  Little did I know that I was actually walking into an interview.

I was meeting with Cliff Oxford of Entrepreneur Advisors who offered me a job on the spot as their VP of Internet Technologies.  I accepted.

Since then, my time has been consumed with laying a foundation for their web presence.  This has left little time to blog.

Now, I've constructed this site to feed the niche market of business professionals and their businesses with information on Social Media and best-practices.

And, now, have a month or so, I'm able to contribute once again to the blog.

Stay tuned.  Much more to come.