Ok, so I realize I’ve broken my own rules of posting consistency. However, I now vow to write at least one blog post on this beloved site per week.

For starters, check out this cool article by Dave Hale, the Internet Marketing Professor. He polled a large handful of industry professionals asking for their Social Media Predictions for 2010… I was one of them.

Also, the wonderful people over at the Social Media Club of Utah Valley were nice enough to profile me last month. My own ego won’t allow me to not share this for all to see. More to come over the next weeks.

I’ll be taking a stab at some video production as well as my first legitimate large scale Social Media Marketing campaign.

Companies are flocking to Social Media like tweens to a High School Musical convention. It’s viewed as the magic pill that transforms you from fool to cool faster than a PSA announcing you’re Zach Efron’s new BFF. The problem is that once companies realize that creating a profitable and reputable Social Media presence actually requires effort and communication, they give up.

If you want to separate your business from every one of your competitors in the social media sphere, you absolutely must be consistent!

Customers appreciate and respect reliability.  If you have commitment issues with your Twitter account (you go multiple days or weeks without even a text), you suffer from blog neglect (inconsistent and less-than useful posts), or you Facebook abandonment, you’re doing it wrong.

If you’re not willing to put in the effort to provide useful, interesting content on a consistent basis, you may want to reconsider using Social Media at all.

This week at Blog World, Social Media tycoons, Patrick O’Keefe; writer, web developer, entrepreneur, community administrator and author of ManagingCommunities.com, Amber Naslund; Director of Community at Radian6 and blogger at Altitude Branding, Wayne Sutton; Partner at OurHashtag and blogger at SocialWayne.com and Robert Scoble; Managing Director at Building43.com at Rackspace and blogger at Scobleizer will be presenting on this and many other social media mistakes made by so many new media n00bs attempting to use this new forum to help their business. You would do well to pay attention to their mad internet skillz.

Jump on the bandwagon.

I’ve been having some discussions with a good friend of mine over the past few weeks regarding social media.  He just got back from a conference in Arizona.  The conference was full of CEO’s and corporate executives who were (in his words), “drooling over social media,” and he was not at all happy about it.

It seems that as social media has become a more mainstream method of advertising, corporate leaders have begun to  interpret the phenomenon as a magic moneymaking pill. They assume that if they have a Twitter account, or a Facebook fan page that the dollah-billz will just start pouring in.

If history has proven one thing, it’s that there are no magic bullets or secret formulas.  Adapting this incorrect opinion of social media is foolishness.

Social media cannot make a crappy product, a poorly run business, or a weak marketing plan successful.  It’s possible that your product is amazing, your company is groundbreaking and your marketing is visionary, and that social media still isn’t meant for you.

The catch 22 right now is that social media marketing is something that the early adapters don’t want to miss out on, but it’s so new that there are currently very few ways to measure ROI.

So, before committing to jumping on the social media bandwagon, make sure you have goals in mind and a defined value that you would like to glean from your efforts.  Without some sort of metric to track or goal to measure, your efforts in social media will be hollow and fruitless. And, just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean you should be doing it.

Twitter has received a lot of criticism for their inability to retain the majority of their users on a long-term basis.  A few months ago, Marketing Pilgrim featured a research study done by The Nelson Company proving that roughly 60% of users who sign up for Twitter fail to return to the service after about a month.  Those who actually use Twitter on a regular basis blew a gasket.  They couldn’t believe it.  However, after working with hundreds of people and businesses in the past few months, evangelizing the worth of Twitter with a fury and passion, I can honestly say I’ve seen the same trend.  People just get discouraged with Twitter. They sign up full of excitement from the hype, but quickly lose momentum and interest when they don’t understand the lingo, or how to get people to follow them.  They hit what I like to call “The Twitter Road Block.”

Overcoming the road block really only requires persistence.  There are also a few tools that will definitely make the transition through the Twitter Road Block much easier:

Twitter Search

Twitter has a service called Twitter Search which allows you to search for Tweets with specific words in them.  The coolest thing about Twitter Search is that you can subscribe to specific search queries using RSS.  Or rather, you can track multiple specific keywords at the same time via your Feed Reader.  Think about it this way. Lets say you’re the president of McDonalds and you want to work on client retention and customer service.  You could search for negative words associated with your product or company name, like “Hate McDonalds” or “:( McDonalds”.  You could then subscribe to the feed, and you will be notified every time someone sends out a negative Tweet about your company.  You can then fix it.

Little do you know, whether you like it or not, people are talking about you, your company and your products on Twitter right now.  Time to start watching who, and talking back.

Don’t stop there though! Search for things you’re interested in and start talking to people who are interested in the same thing!  Twitter is a forum for discussion.  Most people leave because they have nobody to talk to.  The best way to build a great reputation for yourself on Social Media is to be social! Be the person who talks to everyone.  That is how you will gain the most value from Twitter, and how you will brake through that frustrating initial Twitter Road Block!