Many of my local business clients say that they just don’t get social media. They tell me they just don’t understand how using social media is going to get them more business.

And the answer is simple, really. More effective exposure, faster.

To really wrap your head around this, it helps to realize that behind the search rankings, dot coms and email addresses are people. Why are people online? Because they want information, they want to be entertained, and they want to connect.

We advertise in newspapers, magazines, on radio, on television because we want to reach people who want what we’re selling. The same thing goes for the web. Nowadays, that mean using social media.

The biggest deal about social media is so big, we often don’t even see it. Sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, Mixx, Twitter and all the others have one thing in common: they’ve redistributed power that used to remain in the hands of the few to the hands of the many.

When this happened, a lot of the gatekeepers between us and our potential clients and customers fell away, in a way that allows more discourse between people, without leaving sensitive private information exposed.

I can write a blog post about an aspect of what I do without revealing the secret formula that gets people to buy from me or hire me. And you can read it or provide feedback without exposing your private information. For example, if you send a Twitter link about my post, and my blog recognizes it, you can make a short comment without even telling me your email address, as you would need to do if you were to comment on my site.

And blogging and tweeting are just two types of social media you can leverage to benefit your business.

I know, for some people this is really scary.

Socializing online puts you in a weird position as a business person if you start maneuvering without quite “getting” it. You don’t want to be the guy who thought it was okay to put his link on someone else’s Facebook profile and find it removed the next day, and have potentially powerful allies blocking you because you breached some etiquette or made a mistake.

You don’t want to end up talking business too soon, yet you also don’t want to be the person who had an opportunity to promote themselves, but saw that it was okay only after their competitor beat them to it.

I got an email today from a new friend who told me he couldn’t wrap his way around social media. Like in many new social situations, he didn’t know how to act. If like him, you think you don’t “get” social media, and how it can be used for business, I think that if you’re like most people, you’re wrong.

You already get Web 2.0 and Social Media. You just don’t realize it. The very fact that you don’t want to “be that guy” means that you’ve figured out that there’s a certain etiquette to all these new tools, and that they vary from community to community.

Remember how you figured it out offline? You found someone to help you, someone who had the results you wanted that you could copy, or you worked it out through trial and error.

Luckily, online there are people who are willing to teach you the ropes, so you can skip the trial and error. Now all you need to do is find people who are where you want to be, and do what they do.

Social media isn’t as hard as you think it is.

It’s the number one topic on everyone’s mind at some point: what will happen to my business during hard times?

It doesn’t seem to matter what business you’re in, or whether the news says it’s getting a little better or a little worse.

Every business owner’s mind drifts to the recession at some point.

We wonder: are we headed for another Great Depression? Or will we just be tightening our belts to ride out the latest storm?

Wish I had the answer to that but I have no clue. I’m a website promotion specialist. How
would I know?

What I do know is that I’m not participating in the recession — I’m too busy and I haven’t got a *thing* to wear!

I say that with tongue in cheek, but due to an expensive health problem I’ve had since 1992, I really don’t know what it is to have an adult life where you can consistently indulge in extras — mine always went to meds or physical therapy, or back-pay on doctors’ bills. So for me, it’s Always a recession.

But I believe you can turn just about any circumstance into a positive, and sure enough, it puts me in a unique position to tell you how to get your business to prosper in a time when it feels like the economy is in a tail spin for some indefinite amount of time.

The answer to recession for me?

Market harder, and market better.

Doing better, faster and more creative marketing has always helped me move my business forward, even when I was having a hard time — even now when it seems like Everyone is having a hard time.

I was no genius when I started thinking this way, so don’t think that just because website promotion and marketing is my business, this strategy can’t work for you.

So what does marketing harder mean? Or marketing better, for that matter?

I’m not saying that if you were spending $2000 a month on advertising that you should now spend $3000. Nor am I saying cut back. There are basically two steps.

First, spend your advertising money *smarter* –make it go as far as it possibly can. Really look more closely at what is working the best to bring your business leads, sales and in the case of the web, traffic, and focus your money and attention there.

Reduce or eliminate everything else. If it makes you feel better, put it on hold and resume it when you have more in your pocket.

In other words, if ezine ads have always set your sales on fire, but pay per click has always been iffy, move more of your ad budget into ezine ads until the economic storm passes. Once your company is in better financial health, you’ll be able to afford to hire an expert to tweak your pay per click if you need it.

Some sites seem to be made for pay per click, but get hit and miss results with press releases. In that case it would be better to reduce, but not end, press release campaigns, and shift that money to PPC until you have more profit to risk.

The second step would be to append that advertising with more cost-effective marketing, especially in whatever area you’re not doing now. If it will only cost you a few hundred dollars in the short term to implement a tested technique that will get you results for years to come, investing the time is a wise move.

Let’s say you’re doing article marketing by posting to hundreds of directory-style sites.

Awesome.

Now get those same articles distributed directly to ezine publishers that have better
reach, and are more exclusive about who they accept. Need to test them out first? Run a classified or top sponsor ad.

And don’t stop there. Once your name gains recognition among your peers, take your expertise marketing to the next level and do some interviews.

Find ten people with targeted audiences and do 10 interviews. You can even cut those ten people in on the profits by offering their audience a special offer and paying them a percentage per sale as a referral fee.

There’s all kinds of creative marketing you can do that you can start with quickly, from blogging, article marketing or social media to organic search strategies. And of course ther are also all kinds of twists you can put on whatever you’re already doing.

How do you find them? For at least 30 minutes today, sit down and write marketing ideas. I learned a tip from a brilliant man named Allen says that after your mind has been working on something for 30 minutes, it just keeps coming up with more ideas on autopilot.

I’ve found that the longer I go, the better my ideas get. So even if you have to stop after 30 minutes, take that pad and paper with you.

And no matter how silly any idea seems, write it down. It may inspire something else later.

When you’re done, pick the best one and go do it, or assign it to your marketing team if you have one. Research who does something similar, and follow their successes.

It’s the ultimate recipe for getting a business through hard times — market harder, market more creatively, and do it in addition to, not instead of, advertising. Some marketing takes a little time to work.

The people are still out there. Your business still helps people. A recession or hard times just means you have to work a little smarter for the same amount of money.

You can do it. Don’t abandon hope just yet.

Last week, we were talking about one of the reasons business blogging growth is slowing.

Part of the reason growth is slowing is that the instant fame model of blogging is proving to be hollow. You can’t be an instant success blogger. It just doesn’t happen.

It may look like this blogger was an overnight success or that company got instant social media attention. But there’s always a huge amount of work coupled with a huge amount of work behind it.

And yet. There is a way that business blogging can greatly enhance your visibility day after day, if you’re willing to forgo the Hyper-Viral model.

What if I told you that there is a way to get the same overall effects and the same amount of traffic as being on the front page of Digg, with better results? Would you want to know how to do that?

What if you saw the results over a couple of weeks or months, instead of days — BUT you could make it keep happening over and over again with a regularity that you just can’t guarantee with Digg?

Some people are saying yes, what’s the difference when I get the traffic and publicity as long as I get it? Especially if I can repeat it?

But some people are thinking, no, I want a big burst of success.

So I’ll present another part of the reality. Let’s say you have a choice between these two scenarios.

I can get you on front page result with Digg, and in time and labor, it would cost you $4000, but I could only pull it off once a year. In that one time, you still have to pay me whether you’re on the page for five minutes or 15 hours. And I can’t sell you votes or any of that stuff — you have to do the work involved, and know that after many, many times, it will eventually happen, but not be sure when, and not really be able to control it.

OR.

I can get you the same amount of traffic, the same amount of links, from the same number of weeks or months of work but over the time you’ll be working.

In other words, that traffic will be spread out over several weeks or months, starting in a few weeks.

Your internal time and labor costs are around $1000., then there’s $2000 in set up and fees. BUT. Once you learn how to do it this one time, you can do it over and again, as often as you like.

Now. It’s front page of Digg, one time shot, take whatever results you get for $4000. Or spend $3000 and get the same results, but over, say, a month’s time, then repeat that result as many times as you like for free after that.

Option Two looks better now, doesn’t it? In the days to come, we’ll be talking about letting go of that shortcut mentality of getting one quick Digg front page vs spreading your traffic — and risk — out over multiple social media properties, including your own blog.

If the growth of business blogging is slowing, and Twitter becomes old news, what will be be talking about next in social media?

We’re already audio blogging a bit, and video is getting to be a more feasible option. I don’t know that it will get to the point where just to be seen you need to have video, not any time soon.

Not the way it is with blogging.

What I wish the next great thing would be is topical social networks. But I doubt it.

One reason is that until you can port your identity around on the web, or sites can recognize one standard profile, no one is gong to want to constantly have to create and update a new profile every time they log on.

Since the early web, the mainstream user seems to want to come online, visit a few standard places (email, social, news, search), and a few favorites, then go home.

Our job, if we want to push constant content to them, is to convince them why we should be allowed into their current favorite online destinations (such as their Inbox, via emailed newsletter sign-ups), or why they should add our site as a new favorite.

There’s always a point of “too many”, so we’re constantly fighting for a limited amount of attention.

Even if that attention grows it is scattered among more things.

For example, there was a point at which people didn’t want to view video online, because they would have to wait for it to stream into the browser enough that they could consume it.

Now that it’s faster, they’ve got YouTube. And while it’s great if your video is ON YouTube, the problem is that you’re competing with all the other people on YouTube.

Even if you can get them to view video directly from you (via podcast for example), you’re competing for time in the day.

If we assume they are awake for 17 hours a day, and work, eat, and are in transit from one place to another for ten hours, there’s still only 7 hours left of leisure, which they’ll split among other activities. Your target consumer may only be on the web a couple of hours a day.

If your video is ten minutes long, what will convince them to watch it? If your social network takes ten minutes to register and confirm, what will convince them it’s worth joining?

Not only do we need to compete for attention and time, when someone decides they have time for us, we have to convince them over the hurdle of creating yet another profile, for yet another site.

Yes, I can log into your site with Facebook.

But Facebook won’t pull in the link to my own website. It can’t tell you which email address I prefer to get reminder in, if at all. And it currently can’t push your email newsletter to my Facebook private messages.

There are similar problems with other ways of authenticating.

Until there is one ID system that knows

• how you like to be contacted without being spammed
• what your homepage is
• what geographical location you want to be associated with (which isn’t always where you physically are, so GPS is out)
• your date of birth
• who your existing friends on the new network are

and the other types of data you want to take with you, asking people to join your social network, instead of following your blog, may not be the answer.

Not to mention the fact that you’re asking for a bigger social commitment.

Reading a blog every day or so, commenting when you feel like it, that’s like a casual dating situation.

Joining a social network is much more like asking your readers to be in a serious on-going relationship. What good social network doesn’t require the commitment to participate?

Is your audience ready for that kind of commitment?

Are you?

If you’re not, Ning may be the answer, at least for now.

Yes, I said “may”. And also “for now”.

With Ning, you can create a topical social network on a networking site many people already belong to. You can even map the subdomain they give you to your domain name, for a monthly fee.

To explain why I say it MAY be the answer, let’s do an exercise.

Let’s say you do set up a site on Ning. Here are the questions you now need the answers to, mostly in the affirmative, for your idea to have a prayer of working.

Is your audience big enough that the small percentage of them who will post to the forums and start their own blogs will be enough?

Expect about 10% of your current RSS Subscribers, and 1 — 10% of email subscribers to join. Only half of them will bother to do more than register unless you nudge them.

Given that, think about it again.

Do you have time to create content and spark discussion?

And provide video content?

Or moderate out spam content?

Or the money to pay someone else to do it?

Even if you do, your data is still tied to Ning. If you ever want to create your own, separate from Ning, who is going to export that data? And how?

And if you have a community now, who’s going to port all username/password information into Ning?

Maybe one day, Ning will let you subscribe to a service that lets you completely white-label its service.

You will still have to have a hot enough topic to keep it from being a ghost town.

Indeed, will your site topic ever be hot enough to get its own topical social networking site, forsaking all others — like Facebook, for instance?

Or do you need to be content with the option to have a Facebook presence rather than your own network?

Not every interest group can support their own social network, and of those that can, the first mover may be the one that prevails. There were at one time, thousands of forums about internet marketing.

But only the few best ones, and the special niche versions, survived.

And if you are the first mover, you have to really think about how you’ll create, maintain and push forward community.

No matter whether the custom social network is the answer, or whether it’s some other sub-section of social media that becomes our next obsession, it’s coming from the innovators.

So, social networking may be the next big thing in social media, or it may not. If it is, you have o make sure you’re ready for it.

I think that there are so few companies that can support that type of evolution, that while social networking will become more popular, it won’t be what business massive adopts the way we did we did with RSS, blogging, social bookmarking and other social media tools.

I believe the next big thing in social media is some existing invention we’re not aware of yet, or something that may have already been invented recently but is still on the fringes.

I had just finished writing about how great business blogging was when I waded knee deep into social media.

Now that social media sites like Twitter are spreading into widespread adoption, the people who alerted you to social media are already on the next boat.

The question for you to think of is, what is that next boat? The only hint I can give you right now is, watch the innovators and the early adopters who told us about RSS, blogging, social bookmarking, social networking and all the other new media.

As for me, I’ve got something cooking that I believe will change our relationship with online video forever, IF it can be pulled off, or is even technologically possible.

My idea, though immensely shareable, is also easily copied. If it’s not the right idea, launched at the right time, it may also only be effective in the short term.

So for right now, I’m just raising the question to encourage you to find your answer. So what is it? What are you going to do next in social media? What’s left to tackle? What do you think the next big thing will be?

In an upcoming post, I’m going to discuss what I believe the change in strategy should be, as far as small and local businesses, for blogging. Then this coming week, we’ll be talking about “what ifs” for the social media horizon.