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.

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