It is fascinating then, to hear in a podcast with social media consultant Rick Mulready, where Monty thinks social media fits in a company’s outreach.

And it is not where you would think it is.

Study the picture to find out what has happened.

Social Media Is at the Top

As social media practitioners, we are constantly asked to provide figures that justify our budgets and prove that we are having an effect.  Monty tells Mulready that Ford does constantly review performance and activity to see what people on social media are discussing and understand which of Ford’s posts have won the biggest reaction.  But he dismisses “likes” as “grunts” and he does not talk at all about measuring the effect of a sequence of posts on sales figures.

In part, that is because Monty does not see social media as the last point before leads become customers.  He puts it higher up in the sales funnel — right at the top, in fact, where the company introduces the product and the brand to the public, starts the process of creating recognition and begins to build trust.

He even points out that the root of the word “relationship” is the Latin word relatio, which means “a bringing back.” Social media, he says, lets marketers go back to the original way of making sales: with the trust seen in a look in the eye and a shake of the hand.

That trust can then be tapped by the rest of the company’s marketing efforts when the new Ford is introduced into showrooms and when the sales staff hand over the keys for the test drive.

The Top of the Sales Funnel is Where Trust is Made.

It is a very different view from the one that tends to be held by social media practitioners — or at least the managers and directors who want to see the reports that justify the budget allocations.  It is a view of social media as an activity that produces something vague and difficult to measure: positive sentiment, a degree of familiarity, a sense of reliability.  Those are the sorts of things that will, eventually, translate into sales even if those sales will not come through a call to action posted in a tweet that contains a link to a landing page.

Is this a sales funnel?

Monty though, is lucky.  Social media is part of his company’s corporate communications department, and he works for a big company.  When Ford plans a new car launch, it makes sure that all parts of the company are working together.  The firm’s Facebook page might show pictures of new the car, but its PR team will make sure that those pictures also reach the mainstream press, and the local showrooms will have their own campaigns to pull in leads.  Ford can enjoy the trust that social media helps to create but it does not have to rely on social media to do anything.

Smaller businesses have a bigger challenge.  They often have to build trust on social media and then use the same platform to turn that trust into sales.  But even they can learn from Ford’s recognition of social media’s position at the top of the sales funnel — even when those activities yield few figures.

I repeat this message constantly.

It is not the formula for the perfect tweet.

It is not the best way to bring in new followers.

And it is certainly not predictions of social media’s rise, demise, or over-valuation.

It is that, for marketers, social media is a tool.

It is just one tool among many.

As marketers, we have always had lots of tools that we could use to push a sales point to potential customers. We could use direct mail and follow-up phone calls. We could use print ads and paper flyers. We could buy space in the Yellow Pages, take spots on the radio, and build loyalty programs that keep customers away from competitors.

And now we can also tweet, post, email, and share.

Social media has not replaced any of those other channels.

It complements them.

Broadcast By Email, Discuss on Facebook

You might not be in charge of your business’s direct mail program or its print advertising program. But there are very few businesses that rely solely on social media to find new customers. There are even fewer businesses that should only be using social media to find new customers.

Your social media efforts will not be working in isolation. They should work with all of the other elements in your firm’s marketing program so each method is able to play to its strengths and all of the methods — together — deliver a powerful punch.

So while it is easy enough to take the content you have written on a company blog and insert it into a newsletter or place part of it on Facebook, that sort of co-operation should be just the beginning.

Newsletters, for example, are excellent at delivering messages to targeted audiences, but they are not good at turning a broadcast into a discussion. Instead of simply pushing a message through email servers, end the article with an invitation to readers to share their stories or add their opinion to your Facebook page. As you press Send, place a post on Facebook that gets the discussion rolling.

Your newsletter will have turned from a simple broadcast channel into the start of a new engagement with leads.

You could do something similar on Twitter.

You cannot post an entire article on the micro-blogging platform, but you can place the headline and a link… and you can then tweet samples of the comments to show the article’s controversy and bring your followers into the discussion or onto the blog.

You will have used the email to make sure that you have reached your target audience. You will have used Facebook to host the discussion. And you will have used Twitter to keep that discussion rolling even after your Facebook followers have had their say.

And there is one more thing you should be doing to make the most of all your communication channels: you should be adding a call-to-action to all of them.

You might want to do that in different ways — more subtly on Facebook; less frequently on Twitter; harder hitting on your website — but when you have got so many tools to play with, make sure that they are all working together and that all have a cutting edge.

But rarely more than that.

Occasionally, a post might go viral. A photo might be shared by more people than usual or a tweet could garner more replies than you expect. But it does not happen often. It is not the day-to-day experience of running social media campaigns and even when it does happen, the figures might be larger than they tend to be, but they are rarely astronomic.

For people who use social media professionally every day, all that talk about the massive power of social media, the ability to reach millions of people with a single tweet, can feel pretty overblown.

And then this happens.

Reddit’s Users Go On a Witch Hunt

Reddit’s users took it on themselves to scour video footage of the Boston marathon, search social media sites and identify people they thought might be behind the bombings. They got it wrong. They identified an innocent person and made his family’s life miserable. What started as a well-intentioned plan to help the police become a witch hunt for which the Reddit community had to apologize.

That example of the danger of social media got plenty of media play. But there was another instance of a social media mob that picked up much less attention recently. A cyclist in the UK was attacked by a van driver in an incidence of road rage. The cyclist was wearing a bikecam and uploaded the footage to YouTube. When it became clear that the police had let the driver off with a caution, other cyclists used the van’s registration plate to identify the company that employed him.

Online Cyclists Attack a Business

“Weird and Wonderful of Birmingham,” a pet shop, received so many complaints from cyclists that it had to delete its Facebook and Twitter accounts. It also had to disable the online feedback form on its website, restricting its ability to take orders and deliver customer service through the Internet.

This was an event that had nothing to do with the Web and nothing to do with social media. The incident happened on the road and might have been quickly forgotten if it had not been for the presence of a camera that allowed plenty of other people to witness it.

That audience, in turn, was able to pick up the tools of social media to spread the word and apply sanctions to the company.

Reddit’s actions showed the power of social media at its most dangerous for individuals. The actions of the cyclists angry at seeing one of their own attacked showed the power of social media at its most dangerous for businesses.

Both showed that the relatively stable figures that we see every day in social media can be deceptive. Behind them lie more connections — and a great power that has to be handled very carefully.  

You probably have a favorite restaurant, a place you go to again and again. And each time you walk through the door, the proprietor comes out and greets you by name. You swap small talk about your families; he shows you to your table; and at the end of the meal, you find that you are being offered a free dessert or being served a drink on the house.

The owner makes you feel special, and you feel that you have a special relationship with the restaurant. It is not just another place to eat in town. It is your place, the first choice whenever you want a romantic meal or to celebrate a special occasion.

That is the sort of relationship you are aiming to build with clients on social media.

And it is the sort of relationship you are never going to be able to build on social media.

You will never build it completely because, while social media is essential, it is not a replacement for the warmth of real person-to-person contact. Nor is talking to a mass of people at once as special as talking to an individual. But there are a few things that you can do to make the relationship between your social media platform and your followers more personal.

• Talk to one person at a time.

Nothing reminds a restaurant patron that he is just another customer more than seeing the proprietor give the next customer the same “special” greeting he just received. The same thing happens on social media. Every time you write “Dear Friends” instead of “Dear Friend” you remind the reader that you are not talking to him; you are talking to him and thousands of other people just like him.

Stick to the singular and respond directly to comments placed by your followers. Those comments are social media’s version of a smile, a greeting and a sign that you are listening.

• Back up your social media efforts with newsletters.

Social media is always public. Everyone can see that you are talking to lots of different people, but that is not true of email newsletters. These should not replace social media, but they can complement it, allowing you to send personal messages targeted towards specific groups based on buying habits and sign-up page.

Again, keep the salutation singular and make sure that you use segmented lists so that the contents match the reader’s interest as much as possible.

• Keep the discounts flowing

Ultimately the proof of a customer’s special relationship with a business is the freebies and discounts it is willing to provide. In a restaurant they usually take the form of a free dessert or extra chocolates with the coffee. On social media, you can hand out t-shirts, discount coupons, or rewards for shares and comments. Treat your followers to exclusive gifts and special offers and you will go a long way towards proving that you really do care about them — and they will be more likely to keep coming back.

In that vein, I would like to offer a free $349 report on your business marketing efforts.  Just ask and ye (singular) shall receive.

The police in the county of Kent had appointed a Youth Police and Crime Commissioner, a 17-year-old woman called Paris Brown.  Her job was to act as a liaison between the area’s young people and the local police, for which was paid a salary of £15,000.

Before appointing her, the police had conducted a thorough review process.  They checked her resumé and contacted her references.  They put her before a panel of her peers and listened to their recommendations. 

They were very confident that out of the 164 applicants who had applied, they had chosen the right person. 

After she was appointed it, became clear that in the years leading up to her selection she had posted a number of offensive tweets on Twitter.  Some of the tweets were homophobic.  Some were said to be racist.  Others talked about drug taking and drinking. 

After a short media storm, Paris Brown resigned from her job.

To anyone familiar with social media, it seems remarkable that an application review process for a high profile job did not involve checking social media.  But according to Kent police and crime commissioner, Ann Barnes, who was responsible for the appointment, it appears to be exactly what happened. 

“We went through a perfectly normal recruitment process,” she told the BBC.  We had her vetted by the force and nobody normally looks through anybody’s Twitter feed.

“Social networking sites are a no-go area for most of us adults.

“A lot of young people use them and say the most horrible things.  They don’t even think about what they are saying and I think this is what happened with Paris.”

Hot Water? You Know Social Media Better Than Most

It is very easy today to assume that everyone is online, writing tweets, uploading their images to Instagram and chatting with friends and family on Facebook.  But there is still a generational gap.  For some older folk, in particular, social media is unfamiliar territory.  They know that it exists in the same way that they know that boy bands and rappers exist, but they do not understand the benefits and they do not have any desire to engage with it.

Of course, that is not always true.  There are reports of young people leaving Facebook as they find their parents and grandparents on the site, but the platform still has more than a billion users and there are few figures that support the idea of a youth exodus. 

That means that as you are offering products and services to potential customers through social media, you should remember that your message might be missing a large chunk of its potential market.  You could find that you are only talking to its youngest cohort, the people who have grown up with social media.

If you this all of what I have said is like the discovery of hot water (i.e.  already old), it means that you know more than most about social media — and that you should control how your market stacks up with the use of social media.   Some geographic areas and some countries are at completely different levels of social media usage.

I found this today about the use of smart phone in the USA.   Check out what I mean. Geography is not the only difference.   I might also mention that digital marketing to cell phones is happening fast and you need to be there.   Talk to me and I will show you a way to leap-frog into this market in a free, quick, effective manner.

Dove’s twitter timeline is a great example of a brand that’s engaged with social media, figured out what works and keeps pushing for broader reach and stronger engagement. Posts are filled with hashtags to ensure that other people’s responses carry the company’s branding. Questions about fashion and skin care create discussions and push answers onto followers’ pages. And when the brand requests retweets, it makes the request hard to refuse, increasing the chances of winning attention:

We love that @DoveMenCare & @thefatherfactor started a #DadsClub, where men can share parenting tips. RT if you know a dad who cares!

So it is no surprise that when Twitter introduced Vine, the brand’s social media team were quick to put it to use. The company put out a simple commercial showing a bar of soap knocking over a triangle of bottles.

That video went up in January. But despite the addition of plenty of links, Twitpics, and even YouTube videos, Twitter’s six-second video format has not been seen on the Dove timeline since. The inference seems to be that Vine was not generating any more engagement or reach than the brand could more easily achieve with a simple still photo.

Other companies with strong Twitter presences have also struggled to make Vine work consistently. Sweetshot Photography, a headshot and commercial studio, was quick off the mark with a short Vine-based commercial which, the company tweeted, produced some “potential clients.”

That post, though, was followed by a complaint that Vine’s update was producing videos that were too fast and jumpy. A couple of weeks later, the studio noted that:

We love #Vine but find it a bit challenging trying to capture our brand in 6 seconds!

Since then, the timeline’s media has consisted mostly of stills.

Why Take Six Seconds When You Can Take One?

Vine’s aim was to do for video what Twitter has done for messaging: to create a platform that uses brevity to pare communications to its essential elements. The problem with Vine, however, is that users already have an option to do that by using a single still image instead of a short clip. Vine’s six-second, stop-motion movies might be seen as short versions of full-length videos, but they can just as easily be regarded as longer versions of still photos.

That does not mean you should not use them, but it does mean you should track their use and measure the results. A photo takes just a second to capture and a few seconds more to upload and write the tweet. A Vine clip may consist of several photos stitched together. The sequence can take some preparation and while the effects can be impressive and memorable, the question that a social media manager has to ask is whether the results could not be achieved in a more efficient manner.

What you will probably find is that Twitpic and Instagram make for the best casual uploads, a chance to bring users into a workplace and engage with a business for little effort. A creative Vine clip has a better chance of being shared but demands a great deal more thought and time. It is only worth doing if you have a creative idea and the time to make it work.

If you can think of something creative to Tweet like this, let me hear from you.

Companies that use social media usually expect their social media managers to be able to show ROI figures. Those numbers are not easy to put together. You can point to views and likes, comments and click-throughs but proving that this social activity is translating into sales is much harder to do.

That does not mean it is not happening. It is just hard to show how a closer relationship with a follower who reads posts and sees the brand day after day, translates one day into a purchase.

But ROI figures do not have to relate to measurable sales growth. Not all social media activity is planned with the aim of turning viewers into customers.

I worked at Raytheon in Waltham, MA, for a while and have even used their radar and GPS on my sail boat, but Raytheon has a very small number of customers and the size of its potential market is never going to grow. Outside of pleasure boat radar and GPS, the defense firm makes rockets, missiles, radars and other military technology mostly for the US government.

Even the pleasure boat market is limited and goes unmentioned in their website, so you would think then that the firm would have little reason to be active on social media. Its social media managers are not hoping that their updates and tweets will result in the sale of an air-to-ground missile to a follower who liked the filter they used on an Instagram pic.

And yet the company has a strong social media presence made up of a Facebook page, a LinkedIn account, a YouTube channel, a Google-Plus account, and four Twitter timelines.

For a company with nothing to sell to its followers, that is a lot of activity that is not going to translate into measurable revenue.

But for Raytheon, that activity is necessary.

How Do You Count GPAs?

The company might not be pushing products to its followers, but does have something to sell to them: the possibility of a rewarding career.

Of those four Twitter timelines, one is about the company’s achievements; one is about math; and two are related directly to jobs and graduate employment. Raytheon’s Facebook page talks about some corporate news, but most of its posts discuss the sort of topics and events that science students might find interesting or want to attend.

The people running Raytheon’s social media activity understand that in order to have good products to sell, it needs to employ good science graduates to make those products. Today, those graduates are more likely to think of a career at Google or Apple, or some other firm where their friends can see the products they make than with a defense firm whose products are kept hidden on military bases.

Being active on social media, and on a wide variety of different social media platforms, is a vital part of the company’s outreach program to contact young scientists and show them the benefits of a career with a defense company.

That is a use of social media that is often overlooked. As companies demand proof of the results of their social media activities, it is important to remember that those returns on their investment do not have to take the form of improved sales figures. They can also take the form of improved recruitment figures and a better quality of applicant.

How you measure that, though, is no more easy than showing the ROI of social media branding.  Here it might almost be funny, but not relevant, to end with a variation of my favorite quote: “Half the money I spend on social media is wasted; the problem is, I don’t know which half.”

Social media is an equal opportunity.  Big companies can employ large, dedicated teams to send out their posts, to upload their pictures, and to reply to comments, but there is no guarantee that their bigger budgets efforts will produce bigger results.  Coca Cola’s Facebook page was famously started not by the company’s marketing division, which missed the value of social media, but by two fans who managed to build a giant following which they later agreed to hand over to the drinks company. 

Too often, large firms settle for turning their Facebook pages into landing pages for advertisements placed on the platform, or they ask questions or beg for comments to extend reach and to spread themselves across social media.   Instead of building relationships that turn customers into fans, they turn ads that treat social media as a billboard.

Some firms though, do get it right, and they are often the firms you might not expect.

Sapient India, for example, is the Indian branch of an international marketing and technology services firm.  The company’s Indian office has been open since 1990, and it now employs about 6,500 people in the country. 

To a large extent, the company’s Facebook page is intended to motivate them. 

There are posts about the firm’s charity work and the volunteer efforts of its employees.  There are mentions of the company’s talks and shows and awards.  And there are also discussions about issues that might affect staff, such as Yahoo’s decision to stop telecommuting and its appeals for new employees.

What you will not see on the page is an attempt to push products or services.  It is possible to read post after post on the Facebook page and still come away without a clear idea of what the company does.  Instead, you would have a clear idea that Sapient India is a fun place to work, a place that cares about its employees, and a place that can help ambitious staff to achieve their potential.

For Sapient employees, it is as enjoyable a read as an internal staff newsletter.  For engineers and other experts wondering where to work, it is a useful opportunity to see inside a business competing for their skills.

And for social media marketers, it is a great example of how even a B2B business can create an effective platform on Facebook.

Individuals Are Brands Too

The same surprises can turn up on Twitter.  British soccer player Michael Owen is just one of a large number of celebrities on the site giving fans (he has nearly two million followers) a glimpse into his real life.  But while many of those celebrities settle for letting their assistants tweet their show dates or gratitude to their fans, Owen uploads pictures of himself playing hide and seek with his children or taking his family to the local swimming pool. 

The effect is the feeling of a real relationship with a real person rather than the kind of distance stars usually prefer to keep from the supporters on which their brand relies.

Both Facebook and Twitter are filled with good examples like these, examples of businesses and individuals who are using social media well and naturally.  As you use social media, keep an eye out for them, follow them — and copy their techniques.

Do not be afraid. 

One of the most remarkable things about using social media for promotion is the ways in which people get it wrong — even the very simple stuff.  Struggling to figure out the best targets for your Facebook ads is understandable, and A/B testing the copy on those ads takes time, effort and a head for figures.  But the basics? Using Facebook to maintain relationships with a fan base, to provide updates, to build curiosity, and to reach friends of your biggest fans? That should be simple, right?

And yet so many people are getting it wrong — and they are often the people you would think would be the ones most likely to get it right.

Kickstarter, for example, is a great match for Facebook.  Success on the crowdfunding site requires constantly reminding people to pay up, telling their friends, and maintaining their interest in the product that the campaign is hoping to produce.  Plenty of successful fundraisers have spoken of the importance of using social media in general and Facebook, in particular, to keep the campaign rolling forward.  The site even embeds a “like” button on the campaign page to help the content spread easily on social media.

Some of the small businesses on the site have done a great job of mixing Facebook with Kickstarter.  Dark Energy’s Reservoir, for example, raised $113,433 to fund development of its portable phone charger.  The company’s Facebook page contains constant updates, lots of expressions of gratitude, pictures and videos, reports of write-ups in the media, and even direct invitations to leave comments to keep the campaign buzzing.  The page picked up over 1,500 “likes.”  That might not sound like much but it was enough to beat the firm’s $100,000 target.

Other businesses though have taken a less professional approach — even when they are getting everything else right.

Confusing Business and Personal Pages

Mycestro describes its product as the “next generation 3D mouse.”  It is actually a kind of large button that sits on the index finger and controls a computer through movement in the same way that a mouse does.  It is an idea that resonated, picking up nearly a quarter of a million dollars in pledges.  And yet the creator, Nick Mastandrea, chose to promote the campaign on his personal page  instead of on the company’s business page.  It is an odd choice that does not seem to have done his campaign any harm.  The page is filled with updates and press mentions, product images and links.  But to read them, you have to look around personal posts and pictures of friends, read comments from family and see shared videos that Mastandrea happened to like.

The overall impression is a lack of focus, and you have to wonder what his friends think of a page that talks only about his work.  All of that product information would have been better placed on his business page where it belongs.

But while confusing business and personal pages is a common early mistake for commercial Facebook users, there is one that is even bigger and much more destructive: not using Facebook at all.  Take a look at the comics section of Kickstarter and you will find plenty of campaigns that do not mention their Facebook page anywhere.  Those cool kids really should know better.  

That is the amount that Facebook will charge to make sure that your message ends up in his personal inbox rather than his “other” inbox. That second folder, which looks a lot like a spam filter, is where messages arrive from people with whom you do not have a direct connection. You might not even realize you have one. (You can access it by pressing the messages icon at the top of the page. It is the grayed-out, almost invisible link at the top of the drop-down box.)

The charge is relatively new. I am sure that they got the idea from LinkedIn.  Facebook announced back in December that it would start rolling out $1 fees for messages to the inboxes of people outside the sender’s circle of connections. As LinkedIn has proven, it keeps all the mass mailings to zero. 

Since then, the company has been playing with different price points for different users. Presumably, a dollar to contact Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook is a price that many people feel is worth paying. A one-hundred-dollar-message, which is still likely to be ignored, might make the sender think twice.

It works for LinkedIn, but for Facebook it is difficult to see how the payment could benefit anyone. The sender is effectively paying a buck to get around the recipient’s spam filter, something which the recipient is hardly likely to welcome. The message is more likely to be read in an inbox than in the “other” box, but it still does not mean it will get a response. And while Facebook has not said how much money the service has generated, it is hardly likely to be a major source of cash for the $100 billion company.

The Benefit of a Buck

But the fee does deliver one benefit besides stopping mass mailings. If you get a message saying that you have to cough up a buck to write a message to someone on Facebook, think of it as a reminder that you are doing something wrong.

You should not be sending messages to people you do not know on Facebook. You should be building connections with them first. You should follow their page, place comments on their posts and mention them in your own posts so that you drag them back to your page.

You do not have to invite them to follow you, “like” you, or “friend” you but, if you are saying the right things, offering valuable insight and delivering content that they find interesting, you should find that the response happens anyway.

At that point, any message you send them will not be a demand that primarily benefits you — the usual characteristic of unsolicited mail. It will be received as an offer that can benefit the recipient. Because your contact now knows you, he or she will know that you have got a service or a product that can help.

It takes longer to build that relationship, but not only will your message get read, it will not cost you a hundred bucks (or even a dollar) to send it.

Both of those sites rely on images.

Sure, they both allow comments and some description.  They both allow sharing and users are expected to follow each other’s contributions exactly as they do on other social media platforms. 

But the content they are sharing is visual.  It is not tweets or updates, and certainly not blog posts.  It is photographs and images that can be seen, admired, and enjoyed at a glance.

Dumbing Down?

As a side comment, I suppose you could initially think that the popularity of pictures as opposed to writing is the dumbing down of the Internet, and in a way it probably is.  But remember that each and every day you visual intake (if you are not blind) is the dominate sense you have.  You are viewing and taking in everything around you.  People need and are attracted by that need for visual contact on the Internet, too.

For business users, that is an important lesson, and it is one that has not been lost on a number of companies.  Top Instagram users are already being commissioned to attend corporate events and sponsored shows, shooting pictures that they share with their giant audiences.  Brian DiFeo (@bridif) and Liz Eswein (@newyorkcity) of Instagram marketing company, The Mobile Media Lab, for example, have been paid to cover the Volvo Ocean Race, a six-day sailing event held in Miami, a campaign to promote a range of sunglasses, and even a New York Rangers playoff game against the Ottawa Senators at Madison Square Garden, for which they were paid by Delta, the team’s sponsor.

The companies paying those smartphone-wielding photographers recognize the distance those images can travel when they are shared on social media platforms, the reach they can gain to new audiences and the branding power the sites can give them.

But you do not need to hire a leading Instagram expert to give your business — or the businesses you represent — similar results.

You just have to make sure that you are adding plenty of pictures to your social media streams. 

Build Anticipation by Showing One Picture in Five Parts

That does not mean you should be including a picture in every post you tweet or every update you publish.  But you should be uploading an image once a day.  You can shoot behind the scenes of the business, reveal how the products are put together and give sneak peeks into the new labels or package designs that customers can look forward to seeing.  Like the leaks that Apple and other businesses like to slip out before a launch, they will help to build anticipation for the product’s arrival.  Headline Publishing, for example, recently used its Facebook page to display a series of excerpts from the cover of author Neil Gaiman’s new book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  The cover was revealed in five installments, picking up more than 400 shares for the final picture.

You can also take pictures of the people behind the business.  Shoot the odd portrait and add a description explaining who answers the phone at the company, who does the design and who does the engineering, and you will go a long way towards deepening the relationship between the company and the audience.

Build up a bank of images that you can turn to at least once a day, and you can be certain you will be riding social media’s most popular wave.