If you enter into social media without a plan, you will fail. Period.

All the hours you spent will be wasted, you will receive no traffic bump, there will be no engagement, no one will care and you will learn nothing. Except maybe that you’re an idiot and that you should have listened to me when I told you to create a social media plan. You wouldn’t jump into a raging river without knowing how to swim, don’t create a Twitter account without knowing how to use it.

Grab a pen, I’m about to save your life.

Just because the tools of social media are free doesn’t mean they come without their own barrier to entry. The barrier is the knowledge of how to use them. Before you get started with using social media, you need to understand the tools you’ll be using. When we work with clients on their social media strategy for their business, here’s a bit of what we’re always sure to discuss with them.

Secure Your Brand

The first step of a successful (and long term) social media plan is to grab your brand everywhere you can, regardless of whether or not you plan to use it. It’s important that you have control of your identity all over the Web.  It’s always better to have the username and not use it, then need to wait and kick yourself later when someone else grabs it. Having a unified social media username is very important in establishing trust with other members (and potential press contacts) who may belong to multiple communities with you. You want them to know that you’re the same person.  Appearing as [cameraexpert] on one network and [cameras343] on another may confuse them.

To help ease the mind numbing task of username registration, we suggest using Knowem to search a large listing of social media sites. One search will tell you where your brand is still available on 120 different social media sites. (We also use their premium service to register the profiles for us since we’re too lazy busy to register all those profiles ourselves).

Set Your Metrics

Listen to me. Do NOT enter social media until you know what you want to get out of it. Period. If you don’t know what “success” is for you, then you’re not ready to start yet. It also means you should cut back on your blog reading.

Before you jump in, define success. Is it:

• Building buzz and conversation around a particular product?
• Better overall brand awareness?
• More traffic?
• Blog subscribers? Increased leads?
• New knowledge about your customers and how they view your brand?

Once you know that, the next step in your social media planning is to figure out how you’re going to measure success.. You want to identify your challenges, goals and concepts to determine how “buzz” will be quantified. Is it blog comments, conversions, links, Twitter talk, better brand recognition? If you can’t measure whether or not you’re meeting your goals, then you’re going to fail before you even start. It will limit your ability to bench mark results and render you unable to implement changes.

If you don’t take the time to figure out (a) what you want and (b) how you’re going to get it, you will fail in social media. In fact, you’ll fail in life.

Know Who You Are

[259x194]I tend to believe that for most businesses,

How To Pick The Best Social Network For Your Brand

by Lisa Barone on 12/15/2010 · 10 comments | Social Media

[340x226]My inbox is swamped right now. It’s swamped with endless end-of-the-year statistics all hailing the same thing – businesses are looking to up their investment in social media in 2011. They’re looking to these channels for promotion, lead generation and as alternate forms of customer service. And that’s great. But before you start throwing your money into social media, make sure you’re setting up shop on the right network. Because it doesn’t matter how pretty a house you build if you’re putting it in the wrong neighborhood.

Below you’ll find a series of questions I’d recommend businesses ask themselves before they join any social network. While all the different Twitters, LinkedIns, Facebooks and MySpaces are great, they’re only great if you’re using the right one for your business. Otherwise you’re just working to build a collection of useless accounts.

Why are the strengths of this site?

Whether it’s Twitter, Dailybooth or Flickr, it doesn’t matter. Before you decide to allocate resources to a particular site, know why you’re doing it. How will being on Twitter help your business? What can you do here more efficiently than through a different platform? What is the goal of Twitter for you? And unless you want to get smacked, don’t just recite what you read on Mashable or some other social media blog. Actually evaluate the site and decide how it’s functionality will help you. Just because LinkedIn is great for one business, doesn’t mean it’s going to be a fit for yours. You want to find what is. Decide what you need and how this site can help you get it. If you can’t figure out how this site will help you, find another one.

How much time can you afford to spend there each day/week?

I’m talking realistically, not in your social media dream world. How much time can you realistically spend to maintaining your Facebook page? An hour a day? An hour a week? An hour a month?

The amount of time you can spend will be directly tied to whether you’re successful or not. Scott Stratten often states in presentations that his Twitter followers really start to grew when he began dedicating a significant amount of time to interacting on Twitter (he has 74,768 followers at publishing). Shocking, right? Well, not really. These are social channels. In order to see a return on them, you have to actually be social on them. If you only have half an hour a week to build brand awareness, then it’s probably not going to work for you. Social media, much like SEO and most other parts of your marketing identify, are not one-time investments. You need to actually be there and show people that you’re part of that community. The only thing worse than not having a presence on an important social network is having a crappy one. Because then it’s not ignorance, it’s just that you don’t care. If you don’t have time to raise the baby, don’t have one. Less therapy for everyone.

What are the demands of this site?

When you go and create that social media account – you’re actually going to be expected to do something with it. If it’s a Twitter account you’ll need someone to update,