Social media is cool! Blogging and podcasts are cool! We're so cutting edge! Twitter is like the future here today, and no one knows about it!

Yeah, whatever.

The people looking at social media long and hard fall into a few camps, and I'm writing this for those who are scrunching their noses up and asking, "how exactly does this improve my business?"

For the rest of you who like to connect, who love the conversations, who've found their next water cooler... awesome. Keep doing that. I do. But I'm here to talk to those business-minded folks who have to explain to their bosses how blogging is going to sell more sandwiches.

Truth Is, It Won't

Blogging and social media and all these whiz-bang tools don't sell things. People sell things. People who know how to sell things sell things. This social media stuff is great, but it's a set of tools, so you've gotta pull out of the "yippee! hooray!" cloud for a bit and look at basic selling mechanisms.

The trick is, social media for business (external-facing) is a way to be a salesperson when you're not directly face to face with a customer. It's a bunch of tools hidden inside.

Let's lay them out in cold detail:

Your Business-Making Social Media Kit

Blog or Web site

Between the two, I think a blog is better because it comes loaded with inbound marketing potential. That means people will come to it and will want to hear what you're saying (provided you write useful things for your customers, and not about how awesome your product is).

But, in any case, you need a storefront—and this is it. As such, are your sales clearly marked? Are your "registers" ready and obvious for ringing? Do people know what you're selling and how you intend to do business? Making sure that the answers are "yes" is an important priority.

RSS and email subscriptions

We're still talking about your blog: Make sure people can subscribe to your content and get it sent to them in a format that matters to them. My blog reaches over 50% of its user base by email. (I wouldn't want to read me in email, but you do. Fine by me.) Make it easy for people to connect with your materials.

Twitter and other Social-Network Sites

Find out (really fast) whether your customers are on Twitter. Use https://search.twitter.com and think long and hard about the terms that people would use to talk about your potential marketplace. Search dozens of ways and see what comes up.

Do the same for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and anywhere else that seems to make sense as a place where your customers might be online. They're there somewhere. You have to decide where and point your efforts there.

Convert, convert, convert

It's great that you have 3,000 friends on Twitter. If you're using the tool to sell, you have to look with more than one head. Friends are great, as they make allies in affirming that you're a great person, but you also need to be seeking to convert potential business. Be sure you know which are which. I don't sell to my friends. My friends sometimes bring me sales. Two totally different things.

As for those who are more prospects than friends, convert them. For those interested, make a gentle introduction to have them join your email marketing mailing list, or to sign up for updates about the company, or whatever your conversion effort is. Don't let them just reside in Twitter. Twitter isn't a database.

Content for Selling

If you're making podcasts or videos or e-books or other content, you face a little "social media community" hurdle: People are wary of registering via forms to get your free content, so the traffic to that content diminishes—but counting up 10,000 views on YouTube that you can't measure as sales isn't all that fun, either.

My suggestion: Add a lead-capture opt-in CGI form under the embedded content in the blog post where you offer the video (or whatever product). If you're doing audio podcasting, mention a place where people can go to sign up to get show notes and more info. Always give something back for the request to add someone to a list, but ask. Don't eschew this just because some folks will be wary. Some want your information, and you want their business.

Conferences and Face-to-Face Events

Lots of people seem to fall down during their face-to-face interactions. Online community marketing and relationship building gets you about 70-80% of the way there, but face-to-face closes the deal. I've never closed anything bigger than a speaking engagement without a face-to-face visit. Sorry, bucky, you still need to hop on airplanes (where I'm writing this post).

Do your homework before going to events. Figure out who's going. Figure out who are potential prospects. Plumb LinkedIn and Facebook to see who lives where the conference is going to be. Ask for as many meetings as you can. Make the meetings over coffee or drinks, and keep them to 20 minutes max, even if it's a win.

Bring useful business cards, not clever ones. Bring cards that tell people what your goals are, or how easiest to reach you (versus 200 ways to get in touch). And then do the magic trick: Get their card. It doesn't matter how many you hand out: If you're not collecting, you're not building leads to generate prospects and close sales. If you're not doing that, you're wasting (goodwill aside) your company's money on the trip.

Does This Make Me Look Harsh?

2009 is a tricky year. Budgets are cut all around. Companies need more sales for less money, and so they're flocking to social-media tools to get those results. Unfortunately, the brilliant sales people and marketers who haven't been using these tools are at a loss.

They know how to sell. They know how to use their old channels and metrics. They've come to this social media world without the tools, the language, the culture, or the measurements... and we, the social media nerds, haven't given them much help.

Stop telling people they don't get it. Want to hear a rant? Here goes: I have several times asked very basic business questions on Twitter and received many lackluster answers. For as much as many of us are so proud of our social-media street cred, we don't know how to sell. We don't understand how advertising, marketing, PR, and other business communications work together. And we don't understand how the C-suite in businesses wants things done.

Your Next Actions

Look again at the starter list above. Look at what you're already doing for business. Now, take a nice big white piece of paper and draw some circles and boxes as appropriate:

• Business objective (such as "sell more lawnmowers")
• Target audience (such as "moms")
• Sales target (200 mowers a quarter)
• Marketing plan (both the traditional offline stuff and the social media stuff).
• "What I need" (boxes and circles showing what you need to know, like "where are my customers?")
• Selling mechanisms: In offline marketing, you might offer coupons or tracking codes or in-store promotions. In online, what will you offer? Affiliate marketing programs? Awareness campaigns leading to a site with a fat "buy now" button, or a "request in-person demo" button? What's your killing field for sales?
• Community requirements: What do your customers (who are already online, we know) need from you that online can deliver? Would conversations in Twitter be useful? (Comcast and Whole Foods and Molson and Starbucks and others would say they are.)
• Listening: How will you hear what people are saying? The new metrics of the social Web involve some messy listening efforts, too.
• Needle movers: Write down what will convince you that you've been successful.

Don't Do Everything. Try Something

I'm a lab rat. I spend lots of time trying new mechanisms to see how they impact business communications and online communities. I do lots and lots of testing. That may not be how you run your business—but people like me exist to offer you simple, bite-sized ways to get into the game.

My recommendation? Start with the drawing exercise above. Whenever you're stuck, reach out on a social network and ask people how they solved XYZ issue. Be as specific as you're comfortable being. And if you get really stuck, reach out to someone who has some experience in the specific space.

Then? Try something. Pick something you can measure. It might be "let's see if I can get 100 people to join my Facebook group about our lawnmowers." (I'm not sure why I'm using lawnmowers as an example.) And then give yourself a deadline. Then, through trial and error, see how you can best form the group—and see what you learn, again through trial and error, once you have the group in place. Learn whether the interactions there are useful. And move on after a few months.

You don't have time for huge ramp-ups. Yes, you need a few months to see results (It's like going to the gym). But if someone tells you that it'll be a year before you see any kind of measurable change, run away screaming. Or, easier still, don't pay them.

It's a Brave New World

One part is true: This is all very fresh, and there are not many case studies. But think about this: People buy into case studies because they are a tangible way to say "I'm not the only idiot who tried this, boss." It's a great ass-covering tool, I know.

If you want to wait for all the good case studies, give me two years while I help your competition succeed, and then I'll send you all of mine for free. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep working on integrating the new stuff to the basic stuff, because I think that's where the action is, my friends.

Are you going to make this your time to put a toe in the water? If not, don't worry: You can always just rejoin the gee-whiz crowd and talk about how cool it all is. It's cool, for sure. But you're smart, and you know that fear is just a reaction to the unknown. There are resources out there that help alleviate fears, acting as water wings for your first swimming lessons. That's how I'd do it.

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