Here’s my post on what I got out of Tom Parish’s SM Marketing Metrics panel. If you’re looking to read about the Meebo/Tweeter mini-revolt, it’s in posts below. Email me or drop a comment if you have any questions or want clarification on any of these points. I’m sarasco (at) refreshweb (dot) com.I’m here in the audience listening to experts discuss and debate social media strategies and metrics. I had always thought SM would be easier with bigger companies. They already have brand following and a huge number of users. If 1% of the Microsoft or Apple users create content and interact in meaningful ways, that’s a heck of a lot of people. Those are the kinds of things to look at and wish for when you’re approaching SM for a small or medium sized business. The audience size makes it easier. However, the giant gnarly corporate structure makes it incredibly hard to get things implemented–and you have a lot more pressure to prove the value of something. Regardless of the size of your organization, there are some things that hold true.

• You can’t start by hosting a fancy, new platform for interaction. You start small, build a reputation and experience. Then you can move into the next phase.
• Blogs are where to start. It’s not unusual for the page views of the blog to surpass those of the site. The buzz that a blog can generate may very well be the push the C-levels need to give the go-ahead to moving into further SM programs.
• The other way to go might be an internal effort. If people start interacting and being more productive through the ease of social media interactions, how much more valuable will the interaction be once it introduces feedback and input from customers? Internal, firewalled blogs like Dell’s are one option, but really anything where you get people from different departments able to be talking to each other is a good thing.
• Moving customers out of the marketing loop and into one for retention risks losing their customer evangelism to their friends because they stop being marketed to. The message becomes that you’re not as valuable anymore, when, in fact, these people are incredibly valuable assets that are seriously under-utilized. SM is a way o keep them in the marketing loop while giving them tools they need to evangelize to their friends.
• Regarding reputation and crisis management… A press release is not a platform. When these things happen, you have the opportunity to demonstrate how it could have been avoided and how you can fix it through social media. Companies that had been hesitant or resistant before are often suddenly very receptive once they understand how helpful using SM could have been.

The last question was awesome: Regarding the net gen who uses social media and networks constantly and in a totally integrated way, there are billions of dollars at stake going forward. What needs to be proved and how do you utilize these for marketing in an authentic and provable way? The panelists talked about creating things of lasting value that are actually useful–i.e., actual content and not ads. I agree, but what do you think?