Businesses who have not yet implemented social media into their marketing plans are wondering why they should and what kind of ROI they can expect. There are some businesses who have had success in quantifying the return of their social media efforts. One such company is Dell. Dell has used Twitter to both improve customer satisfaction and to drive buyers to their outlet store. They were able to survey their Twitter followers to determine what percentage found out about the outlet store through Twitter and using that quantify new revenue numbers. Other businesses are also finding creative ways to do the same for their social media plans. Here’s a great article at Mashable.com with ideas on how to measure the ROI of your social media plan. Note: The slide show in the Mashable article is a good one!

Even Dell could not have known what their results would be before they put forth the effort. There is no way to know prior to implementing a social media strategy exactly what the ROI will be, but if you have clear goals such as customer retention, conversion to sales, engagement or driving web traffic, etc. you will be able to measure the results as your strategy progresses.

Social media is simply a new tool in the marketer’s toolbox. The more time and resources you invest into it and the more creative uses you find for it, the more influential it becomes. You print a brochure and it isn’t just the brochure itself that sells your product, it is also how you use the brochure. Some brochures get thrown out and have no influence and others make a difference in a person’s decision to buy.

But before you head into implementing a social media strategy, you need to have a clear concept of wha

Yelp.com has just added GPS “check in” functionality and will be a contender with Foursquare. Add them to the previous post as a platform that should be incorporated into social media strategy for restaurants and bars. For more information see Mashable.com.

For all of you restaurants, bars and retailer out there, we recommend incorporating Foursquare into your social media strategy. We think that Foursquare has the potential to become mainstream as Facebook has done and if so it will be the hot new tool to drive customers to your establishment.

Here is a case study about how a BBQ restaurant in Raleigh uses Foursquare and Twitter. The model is that users of hand held devices equipped with GPS can “check in” at establishments. As part of a game, they earn points and you know what customers are at your establishment. These customers can be your brand ambassadors. Once you embrace the technology, the idea is really common sense. Wouldn’t you go out of your way to make any regular customer feel welcome? The addition of social media to your strategy does not mean that you are changing your philosophy or business model. This social media technology just gives you some additional ways to reach out to both regular and new customers.

You will want to offer freebies for Foursquare mayors and specials for those who check in regularly. You will also want to monitor tips about your business to see what people are saying.

Want to take it a step further? Turn social media into currency and work Twitter and Foursquare into your customer loyalty program

For the past fifteen years Fineman PR has been publishing a list of the Top 10 PR Blunders for the year. What is different about this year’s list is that many of the blunders happened in the social media sphere, either directly by the organization or by a slow response to something published in the social media sphere. Two of these blunders were people who were actually able to right wrongs by using social media and the web to publicize the issue.

In an interview with Bulldog Reporter’s Daily ‘Dog, Michael Fineman, President, Fineman PR said, “In the old days, you had to get on top of a crisis in the first 48 hours. Now, it’s the first 48 minutes. In those minutes, you have a responsibility to contain the crisis and alert any audiences that may be in danger or are being impacted by the crisis. Your response must be instantaneous.” Social media has pushed PR professionals to consistently monitor the news, blogs and social media outlets, and it has drastically changed the time frame within which we have to react.

Anyone who knows anything about social media will tell you that to succeed you must be transparent. While we would always advise client to be so, it is more important now than ever. Everyone makes mistakes and the best advice is to be transparent, take responsibility and/or set the record straight, as appropriate.

What is also made clear by this list is that an employee’s actions represent the company (United Airlines and Dominos). Today it is easier than every for those actions to be apparent to the public and communicated to the public quickly and in scale. Customer service and public relations may be making a movement to be intertwined more than ever. Some of the more prominent Twitter success stories (Comcast and Dell) are companies who have used the service to proactively addressed customer dissatisfaction. Maybe CCSO, Chief Customer Service Officer, will even become a new job function.

As we have become more engaged on Twitter over the past couple of months we have seen Twitter work its way up to our top traffic source. Our number of Twitter followers has increased and likely many of them are clicking through to our website link to learn more about us before deciding whether to follow. Also during the past couple of months we have been more dedicated to this new blog and seen it work its way up to the second most visited page of our website. We have posted links on Twitter to our blog posts and likely some of our followers have clicked through to read our posts. Hopefully they have found them informative!

According to Mashable, including a link in your Twitter profile is a “great way to drive traffic back to your destination of choice; although, the link does not provide any offsite reputation – a.k.a. SEO link juice – due to a “Nofollow” attribute that Twitter has in place.”

As an agency sometimes we forget to market ourselves as we market our clients. There are many times in this career where I have quoted the old saying that the cobbler’s son has no shoes. We are proud to say that in this case we are implementing some of the tactics that we encourage for our clients and seeing them work.

What we need to keep in mind both for ourselves, and for our clients, is that while these SEO and social marketing initiatives may help drive traffic and position us as knowledgeable, or maybe even experts if we are successful, it will require a tipping point to actually result in new business.

Social media is evolving at the speed of light. We have only had a glimpse of what potential it may eventually have to marketers and public relations professionals. Twitter just recently added the ability to create lists to organize the torrents of data available. This will have an impact on the industry in ways that we are just coming to understand. We have ourselves implemented lists on our Twitter account in order to organize data and be able to read information by topic rather than when it was posted. In doing so we also discovered that it is a great way to find other relevant people to follow. A recent post at Mashable.com gives you ideas how others are using this new functionality.

A recent study tells us that employers place more value on social media skills than traditional public relations skills. According to the 2009 Digital Readiness Report, a study produced by iPressroom, Korn/Ferry International and PRSA, public relations leads marketing in the management of social media communications channels whereas marketing leads in managing e-mail marketing and SEO. Most social media activities revolve around communicating with audiences, producing content, and serving as a spokesperson for an organization, as do public relations activities, So this makes sense to us. It is and will continue to be very important for public relations and marketing professionals to hone their social media skills and knowledge.

As we have only seen a glimpse of the potential gains, we have also only seen a glimpse of the potential pitfalls and dangers of social media. It is important for companies and marketing and PR professionals to educate themselves about social media and to strategize and experiment as their budgets and time constraints allow for both of these reasons.

Though social media has revolutionized available communications channels, we believe that it will remain one of many marketing channels available to business and one that needs to be seamlessly integrated with the others.