“Active members using our community to interact and engage with us controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period.

Active partners of NetApp engaging in the community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue over the same time period.”

- Navneet Grewal, Director Digital Marketing

Introduction: NetApp launched its first online community in early 2008 to help executives engage and gain a stronger understanding of the products and solutions offered by NetApp as well as to build awareness for the growing storage industry among IT professionals. The initial community, built on Jive Software, was growing in size but engagement behavior and value derived from the community was low. Beginning in August of 2008, NetApp hired Impact Interactions to rebuild their strategy, help the company better meet the needs of its community, and align reporting to real world business goals that demonstrate the value of their community.

Addressing the Issues: After a review of the community, a competitive analysis, and review of appropriate metrics, the Impact Interactions’ team identified several areas which were limiting NetApp’s business results. The main areas of focus for our work included:

1. Restructuring the community’s offerings and forums to meet member needs and provide a clear path to engagement and value (Products and Services categories were redefined to meet member expectations and to provide a stronger focus, changed the community’s architecture to allow member measurement using the Jive Software analytics, and reduced the categories of available forums in order to concentrate conversations in appropriate areas to reduce the cost and time of moderation)
2. Redefining processes of managing the community using our best practices (Engagement and escalation processes, internal subject matter expert recruitment)
3. External member recognition process
4. Alignment of content strategy to NetApp’s business goals (Increased percentage of thought leadership content to attract influencers & decision makers, added partner focused forum & content to recruit NetApp partners into the community as subject matter experts, refocused outreach to concentrate less on technical information and more on business results  like TCO, ROI, Customer Success Stories)
5. Internal team education (Training on B2B focused approach using Impact Interactions’ best practices and experience, reduced B2C tactics that focused on awareness and pushing information rather than building engagement and relationships with members)
6. Understanding key metrics to report to build a health index for the community while also setting achievable KPIs (key performance indicators)
7. Developed measurement framework utilizing Jive Software, Omniture, and Business Objects to deliver focused reports (Traffic – baseline metrics, Behavior – engagement metrics, Value – business metrics with an economic value $ assigned)

The team at NetApp realigned their community using Impact Interactions’ recommendations. One of the main changes was moving forum categories into distinct sub-communities on the Jive platform in order to increase visibility into how members were using each area of the community. Initially, all areas had been under a single community architecture which due to Jive Software analytic limitations reduced visibility significantly into how individual areas of the community were performing.

Social Media Supports Community to Engage Members: As part of Impact Interactions’ ongoing engagement with NetApp, we performed a full social media audit to understand how audiences outside of the community had their information needs met. Having the social media run by their Public Relations firm for the previous two years had achieved minimal results. This was due to poor alignment, execution, and messaging using social tactics such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, and Facebook were simply used as RSS fed message repeaters without a clear goal or objective for each entity. This caused the same exact message to be placed in multiple places despite different audiences. The result was that there was no integration of effort to utilize the strong results of the community with the marketing efforts of the PR firm’s actions. This wasted effort resulted in many lost opportunities for valuable engagement.

To correct this, as part of our strategy work, Impact Interactions recommended the following tactical changes to NetApp’s current strategy. First, the team needed to refocus social away from press release based activities to deliver integrated marketing, digitally relevant content, video, and thought leadership which was missing in action. In conjunction with this refocusing, there also needed to be a realignment of social effort to integrate community, NetApp.com, and digital marketing assets to better meet the information needs of multiple audiences using social tools. While the audiences are similar, there are differences in how segments like to gather information and interact with companies. This requires a stronger focus on each platform’s unique audience to meet their needs properly.  We also recommended that NetApp develop a social listening program to expand the influencers’ network and cultivate stronger relationships outside of existing channels.

For internal teams, we recommended that NetApp align internal efforts through social media guidelines and processes including the use of a social media and community playbook to educate multiple stakeholder teams throughout the organization. To allow for self-service reporting and measurement, it was recommended that NetApp develop a social media dashboard to report results across the enterprise, including CRM data as the value point to prove the importance of the social and community projects in meeting specific business objectives (and KPIs).

Business Results Achieved: Over the last three years, NetApp continued to focus on meeting members’ needs in order to build engagement. This focus increased engagement significantly over time allowing Impact Interactions to implement its value framework methodology to demonstrate the economic value of the community to senior management. This framework was built using data from multiple sources including Jive Software, Omniture, and NetApp’s CRM system and was completed in 2011.

The measured results were impressive. As detailed in a presentation at iStrategy’s San Francisco meeting by Navneet Grewal, active members (defined as those who contribute more than 10 items in a six month period) using NetApp’s marketing community to interact and engage controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in sales revenue over a 6 month period. During the same time period, active partners of NetApp engaging in the marketing community delivered over half a billion dollars in partner owned sales revenue to NetApp.

Summary and Takeaways: By realigning its community to focus strongly on influencers and business decision makers, NetApp has realized significant economic value from its community.

1. Lesson One: Don’t allow the limitations of your software platform mislead you into believing that value cannot be measured
2. Lesson Two: Use an architectural scheme that provides the most insight into member activities while providing a clear path for engagement to members
3. Lesson Three: Identify your audience clearly and provide content that meets their needs in order to build engagement both in controlled sites (community) and non-controlled (social)
4. Lesson Four: Be wary of using press releases as a major component of your social content strategy
5. Lesson Five: Each social site has a slightly different audience that is linked to your organization for a slightly different reason. Utilize a content focus that aligns to those needs rather than shot-gunning the same content everywhere
6. Lesson Six: Getting to the value is hard work. It requires relationships, strong data analysis, and the ability to combine your CRM data with your community and/or social data.

When organizations meet the needs of their audiences, the value realized can be substantial as the results of NetApp clearly show. To learn how your organization can benefit from our expertise, please contact us.

Recent Gallup research shows that brands have very little influence on the decision of a consumer to purchase their product or service. Instead, they seek out the opinions of their spouse, children, friends, and others. At the very bottom of the totem pole are company sponsored Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. So does that mean that Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets are useless to brands when trying to cultivate their audience? Hardly. It simply means that brands cannot rely solely on putting up Facebook posts or sending out Tweets with quips about company information or the newest rebate. Brands must focus on truly engaging users if they want to build an audience that will, in turn, go out and spread the word. Brands have to put in the time and effort to create passionate engaged followers.

Source: Social Media: The Three Big Myths, Gallup

When brands don’t nurture these relationships they are opening the door for a larger audience to speak negatively or ambivalently about them. Look at the chart below that describes the different types of engaged users. What should stand out to you is the fact that an actively disengaged customer is just as likely to talk to others about your product as a fully engaged customer, just in all the ways you don’t want them to. When brands have Facebook pages that exist only to fill some percieved need to be on Facebook and don’t engage the people on those pages, they risk alienating their potential audience. The problem then becomes not only the fact that people aren’t giving you Facebook likes, but that they are also now talking poorly of you offline and that is something you won’t be able to track with metrics. Putting effort into truly engaging those who engage with you on social media sites and focusing on the quality of your interactions over the quanitity of your interactions will, in turn, have a greater reach and potentially be longer lasting over time.

Source: Making the Most of Social Media, Gallup

Engaging your audience isn’t always an easy task and in times like these, when everything has to be monetized, it’s easy to get scared off by the seeming inability to truly measure the value of your online community. To some, online communities really don’t earn their keep or are really only there to preach to the already existing choir of users.  In our experience, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Online communities can be both the lifeblood of an organization as well as a platform to attract those ever elusive new users/consumers. We’ve helped several major organizations grow their online communities into vital repositories of information, communication, and conversation.  Not only that, we’ve seen these communities facilitate huge ROIs for their brand.

Richard Millington, founder of the UK based Fever Bee Community Consultancy, recently wrote an article titled “Why Branded Online Communities Are Doomed.”  Some of what he wrote has merit, but, in our view, a lot of it doesn’t because we’ve personally seen the opposite happen.

Communities CAN be an important source of revenue

“At the moment, most branded community efforts fail. Few attract more than a handful of active participants. Even those that succeed, barely deliver the ROI they promised.” -  Richard Millington

While this may be true of some online communities, blanket statements about their ability to both attract active participants and deliver the ROI they promised is patently false. We helped NetApp build their online community which has gone on to produce over half a billion (yes, billion) dollars in partner owned sales revenue. Cisco has seen a ROI of over 100% from their online community.  And there are other companies all over the country and around the globe that are seeing direct monetary benefits come out of their online communities.  Whether it’s through direct sales coming out of those communities or greater brand awareness, over all, B2B and B2C communities can and do work.

Communities aren’t just for loyal customers

“If you’re trying to reach new audiences, a community is the wrong choice. Why would people join a community for a product/service they don’t buy?” - Richard Millington

Again, this is not what we’ve experienced in our many years of helping companies build out their online communities.  If you’re trying to reach a new audience communities can be one of the BEST places to turn to.  When reading that question, we ask the question back “Why would someone buy a product that they haven’t asked other people, people who are already users, about.”  Communities are where they can get their questions answered and it’s someplace where, once they do become a user, they can return to.  They know the community will be there to help them and having a robust, active community there for your prospective customers is a benefit rather than a waste as Mr. Millington would have you believe.  Not only that, often times these communities help stave off customer support calls by answering questions within the community.  This, in turn, saves the company money and also builds quality relationships among new and loyal users.  Those new users will look to the community as a source of information and turn into loyal users resulting in even more revenue as they continue to buy more products and support your brand through word of mouth advertising.

Size matters but it can’t be one size fits all

“Communities don’t need a big launch, they need a small launch…They need very high levels of personal contact. They need to be directly invited. Most importantly, they need to be prompted for the first few weeks to participate in discussions.” -   Richard Millington

Yes and no. Mr. Millington is right that companies need to focus on nurturing their communities and even help guide the conversations sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that the community as a whole can’t be big at launch.  Directly inviting members isn’t going to get you far when it comes to building your community. We have found that only 3-5% of all invited users or users who find the community feature will go deeper than one page into the new community.  Even then, only 15-20% of those will actually stay long enough to come to their own opinion about what you’re offering and only a few of those will actually post anything. We prefer to advise our clients to look across their entire audience for places where users share interests and create a larger group of members and visitors that can interact with the community from that.  The size of the “starter” community should be based upon a percentage of your entire audience not a finite number of 50-100 as Mr. Millington suggests.

Communities are here to stay

“We need to understand that communities take time, but it’s an investment which pays off many times over.” -  Richard Millington

Now this is something we can all agree on. Communities take time but, like Mr. Millington says, it’s an investment which will pay off in the end.  Done right, online communities can be the keystone of your overall communication plan. We’ve seen them be successful time and time again. Online communities are far from doomed.  We’ve seen quite the opposite.  They can and do have measureable monetary and social effects on both new and loyal users and they are a powerful tool in your arsenal of social media tactics.

Are you attending the upcoming Marketing Profs SocialTech 2010 event in San Jose on October 26th? If so, we hope that you’ll come say hello and bring us your social media questions. Our team will be exhibiting at the event and will be available to answer questions that you may have regarding social media for technology companies.

The Impact Interactions team has a long history of helping B2B Technology companies. In 2000, our president Mike Rowland helped Cisco Systems launch and manage its first online community, The Networking Professionals Community (NetPro). Mr. Rowland also helped SAP launch its first online community, the SAP Business Community as well as an additional 18 local language communities around the globe. Both NetPro and the SAP Business Community won multiple awards for their excellence in meeting member needs. Since then, Impact Interactions’ team members have helped multiple B2B technology companies ranging from Cisco to SAP to NetApp to IBM to Intel understand how to use social media and online communities to generate leads, lower support costs, educate staff, and extend offline events.

“Too often companies focus on the tools or third party sites like Twitter or Facebook, then wonder why they aren’t getting the results they anticipated,” states Mike Rowland, president of Impact Interactions. “In the technology industry, the users are very sophisticated and have clearly defined needs that must be met to succeed. Our methodology begins with defining success from a measurement point of view. We then build out key performance indicators (KPIs) to track our success based upon three categories of measurement: Traffic, Behavior, and Value. Too often marketers substitute traffic metrics or behavior activities for value. This is why so many senior executives have difficulty believing that social media is effective, even in technology companies. In order to demonstrate true value to the organization, you have to move beyond traffic and behavior and find the economic value of social media activities.”

Recently, Impact Interactions was selected by Cisco to help with its launch of the Cisco Support Community Hall of Fame and Expert program, as well as the NetPro Poland and CSC Japan communities. Our continuing work for Cisco also includes social media reporting, community moderation, and social media consulting projects for the marketing and support channels.

Work for SAP includes partner channel social media enablement activities, Best Performance program training for partners in EMEA, as well as dashboard creation and management for SME online activities.

NetApp activities are focused primarily upon the NetApp Community, a leading information source for storage professionals. We also are working with NetApp to create a measurement methodology which proves the value of the community and corresponding social media efforts to senior executives. Additionally, we created measurement dashboards for NetApp’s management team.

Visitors to the Impact Interactions exhibition space at SocialTech 2010 will be provided with the opportunity to sign up for a free 45 minute consultation after the event to answer their specific social media questions. The event is being held at the DoubleTree San Jose on October 26, 2010. More details can be found by visiting the MarketingProfs’ event site.

“We look forward to meeting with attendees to share the best practices we developed over the past ten years helping our technology clients succeed,” states Mr. Rowland. “If social media is to move past the hype and become a successful long term strategic asset for companies, we have to demonstrate not only what works but how success is measured.”

I grew up watching television shows where each week there was a “Special Guest Star” on an episode each week. These guests provided a little extra to the show and usually were cool celebrities. Think of all the villains on Batman for example or the Brat Pack on “Vegas” or the vacationers on Fantasy Island…or for those of you a little younger, the guests on the Simpsons.

Following that idea, I’d like to introduce our Special Guest Blogger, independent analyst Matthew Lees.

Matthew is a well respected analyst in the Social Media and Online Community World (see his bio here). He is the author of reports through the Patricia Seybold Group such as:

1. Selecting An Online Community Platform
2. Best Practices In Crowdsourcing
3. Analyst Report: Lithium’s Social CRM Suite

After reading his research and reviews of his findings, I thought Matthew truly understood how to make social media technology work in an enterprise organization. So, like all good social media practitioners I followed him on Twitter (@mlees) and his blog. Matthew and I first met in person at one of Forum One’s Online Community Unconferences. We’d been reading each other’s blogs and reports and discovered that we come to the industry with the same high level focus… using these tools to improve business results. While Matthew focuses on the technology and its impact, we focus on the process and the users. Together, we cover the issues that all enterprises need to succeed in their social media projects.

We decided in late December over a crab cake lunch here in Maryland, that we should find a way to collaborate together. Our idea is to inform, educate, and drive the best practices we’ve developed to a broader audience with this blog and our twitter accounts. Matthew will be posting here over the next few months both independently and collaboratively with our team members.

If you have a suggested issue of topic for us to cover, please contact us by adding a comment on this entry or by using our contact form.

So, with that said welcome Matthew!

Mike Rowland, President

The world is adopting social media at higher and higher levels according to a recent Neilsen Report.  According to the research by Neilsen, global time spent on social media sites increased by 82% in December 2009 when compared with December 2008. Pretty large increase especially if you look into the footnotes and understand that this research is based upon only U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. No China, no India, no Russia, nor are there any Nordic countries listed.

But this growth coincides with what we’re seeing here at Impact Interactions. We’ve helped develop and launch multiple communities in countries such as China, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and elsewhere over the past several years. And while clients are still interested in their communities in the U.S. their focus is shifting. We are seeing more interest in companies asking us to help them launch communities and social media plans in countries ranging from Japan to Russia to Brazil to Mexico.

The growth in third party applications such as Twitter and Facebook have helped companies to understand the potential reach of the medium, but it is the local language social networks like StudiVZ (German) which have helped in-country marketing teams decide that they must be engaged with their customers using social tools. So even as Facebook moves past these local social media/networks, the smart marketer understands that it’s not the tool so much as it’s the growth that matters in deciding whether social media is a good tactic in a particular market.

In our experience leading a social media workshop in Innsbruck, Austria at the prestigious Management Center of Innsbruck it was clear that our non-US audience were more engaged on local language social media tools including blogs and social networks than on the U.S. offerings. (In fact, it was there that I learned more about StudiVZ and other offerings.)

That doesn’t mean that non-U.S. members are not on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. But it does mean that for the savvy global marketer the research and identification of which sites or applications to use is a bit more difficult. While the strategy remains the same, each Internet culture requires a clear focus on localized tactics. That means a cookie cutter approach using the same tools like Twitter, Facebook, or other application across multiple markets will not deliver the results you desire.

Watch the growth, it’s here to stay. But also look for the smaller sites that can deliever more value to your organization when using social media globally. As the old adage goes “All marketing is local.” The same applies to social media.

-Mike Rowland, President

Looking  at the report’s question #12 (Were your community’s metrics created in support of your organization’s broader business goals or were they created independent of a corporate business?), the following responses were given:

• 47% Created to support existing business goals
• 31% Created independently but helping refine existing business goals
• 22% Neither of the above (summarized from three additional responses)

Looking at what metrics the respondents use to support or refine existing business goals provides insight into the confusion over what constitutes value in online community and social media efforts.

Question 19 asked “What are the three most important community key performance indicators (KPIs) in the reports you send to upper level management?” The answers are a startling contrast to the answers to Question 12:

1. Number of Page Views or Clicks
2. Number of Site Visits
3. Number of Unique Visits

Why are these responses startling? Because the metrics are traffic metrics not value metrics. These are base level metrics not KPI worthy metrics for upper level managers. (In fact, three of the top five metrics measured as detailed in an earlier question were traffic metrics too: Unique Visitors, Page Views, and Visitors. Only two were not: Registrations and Posts.)

What these two questions’ responses demonstrate is that the respondents are still struggling with determining value from their community work that truly builds into measurable business objectives.

When asked about ROI, 71% of respondents confused engagement and traffic metrics with value. Only 29% correctly identified a tangible value metric to use in measuring ROI.

To provide a little clarity in reporting metrics, let’s look at how Impact Interactions’ reporting methodology can help. First, our categories are structured as follows:

• Traffic - The basic building blocks that measure “How Many?”
• Behavior – The second level of metrics measuring conversion and engagement
• Value – The highest level of community metric where the activity has an economic or dollar value associated with it (This is what management really cares about!)

Some of the actual metrics that we use for clients are as follows:

1. Traffic - Unique Visits, Unique Visitors, Page Views, etc.
2. Behavior- Page Views/Unique Visit, Page Views/Unique Visitor, Active Members/Unique Visitors, New Registrations/New Unique Visitors, Total Registrations/Total Unique Visitors, Downloads/Registered Member, Content Added/Registered Member, Content Added/Unique Visitor, Downloads/Unique Visits, Full profiles completed, Referrals from Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, etc.
3. Value – Number of successful customer support resolutions in the community, Total Contact Sales Inquiries/ Total Unique Visitors (or Registered Members), Total Leads Qualified/Generated, Product Referrals, Positive Product Reviews as a % of Total Product Reviews, Direct Revenue Generated from Community Activities, Length of Sales Cycle for community member vs non-member, Average Purchase Size/Frequency for community member vs non-member, etc.

Take a look at those metrics again. The first two categories of Traffic and Behavior can usually be obtained using the platform’s tools (like Jive, Telligent, or Lithium) or through your web analytics’ tools (like Google Analytics, Omniture, or WebTrends). The Value metrics take a little more work. In fact, to really be able to perform a realistic ROI calculation, you will need to get help from outside the community/social media area of your organization.

To derive an ROI related to marketing objectives from a community, you’ll need to access your CRM system. For a support ROI, you’ll need to know the cost per interaction in complementary/competitive areas such as a call center. The standard tools won’t get you there, you’ll have to build relationships within your organization in order to really build a solid analysis that ties back to business objectives. An ROI model built on traffic will contain far too many holes to be useful.

We’ve been helping our clients with these issues and have developed a strong set of best practices that can help you succeed in your reporting. Please feel free to share your insights into this issue and ask questions about reporting and analyzing your community and social media efforts. We’re happy to answer them and help reduce the confusion.

1. While enterprise level organizations are being very careful about spending money, there is a lot of interest in the social media area. We are seeing budgets freeing up, new projects starting and excitement about using social media to market products and services.
2. Enterprise online communities continue to launch at an amazing rate. We haven’t seen this type of growth in corporate sponsored B2B communities since 2000 when the concept was very new. The difference is that now there are third party sites like Twitter and YouTube to integrate into the communities.
3. Every one wants to avoid making mistakes, placing real best practices at a premium for enterprise companies. While there is always some learning by mistakes made in any venture, the companies we are dealing with always tell us that they want to avoid making the basic mistakes that others have made.
4. Analytics are at a premium, but not understood very well by some marketers running communities. We continue to see interest in base level metrics around traffic and basic engagement, but less understanding of value. Part of this is due to the over-reliance on Google Analytics as the main tool instead of a more powerful solution like Omniture. Google Analytics is a basic tool not a true enterprise level analytics tool in our opinion and experience.
5. In conjunction with number 4, we also see clients and prospects changing platforms in part due to poor reporting and administrative control pages. Many vendors seem to put reporting and analytics into their platform as an afterthought. Platform providers moving sharply ahead of the field in providing reporting and analytics for their software are Telligent, Lithium, and Jive to a certain degree.
6. Outsourced providers of social media expertise and management in areas such as moderation, social media monitoring, reporting, and integration are gaining more interest among enterprise level companies. With headcounts frozen or worse, organizations are looking outside their company for experienced help at an reasonable cost.
7. Lastly, the social media consulting industry remains very fractured. There are simply too many small businesses, individual consultants, and former software personnel chasing deals resulting in lower pricing and no concentration of expertise in a meaningful way. In other words, this industry is ripe for a consolidation play. This is what Jeff Dachis of the Dachis Corporation in Austin is slowly building towards. We think that there are multiple opportunities for consolidation and are actively looking for non-software companies to acquire or align with to gain a larger share of this growing market. (It’s only a matter of time before the big guys like Accenture, IBM, or big advertising agencies buy up the industry’s expertise to consolidate their market share.)

So far, 2009 has been far from the doom and gloom year that most were predicting in our industry. Certainly there has been some shakeout, but overall 2009 is shaping up as a really good year overall for social media and online community service companies.

Do you agree with these trends we’re seeing? What else are you seeing in our industry? Please share your comments below.

Mike Rowland, President

Last year, we presented this topic at the Online Community Unconference in NYC to a standing room only crowd. It’s a fun topic, albeit one that elicits strong opinions and discussions. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who is new to online communities and social media, this presentation can help you understand and avoid some of the classic mistakes being sold by the blogosphere and ‘gurus’ every day online. It’s available in our Social Media Resources area as a pdf that you can download.

For this month’s Online Community Unconference (June 10th in Mountain View, CA0, we are updating the presentation to cover even more myths that continue to gain a following despite impacting the results of communities and their teams. For example, are you using B2C thinking in your B2B community? Are you sure you need to be on third party platforms like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others? What about metrics, are you confusing traffic with value? What role should volunteers play in your community?

These and other topics will be discussed in our talk. We hope that you’ll join us.

From our experience, here is what it takes to get hired:

• A focus on business skills like written communications, presentations, and statistics
• Understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective
• A basic understanding of Marketing, eCommerce, Advertising, and Sales
• Experience as a team member who’s used the power of collaboration to help everyone succeed
• A positive attitude
• A “relaxed” professional appearance (you know what business casual means)

Did you expect that?

Notice what’s missing?

That’s right, you do not have to be a Facebook addict or have 2,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn. You don’t have to know how to build a widget to update a user for when the top 20 members are on the site. If you use Tweetdeck, great. If you have no idea what it is, no problem.

Yet, when we give career talks, advice to job seekers, and interview our own candidates they focus on their Facebook or MySpace skill, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or what online community they use. What are we focused on? Simple, can the candidate learn our business while building strong relationships with our clients? Can the candidate make the client look good while understanding that he or she will be in the background?

Afterall, Social Media for all its wonderful claims of revolutionizing the world is really just another set of tools to increase the efficiency of business in meeting their goals. Direct mail, robo-calls, telemarketing, advertorials, infomercials, email campaigns, listservs, click-to-chat, click-to-call, and other marketing tactics helped businesses gain efficiency in their marketing efforts. Social Media is doing the same thing. The underlying principle is to use the correct tool set to engage your customers in a way that benefits both sides of the relationship. (It really is that simple.)

But you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.

The great push right now is to find employees who can help companies understand social media and measure the results of their efforts. Think about every online community, web 2.0, or social media conference you’ve attended or read about… what is the one area that is always a topic of interest? Measurement and monetization.

Success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc. There are so many people who want to work in Social Media today, but few are willing to demonstrate their business acumen to get the position. We saw this in the late 1990s in the online community world, again in around 2003 with the blogosphere, and yet again in 2005 with the early social network companies. And here we are almost ten years later with the same issues.

So do you want to work in Social Media? My advice to you is brush up on your business skills first. Worry about your number of followers on Twitter later.

What do you think? What skills do you think it takes to work in Social Media?

Mike