I have been keeping a journal and a blog to document my progress since the day I set up my Facebook profile (May 2009). Although I had been on LinkedIn for several years, I didn’t get serious about using social media until last year.

Now I’m asking other business owners about their experience with and interest in using social media to enhance their various operating strategies:  communications, marketing, customer relations, etc.  There seems to be general recognition of seven irrefutable characteristics that invoke across-the-board reaction to social media, and mark the stages of acceptance.

1. Curiosity – and the need to do what everyone else is doing.
2. Abundance – like an all-you-can-eat buffet that’s not only free, but you can come back as often as you want and stay for as long as you like.
3. Novelty – With new features, functions and platforms being introduced daily, the novelty never wears out.
4. Frustration – With the overwhelming amount of information and options, with the challenges of learning how to use the tools, and with the amount of time it’s sucking from your life.
5. Fear – You can’t afford to devote this kind of time and energy to something that’s seemingly providing no real return.  But, you can’t afford NOT to because traditional methods of mass communication are becoming even more expensive, and less effective (aka the groundswell approach-avoidance syndrome).
6. Rationale – Social media offers powerful business tools that can save you time and money, and maybe even help you make money.  But a haphazard approach to social media won’t work any better than a haphazard approach to any business strategy. You get serious about putting together a strategy and committing to it.
7. Realization – With the strategy in place (and once it is, you wonder why you didn’t do this sooner), you feel the weight of the earlier stages of this learning curve begin to ease.

Your curiosity is satisfied.  You’ve come to understand that there’s always going to be something new around the next bend.  You’re comfortable within the social media space, and you have a system for staying current with whatever is relevant to your needs.

The abundance will also be there.  But now, that’s a good thing.  It doesn’t have to be distracting or confusing.  It simply means you will have as many options as you could possibly want.

The novelty is refreshing.  It means that social media tools are being advanced and (hopefully) improved.  But you know now that ironically, novelty is nothing new.  It’ll be there for you whenever you need a dose of it.

Frustration levels are diminished by the sheer fact that your level of competency is increased as a function of your experience with the learning curve.  This doesn’t mean that you won’t still get frustrated along the way, but you’ll know where to go to get help you need, and you probably won’t need help as often as you used to.

The fear has turned to love.

The rationale that led you to developing a strategy will be the most important lesson learned.  As your experience with social media as a business tool evolves, you will always come back to the realization that every new step should be strategically aligned with your business objectives.

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Earlier this week a Facebook friend, a small business owner, updated her status with the announcement that she had joined the local Farmers’ Market and would have her Colorado Easy Mix collection available there every Saturday.  I checked out her Facebook Page (of which I’m a Fan) and saw that one of her other Fans had posted a recipe for mango coconut muffins made with Colorado Easy Mix.  I love coconut!  So, I marked my calendar to go to this Saturday’s Farmers’ Market.

It’s March, but I’m in Colorado, so it’s no surprise that the sky this morning was a beautiful crystal blue, and the forecast promised warm temperatures.  It was a “Farmers’ Market kinda’ day in Colorado” – which is exactly how I updated my Facebook status early in the morning as I anticipated my day.  Before I left the house, I tweeted to the world (well, to my 236 followers, anyway) that I was on my way to the Farmers’ Market.

Upon arriving, I accessed FourSquare from my Blackberry and “checked in” at the Homesteading Farmers’ Market.  (And because I was the first to add the location to FourSquare, I got extra points!)  The place was bustling and it smelled sooo good.  I quickly found my friend’s display, (see photo) tasted her samples and chatted a bit.  A woman helping with the Colorado Easy Mix display turned out to be someone I had met recently at a networking event, and we discovered we were both planning to attend the same event this coming week.  (I mention this because I’m a strong advocate of maintaining balance between networking through social media AND traditional socializing.)

I wandered through the market and perused the vendors and small businesses there. I nibbled cheese, chunks of bread, and homemade soups.  In fact, I bought two soup mixes from Ginger’s Gourmet. The chicken noodle soup is her grandma’s recipe and is delicious.  I’ll be having that for dinner tomorrow.  I chatted with Ginger herself who allowed me to take a picture of her display.  She admitted she doesn’t have a Facebook Page for her business yet, but suggested that I “friend” her and send this picture to her Facebook profile.

As I left the Homesteading Farmer’s Market I added my name and e-mail address to their mailing list.  I grabbed the owner’s business card and was happy to see he has a website.  I’m guessing that by this time next year, he’ll be connected to this community on social networks, too. Then, from my Blackberry, I uploaded the pictures I took of the Market to my Facebook profile and sent one out to Twitter through OpenBeak to give a shout out to my friend and owner of Colorado Easy Mix.

After visiting the Market, I came home and baked the mango coconut muffins that inspired me in the first place.  They are still warm on a plate in the kitchen . . . except for the two that I’ve already eaten!  They are so delicious.  It seems a shame not to share them.  So, I’m posting pictures of them on Colorado Easy Mix’s Facebook Page and on this blog.  It seems only right.  It started with a suggestion that came to me through social media, and so I will send it back out through social media.

I’ve devoted the last ten months to learning about social media. I’m mostly interested in knowing how it can be used efficiently and effectively in business. What I’ve figured out so far is that it takes a healthy dose of self-discipline . . . and a strategy. With a desire to find a way to make social media practical enough to use as a business tool, I set out to identify five actions — not too many, not too few — that would drive and support that strategy.

The first challenge was to overcome the novelty of social media that had the effect of pulling most of us in before we were ready. Being ready means having a plan: a singular, well-defined objective accompanied with a checklist and timeline for achieving it. I just finished reading (and outlining and notating) Marketo’s Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media. It reinforced much of what I had already been reading, and validated the content of my most recent presentation:  Social Media – Closing the Gap Between “How” and “Why.” What it got me to do though, was break my own strategy into manageable steps with short-term measurable goals.

Using the worksheets in the Marketo document, along with my own conversation index and communication plan (two elements of my business strategy), I was able to identify distinct action items and metrics to guide my approach to social media. This structure is helping to remove some of the guesswork and give me a sense of purpose when it comes to using social media.

I would recommend that the following five actions be taken in this order.

1. Articulate a singular, well-defined objective. Without it, you’ll be like a bag blowing in the breeze; a ball bearing bouncing in a boxcar.  My objective:   To establish my reputation as a resource and as an advocate for using social media in business.
2. Choose the right tools – I’m limiting myself to two primary social media tools to reach my intended audience. (I told you this takes self-discipline.) Twitter and my blog will serve as hubs. The other six tools in my arsenal – Facebook profile, Facebook page, LinkedIn, SlideShare, YouTube and Flickr – will be used as outposts to carry content that, for the most part, reflects the conversations on Twitter and in my blog.



I chose my hub tools based on the type of audience I want to reach ( “Social Media – Now? or Never!”, slide 9). My social media, in addition to my e-newsletter and website, will allow me to reach the various strata of the relationship cycle defined in my business strategy. Each of these tools has measurable qualities I can use to assess my progress.

3. Manage your network – Over the past 10 months I intentionally grew my network of friends, fans, followers and connections organically and slowly. Again, my initial purpose for using social media was to learn. I was more intent on following and listening than being heard. That strategy is now paying off as I’m about to embark on the process of segmenting and sorting. Although I’m shifting from my initial objective of learning to a new objective of talking (establishing my reputation) and will strive to increase the size of my networks, I still want to maintain a standard of high-quality connections.



If I use discretion based on a set of pre-determined criteria when engaging with people through social media, I will get more value out of the conversations, can be more confident that my contributions will be appropriate and perceived as valuable (as opposed to out-of-context, and God forbid, boring). I won’t struggle to come up with helpful and interesting content. By handpicking my connections (to the degree they can be handpicked) I can be more natural and spontaneous with my comments and responses.

4. Cull and collect content – To say that the amount of information available on any given subject is overwhelming is an understatement. Managing the information – much like managing the networks through which the information flows – requires a system. With a singular, well-defined objective as the basis for that system, I am able to quickly identify the information I need to drive my strategy. Because I have identified blogs as one of my primary tools, for the short-term anyway, I will focus my information gathering efforts on blogs. Limiting my information-mining efforts to this one distinct area will benefit my overall strategy in several ways:
   1. It will enhance my learning experience (my original objective for using social media) by eliminating the distracting task of having to decide where to go to get my information.
   2. The vastness of the blogosphere can hardly be seen as “limited,” so I don’t have to be too concerned about isolating myself from useful or interesting input.
   3. It will give me the opportunity to engage by commenting on others’ blogs. I will not only be getting information, I’ll be contributing. This directly supports my objective.
5. Create valuable content – To borrow a phrase from Stephen Covey, by choosing to blog as one of my main social media initiatives, I will be “sharpening the saw.” Writing things down has always made ideas more concrete and actionable for me. Writing, in general, is therapeutic and relaxing. Blogging, on the other hand, presents a challenge – mainly because I have been without focus. However, I imagine that with this new plan, blogging will be less of a challenge and more of an investment resulting in growth and renewal. With a clear objective for blogging, I expect it will soon feel more like second nature.



Through blogging I’ll be able to process and develop all the information about social media that I’m absorbing. I’ll aim to organize my thoughts and express them in ways that make sense to my targeted audience. I’ll be documenting my own path with intent to clear the way for others who want to explore the same direction. At the same time, I’ll be creating a collection of cohesive, relevant thoughts that can Tweeted, packaged as bites in a newsletter article, highlighted on my Fan Page, and used in LinkedIn status updates.

The picture at the top of this blog represents part of the process that brought me to this plan. It’s all about turning ideas into action. For me, that means one step at a time. Over the past ten months I have taken many measured and mostly-steady steps. I encourage you to do the same, and would love to hear your ideas and know what has worked for you along the way.