Long ago, advertising followed this timeline:

* You buy ad space in a newspaper.
* The newspaper runs your ad.
* You get additional business because of your single ad.
* Repeat.

The media may have changed, but the concept has remained the same: advertising is a one-time shot at getting someone’s attention. Thus, advertising campaigns were born, to ensure that the same ad has multiple chances to reach the same people, over and over.

But what happens on the internet, when everything is both instantaneous AND eternal?

Fellow blogger Chris Abraham thinks social media may be changing the timeline of web advertising into something that’s both longer AND multifaceted. Now, social networks provide web users with numerous ways to FIND your business online. And the “long tail” permanence of most web content means a video or blog post you created in 2005 is still being discovered anew by Google searches even today.

All of which means that YOUR company needs to approach social media not in terms of “what we need to say TODAY,” but rather, “what we need to ALWAYS be saying.”

So… which elements of your company are SO universal, they belong in EVERY aspect of your online presence?

Photo by mfakheri.

Scott Monty (a May 2009 Business Smart Tools speaker) is currently a one-man social media team employed by Ford.  One of his biggest challenges is overcoming the wave of negativity directed at the auto industry during this time of economic uncertainty.  So Scott has been striving to make sure you, the people, have access to some positive facts about Ford that are otherwise getting lost in the shuffle.

That’s because Scott believes it’s in the public’s best interest to know as many sides of the story as possible. If the mainstream media are tilting in one direction, Ford can utilize Scott to help share another perspective, and make sure the public has access to some balanced facts.

How could YOUR company use social media to help the world learn more about YOUR positives?

(Don’t forget to follow Scott on Twitter.)

Shel Holtz and John C. Havens have written a new book about the value of transparency in your business communications.   It’s called Tactical Transparency, and it features extensive quotes from both Valorie Luther (founder of Business Smart Tools’ parent company, Creative Concepts) and BST speaker Cindi Bigelow (President of Bigelow Tea) — so you know WE like it.

But if that’s not enough to catch your attention, consider this:

When communicating online, how much information is TOO MUCH information?

Where do you draw the line between business communications and personal communications?

Who’s controlling what your employees say online (or in person) when they represent your company?

How do you handle a PR crisis?

If any of those questions got you thinking, then perhaps Holtz and Havens’s new book is worth picking up. (And if you’d like to learn more about transparency from one of the authors, John Havens, you can talk with him at the Business Smart Tools conference in May!)

Photo by abardwell.

Last year, The American Red Cross and Pitney Bowes teamed up to deliver nearly 600,000 holiday cards and letters to members of the US armed services, as part of their Holiday Mail for Heroes campaign. This year, they’re aiming for 1 million cards and letters — and they need your help.

Can YOU send a card or letter to a US serviceman or servicewoman this holiday season?  Whatever your politics, one thing we can all agree on is that no one should be alone during the holidays — and, as the following video makes clear, no matter how far away our soldiers, sailors, pilots and marines are from their homes this holiday season, they certainly don’t have to be alone.

Here’s how you can help.

For more information, please visit the official Red Cross website.

Last week, we mentioned the importance of being “present” in as many social media forums as you can handle, because you never know which one of them might help a new customer (or a hundred of them) discover your business.

This week, let’s tackle the nuts & bolts of HOW to be everywhere.  Because even though it seems like there’s an endless supply of social media tools to explore, your hours in a day are still locked in at 24, and you’d like to use a few of those for pursuits other than work…

The good news is, you can be everywhere using one of 3 basic approaches:

The Billboard

This is the least time-consuming (but also least personal) way to use social media: as a one-size-fits-all media outlet for your message.  This means you essentially take the same information you’d use in one format — like a blog — and repurpose that content everywhere else you “are” online — on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Same message, different outlets.

The upside?  Once you have your master blog post or ad copy designed, the rest of your time is spent copying-and-pasting, or otherwise rearranging that message to fit into all of the other outlets.

The downside?  You’re not really being “social” in this case, since you’re essentially using each platform as a one-way conversation — more like traditional advertising but with more distribution points.

The Funnel

This approach presumes that you have a “home base” — a website, web store, or some other central hub that you’d like all of your new visitors to end up at.  In this case, you can utilize as many social media tools as you’d like, but the purpose for each of them will be to offer bite-sized glimpses of the “full story.” If people want more, they’ll have to click through to your home base.

The upside?  Social media is not an arena that prides itself on long attention spans, so a bite-sized message or teaser is often ideal for a medium that lends itself well to skimming.  Plus, you can save the bulk of your time and effort for the visitors who are interested enough to click through to your hub, rather than spreading yourself too thin across multiple platforms.

The downside?  If you’re encouraging the bulk of your social interaction or customer involvement to take place in one (web) location, you may miss out on opportunities to engage people more fully throughout your additional outposts.

The One-of-a-Kind

Not for the faint of heart (or the short of time), this solution calls for a dedicated involvement on the part of you (or whomever comprises your “social media team”).  Here, you’re seeking to customize the delivery of your message AND the quality of your interaction with new (and existing) audiences within each individual social media platform you inhabit.  In this strategy, all tools are equal, and someone commenting on your blog post is every bit as important as someone who silently follows your photo stream on Flickr.

The upside?  Quality of engagement.  Instead of using social media as a bullhorn, this option truly allows you to invest a personal touch in your online interactions, and helps you discover “what works” for each audience on each platform.  That means your ROI will be much higher (but so will your invested resources).  AND, as an added bonus, you’ll learn much more about your audience because you’ll be listening, acting and reacting to them, as opposed to merely shouting at or shepherding them.

The downside?  A lack of time.  The nuances of each of these tools can be exploited ever more fully, but to do so might require a person to spend as much time online as they spend offline — if not more.

So which solution is best for YOU?  Honestly, you won’t know until you’ve begun to experiment with these tools and measured their impact on your business.  But, as in most things, time — and how much you have to share — will tell.

Photo by teliko82.

Once upon a time, a company could make a healthy living just by advertising in one form of media.  Sure, you might invest a minimal amount in radio or TV, “just in case,” but if print ads were how most of your customers found you, then print ads were where most of your advertising dollars went.

Today, social media offers a nearly infinite array of outreach opportunities to help you find new customers — but how do you know WHICH one is where MOST of them will come from?

You don’t (yet).

That’s partly because these tools are still new, and therefore the TOOLS are still finding their audiences at the same time you’re using them to find YOUR customers.  It also means that the number of users for each emerging web tool might grow exponentially over the course of a year, and if you don’t invest at least some time and effort in maintaining a presence across multiple sites / tools / platforms, your target audience might flock to one of those services you’re not using — and then you’ll be playing catch-up.

So why get caught at the wrong party when you can be at all the parties at once?

If you’re mounting a social media presence, be sure to use the central, proven tools that are getting the most buzz (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.), but also set aside some time for the exploration of new services that are just starting to catch on with a wider audience (Seesmic, StumbleUpon, NING).  You don’t need to be active on each service every day, but you do need to have a consistent message across all of the platforms.  Because you never know when one of these new services or destinations might erupt into The Next Big Thing — and if you’re late to the party, one of your competitors will almost certainly be in your seat.

Next week: HOW to Be Everywhere at Once (Without *Actually* Cloning Yourself)

Photo by tonibduguid.

But in order to maximize the use of any feedback you receive, you have to be able to ACT on it — and that means knowing WHOM to share that feedback with.

For example, Bigelow Tea is beginning to experiment with the microblogging service Twitter. In addition to driving attention toward some of Bigelow’s blog posts, Twitter has also enabled tea drinkers to let the company know what their favorite flavors are, how and when they drink their favorite teas, and what information (like caffeine and health benefits) they’d like to know more about.

All of which is great to know, but if the right people AT Bigelow don’t find out about this information, it would simply go to waste.

So as your company starts interacting with your customers via social media sites, make sure part of that process includes a gathering and reporting of any useful information to the departments that can actually make use of this information. Without that step, you might have a pleasant conversation, but it won’t lead to an improved experience for your customers or an improved bottom line.

When someone engages with your company or brand in a social media setting like MySpace, Twitter or YouTube, they often choose to become your “friend.” In social media terms, a “friend” is the same thing as a subscriber — it’s a person who’s interested enough in what you’re doing that they actually choose to receive future messages from you. They actively LIKE (or at least they don’t actively DISLIKE) your brand, and they want to know more about it.

Yet, unlike subscribers, friends are more valuable in quality, not in quantity.

Why?

Because the number of friends you have in the world of social media says a lot of about your ability to deliver valuable information to the people who actually want it. In layman’s terms, having too many “friends” can give discerning visitors the impression that you’re using a two-way medium as a one-way bullhorn — and they get that enough on TV, radio, billboards, magazines…

So, instead of seeking to befriend (or, in Twitter parlance, to be “followed by”) as many people as possible, you should be selective about whom you include in your social messaging. Take the extra effort to find people that are already talking about your company / products / services / industry. THOSE people are already interested in what you do, and they’re far more likely to listen to you, respond to your questions, offer you valuable feedback and take legitimate action.

And wouldn’t you rather have a dedicated, passionate following than just another bloated mailing list?

Photo by vividBreeze.

When things are going well for your company, being “social” in social media is easy. But as soon as a company or an industry experiences trouble — from an economic hiccup to a full PR disaster — it can be tempting to bar the gates and limit all public information so you can better control the message.

Guess what? That rarely helps — and, in these days of instant commentary, it can even make things worse.

Now that the public expects companies to be social, they also expect those companies to be more transparent (read: honest). After all, if they’re engaging you in a one-on-one dialogue, they (subconsciously, at least) begin to feel as though they deserve straight answers during times of crisis. (And don’t they?)

When things start looking gloomy, resist the urge to bunker down and cut off all outside communications. Instead, use the trust and goodwill you’ve built through your social media channels to keep your loyal customers (and critics) in the loop on the situation — and, more importantly, what you’re doing to fix it.

Once the cloud passes, your loyalists will feel as though they’ve weathered the storm with you — and they’ll be even more excited to tell others about what you’re doing right.

Photo by Chad Johnson.

One of the benefits your company enjoys with social media is the opportunity to engage directly with your audience / customers / critics / competitors.  But WHO is doing that engaging on YOUR behalf?

Some companies empower their executives to speak their own minds, in their own words (for example, the Bigelow Tea Blog often features posts from Bigelow’s President and other department heads, along with daily information about tea).

Sometimes a company designates specific employees, often within the communications or marketing departments, to become the “official” voice of the company’s social media accounts (check out Frank Eliason, who operates Comcast’s account on Twitter and, in doing so, has become one of company’s trusted public faces).

Whichever choice you make, consistency is the key.  Your customers will enjoy engaging your brand far more when they understand who, exactly, they’re talking to — and they feel even better when they know they’re dealing with a “real person” like themselves, who’s as comfortable talking about company policy as they are discussing football, lunch breaks or rush hour.

Remember: “social” media involves actual people and real conversations.  Don’t be afraid to be real.

(Photo by djfoobarmatt.)