A few tips for the Social Media novice.

If you do not read this blog regularly or just happened to find it, last week I called an Ad Agency out for not using Social Media.  You can view that recap here.  So in honor of last week's column, I decided this week's column would be about the way's you can use Social media to your advantage.  If you are an average joe like me or if you are the Ad Agency I talked about last week, here are a few ideas on how to get the most out of your Social Media experiment.

1.  Talk to your audience.
-During my time at my first Internship, the manager owned a bar and was a HUGE Social Media guy.  I give him credit because he was the one who introduced me to the power of Social Media.  For every event, or band that played at his place, he would send out an event immediately to all of his followers letting them know about what was coming up at the bar.
-All social media platforms have the ability of sending out a long message to a group of people.  Use this to your advantage.  Inform your audience of not just events, but sales and other things that might catch their eye.

2.  Follow your competitors.
-I would never know about Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, or any of the other Social Media dashboards without hearing about them from the people I have followed, who use it to leverage their social media presence.
-You can learn tons from your enemies on the field if you if you simply follow them and see what they are talking about.  Learn what they are doing successfully and implement it, implement it into your own brand.

3.  Information
-If you have ever used Twitter, you are well aware that is filled with thousands of backlinks that will lead you to news stories spawning from the New York Times to ESPN to Paris Hilton.  
-Use this information.  Just like following your competitors this can give you tons of insight into breaking news that is happening in real time.

4. Customer Service.
-A few weeks ago, when I had my Identity Stolen, I was bitching about Verizon's customer service on Twitter, and immediately got a message, and a follow from the Verizon team.  Customer service has been given a strong emphasis in this web 2.0 atmosphere and with various technologies such as TweetMeme and Radian 6, it is easier than ever to find out where the messages are originating from.
-Social Media is a springboard for many people to talk about the pros and cons of almost every aspect of human life. If you are able to find out the problems that people are having with your product and/or company, you can possibly act quick enough and fix these issues before you have a full blown PR disaster.

These are four big parts of the Social Media pie!  Social Media can be used for all of these and much more...and if you're not implementing any of these into your social media game plan....then again, you sir are an idiot.