While you should create some kind of structure or parameters around the time you spend communicating through social media, and there are some general rules you can consider, you shouldn’t be setting rigid limits. Through the years, I’ve come up with these guidelines. They change from year to year based on the popular network of the moment and how familiar people become with these networks. I suggest that you:

• Tweet or check Twitter several times a day.
• Update the status on a Facebook Page at least once a day, check at least several.
• Blog at least once a week, check comments at least daily.

You should also know your audience because they may have a maximum tolerance. My own parameters for maximum engagement vary depending on service, my audience, and my capacity, etc, but generally I try to:

• Tweet no more than several times in an hour.
• Update the status on a Facebook Page no more than several times a day.
• Blog as much as it makes sense for your business goals, your audience and your capacity.

There seems to be much more of an audience “tolerance level” for more blog posts compared to more Facebook status updates, for example, because blogs serve as useful as repositories of content as well as distribution channels of current information, and because unless someone subscribes to your blog by email, it is far less of a push medium than many social networks, there is much more of a “tolerance level” for more blog posts than more Facebook status updates, for example.

Here are some numbers that you should be thinking about, instead of simply counting how many tweets you put out today:

1. The increase of engagement in your channels. Some easy ways to gauge engagement include Twittercounter, which can email you weekly stats; the Facebook Pages insights that are emailed to you by Facebook; or by using an application such as Swix Analytics.
2. The breakdown of your fan base. Analyze where you are getting not just the most fans, but the most growth. Determine what you are doing when you see spikes in the growth of your Twitter followers or Facebook fans. For example, does that spike in follower count happen when you follow more people on Twitter or when you reference other Twitterers? Does it happen when you use Facebook social ads to drive traffic to your page or when you added a Facebook promotional fan box on your blog? Do more of what works if you can.
3. The strength of your relationships. This is a bit harder to measure, but you need to assess whether you know your customers better because of what they say on your Facebook Page or what they address to you on Twitter or comment on your blog. Are you getting more people responding to you, commenting on what you say, repeating (retweeting,sharing) what you’ve posted? The stronger your relationships, the more influence you have, but having influence should not be your goal. Having strong relationships and earning trust should be.
4. The volume of feedback. While getting a great deal of feedback requires more resources in order to react and respond to it, more feedback means you are not doing business in a vacuum, and you are opening better and faster lines of communications with your customers through social media. Every piece of feedback you receive, whether good or bad, is an opportunity to connect. Always remember that negative feedback is an opportunity to do something better.
5. The conversion from fans to customers. How closely are you paying attention to how fans on your Facebook translate into actual sales? I wrote about Swix Marketer previously, which is a tool that can help you monitor clicks, conversions and sales. Many monitoring tools help you listen to what is being said and manage your responses, but how are you putting mechanisms in place that help you correlate activity in social networks with actual increases in sales?

Get out of the mentality of targeting a certain number of tweets of Facebook updates per day. Instead, go with your overall goals, the needs and wants of your audience, and the content and flow of the conversations. Look more deeply into how social media is increasing your authority, building your connections, and streamlining your communications with all of the people who matter most to your business, whoever they may be.

What numbers do you focus on when evaluating your social media efforts?

stock xchng image by mihow

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At the time, I was using the term “satellite sites” to frame the use of things like a Twitter account or Facebook Page in addition to one’s own website or blog. I later started using the term “gateways” to suggest that Twitter and Facebook Pages weren’t necessarily meant to be destinations in and of themselves, and I used that term after struggling with the word “presences” to refer to one’s social media accounts. Today, I’m mostly using the terms “networks” or “channels,” as in “social media channels.” Better, but still not perfect.

For my 2008 presentation, I wanted to come up with terms to describe the various tools that we were starting to use to share posts and updates to our different channels. I came up with the following terms:

• Social Aggregation Broadcast Tools (SABTs): This referred to the tools that let you add your multiple social media accounts to a single account then post to all or some of them at once. I further classified these as Active SABTs. Today, I’ve heard these tools — such as HelloTxt and Ping.fm — referred to as social media dashboards or social dashboards.
• Passive SABTs: This referred to tools, such as ShareThis and AddThis, where you can install a widget in your site or blog and then let the applications work for you by empowering others to share your content with their networks. Today, these applications are often referred to as sharing platforms or sharing widgets, however, if you check out these company’s sites — including a newer competitor dlvr.it — none of them seem to refer to themselves with a singular umbrella term that sums up what they do.
• Niche SABTs: I used this term for tools that were specific to just one service, such as Tweetburner and Twhirl. Back in 2008, the idea of open APIs for web applications and the development of tools for a single network was still pretty new. Today, entire businesses are founded on leveraging another network’s API to create a new applications. Businesses are even built on aggregating those tools (see OneForty.com).
• Integrated SABTs: This referred to sites and services that were just starting to integrate social sharing tools into their functionality. Remember: This was before the prevalence of applications developed with social media sharing functions as a given, and certainly before Facebook Connect and the like. At this point, we seem to call this social media integration or sharing functionality.

I also used another acronym to refer to monitoring tools that pulled together streams from various networks so you could “listen.” These were Social Aggregation Listening Tools (SALTs). At the time, FriendFeed was the only real example of this. There were also Passive SALTs which included tools like Google Alerts as well as Integrated SALTs which were networks like Facebook that let you pull in other feeds. Today, most popular social media dashboards, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, and HootSuite cover both listening and broadcasting, not to mention the many enterprise solutions, such as Conversation Miner from Converseon and Cisco’s SocialMiner, which take listening and broadcasting even further and let you route messages and track actions.

What are the terms that come to mind most often when you describe the social media marketing tools you use?

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Canadian company Swix offers solutions that can help businesses and agencies track and analyze social media community growth, as well as the results of campaigns or offers.

Swix can answer questions such as:

• How are my social media communities growing?
• How many people are clicking on my offers in social media, on my site or blog, and via email?
• Of those who click, how many take an action (purchase, provide data, etc.)?
• If there are sales tied to my actions or offers, how much money are my social media channels generating, and which ones are generating the most money?
• What’s my ROI based on money generated versus money spent on my campaign?

Swix offers two products: Swix Analytics and the new Swix Social Marketer, currently in beta. The analytics tool lets you track audience sizes for all of your social media properties in one unified dashboard so you can check the health of your community. You can generate analytics reports easily by clicking on the metrics you want to publish — audience growth or engagement numbers — and they are added to a report that appears on a password-protected web page to share with your team, client or other stakeholders.

Social media campaigns usually consist of a landing page or microsite where actions (a purchase or sign-up, for example) can take place. Swix Social Marketer generates unique URLs to help measure the traffic that various social media properties or tools are sending to the landing page and converting the most people per campaign. You can broadcast your offer out to your social network communities using the unique URLs generated by the Swix system for Facebook, websites, RSS feeds, Twitter and email. When people click on the specific link, the system tracks  what they do using cookies, so you know how many people clicked and who converted or took the prescribed action.

While neither of these offerings sounds particularly groundbreaking, they provide the kind of reports that you usually get by cobbling together data, mostly by hand. The cost of Swix Analytics is $9 per month, per brand. So you could start tracking all of a brand’s social media channels including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as its blog’s RSS, and see all the data on one page versus having to go into each channel every week and lifting the numbers for $9 a month. The next brand you want to track would be an additional $9 per month. Swix Social Marketer is currently in beta and free.

If you’ve been reading WebWorkerDaily over the past few weeks, you might have noticed that we’ve been discussing the way that some businesses are using social media marketing in wholly ineffective, or, worse, inappropriate ways. Georgina kicked off the discussion with a look at the problem of businesses rushing headlong into social media in “Businesses in the Social Media Trap,” while Aliza explained why some Facebook pages are set up for failure in “5 Things That Don’t Work on Facebook Pages (and 5 That Do).” Aliza also provided an example of how social media can be effective through the use of a novel, well-planned campaign in “Anatomy of an Indie Film’s Social Media Campaign“

In my Long View, I take a deeper look at the problem of businesses clamoring to use social media without understanding the medium, leading to social networks littered with accounts that are effectively junk. I provide some examples of recent social media marketing campaigns from organizations ranging from Burger King to Livestrong, and explain why they worked (or in many cases, why they didn’t), and share a set of five commonsense social media recommendations for businesses. Read the full post here.

Photo by Flickr user Matt Hamm, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Basic Elements of Campaign

Eleven bloggers from different niches wrote blog posts, either about or referencing the film. For example, I wrote a very personal post about abuse in reference to the lead female’s experiences in the film.

At the bottom of the posts, each blogger published a blurb about the Blog Hunt with a link to the starting page on the www.dragontattoofilm.com site and a clue to the next site in the hunt. The clues did not contain links, but rather “keywords” (in bold) that, when Googled, led the reader to the next blog.

The final blog post did not have a clue but instead had a link to the final landing page. At this point, “hunters” could submit their information to be entered into a draw to win movie tickets, books, posters, the soundtrack, a Barnes and Noble Nook and a custom designed dragon pendant necklace.

The Blog Hunt ended on April 1.

Campaign Challenges

All of the sites had to publish their blog posts at 8am EST on the launch date. As the bloggers were all over the country, some errors occurred, such as failures to include the clues at the bottom of the posts. In my case, I didn’t realize the expectation was a homepage mention of my blog post, something which was not in my control. So I ended up contacting my editor at 5am (my time) to help with that, and she graciously agreed.

“There was a pretty crazy hour or so where I was smoothing out the wrinkles and filling in the holes,” says Roads. “I have to say, I feel pretty lucky that this was the most challenging part.”

According to Roads, the initial reaction was “phenomenal,” with “a flood of people” completing the Blog Hunt on the first day when the posts were published and disseminated via RSS feeds and syndicated on Twitter, Facebook and the like.

Roads also said she was surprised by the “intense spectrum of reactions from bloggers” she approached. Some people thought she was a “snake oil salesman,” and she was redirected to their advertising people. Others told her they didn’t participate in “viral marketing tactics.” The majority of the people she approached, however, were enthusiastic, excited to be included, and very supportive of the idea.

Campaign Results

Number of people who completed the Dragon Tattoo Blog Hunt: 500

Adds Roads, “We designed, built and premiered the www.dragontattoofilm.com site in short order — just one week, immediately before the Blog Hunt launched — and improved its Alexa ranking from 3.8 million to 280,000 in a matter of weeks. We earned a Google PageRank of 5 within seven weeks of being live.”

Roads also wrote up a case study on the campaign. On her blog, she explains the spirit in which she approached bloggers to participate:

The exposure for bloggers participating was bolstered by Landmark Theaters sending information about the Blog Hunt to all of its newsletter subscribers — over 300,000 of them.

“I’m a blogger and I believe strongly in the blogger/reader relationship. So, instead of talking strictly to movie and book blogs about the film, I dug into the niches surrounding the book such as tattoos, violence against women, genealogy, Apple, tech — and I approached top bloggers in those areas,” Roads explains. “I didn’t ask them to write a review of the film, I asked them to put on their blogger cap, watch the movie and write about it from the lens of their blogging topic. I encouraged them to maintain their blogging integrity.”

Campaign Observations

Many of the bloggers who participated in the campaign are also Twitter users. I took it upon myself — as did others — to retweet some of the links to the other blog posts in Blog Hunt. I emailed Roads a request for permission to do the tweeting because there was an obvious concern that tweeting links would give away all the clues.

However, it seems to me that the missing piece of this campaign was the lack of a planned Twitter element. Many of the bloggers participating in the Blog Hunt, like Darren Rowse, are also active on Twitter, with many followers. Rowse’s tweet of his campaign-related blog post  from his  @problogger account generated 190 retweets, while Brian Clarke’s @copyblogger tweet hit 150 retweets. Some of the participating bloggers, however, are not Twitter users, so perhaps keeping Twitter out of the mix helped Roads prevent any technical confusion.

Have you created or participated in an interesting social media campaign? Please share.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): The Dos and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Editor’s note: This post is the first in our new “Social Superstar” column. Every Wednesday, Aliza will be writing about social media and providing hints, tips and insight; helping you to make social media work for you.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of social media, and I’m reminded of where we were in the mid-90s with the advent of the web. I lived and worked through Web 1.0, and am feeling a sense of déjà vu as we play out the same routines with Web 2.0 and beyond: social media is getting the same basic adoption patterns, the same reactions and overreactions. It’s just different tools and terminology. We have a long way to go before everyone and their cousin uses social networks more than they email, or tweets more than they call, but nobody can deny the way we communicate has once again been changed forever.

Here’s how I’d illustrate where we are in terms of social media tool adoption and integration into the fabric of our work and lives, as compared to early web adoption:

When I listen to people get all excited about social media as if it were some newfangled discovery, I keep wanting to say “It’s just online community. We’ve had that for over 20 years now. We’re just getting it via new applications with more integrated features. But it’s community!” Friends, fans and followers? We used to call them community members or our online friends.

Despite having been in this same place before, I have to admit I’m still excited about the possibilities. My concern is where things could be headed if we’re not smart about how we use the new tools at our disposal — we could end up repeating many of the mistakes made during the Web 1.0 years. With that in mind, here are my ten things to avoid in social media:

1. Avoid the fishbowl syndrome. Those of us “in the know” are starting to like the sound of our own voices, but we’re really just preaching to the converted (yes, just like I’m probably doing now). Just because we know about social media doesn’t mean everyone does, or even cares about it. We need to jump out of our fishbowls and smell the air of reality. Get out into the world beyond your tweeps. It will do you good.
2. Avoid glut and overload. Just because it’s there, it doesn’t mean you have to be on it. It’s our own fault that we are overloaded by every new social network or social tool out there, because we keep joining them. We don’t need them all and neither do our clients. A few strategically and thoughtfully selected networks, applications or tools can go much further than dozens of them. You don’t have to be everywhere.
3. Avoid knee-jerk reactions. Don’t be so fast to say “yes” to social media, but don’t be so fast to say “no” either. Like with any good business — or life — decision, take your time, weigh the aspects and options, do your homework, turn to trusted friends and advisers, then make a deliberate decision. Don’t get a Facebook Page just because everyone else has one. Understand what you are trying to achieve, research if your audience is not only on Facebook but actually paying attention to anything other than their virtual farm crops, then plan your approach. Planning takes time.
4. Avoid overreaching and overstating. Just because we feel social media is important doesn’t mean it is to everyone else. Those of us using the tools are doing so for a myriad of reasons, so we can’t lump everyone on a social network or with a blog into one box. Good communications and good customer service are still where it’s at. The delivery methods have changed rapidly, but it still boils down to the Golden Rule: the “Please” and “Thank You,” and the smile.
5. Avoid the shingle phenomenon. Don’t join the people who add “Social Media” next to their title or company name and suddenly, they’re an expert. Or worse, they shell out a few thousand to someone else who claims to offer Social Media Certification, then they sucker in a bunch of unsuspecting clients and bring them on a reckless ride after only 40 hours of “intensive training.” Just don’t do it.
6. Avoid the big plunge. I’ve always advised my clients to dip a toe into the water first to see if it’s warm. Don’t just pull out all the stops with social media. Use a phased approach to adopt new tools, technologies and tactics. You need to warm up, work out the kinks. Jumping into the deep end before you can swim only means you’re likely to drown.
7. Avoid the quick hit. Social media is not a campaign; it’s a commitment. Plan for the long term. Take your time, and be deliberate about your actions. Measure. Evaluate. Improve what you are doing. Listen. Respond. Interact. Connect. Be there for the long haul. Learn and grow with your audience, your customers, your constituents. You now have unprecedented access to your customers. Use wisely.
8. Avoid the numbers game. Sure you can use automated following tools and maybe get a slew of people following you back. But they’re not listening. They don’t care. I’ve always said that I’d rather have 100 friends, fans or followers who care than 1000 who ignore me.  Social media is not about the big numbers but what you do with the numbers you have — and what they do in return. Devoted actions of a few can have an exponential impact, far greater than inaction by many.
9. Avoid the silos. Do not relegate social media to an afterthought. Do not get your communications or marketing team together, and then give the social media team the notes. Someone with social media savvy needs to be at the table from the start. Their knowledge and experience can better inform your brainstorming, can open new doors, can enhance old tactics or eliminate them all together.
10. Avoid one-size-fits-all thinking. What’s good for your neighbor may not be good for you. What is good for one of your clients isn’t necessarily the right thing for all the rest. While it is tempting to squeeze social media into a formula or to make a template and mass produce campaigns, each company or organization or individual deserves a plan customized to their needs, tailored for their distinct audiences, and made to fit their capabilities. Greed drives automation, and automation drives mediocrity at best, expensive failures at worst.

Where do you think social media is right now? And what are you definitely trying to avoid?

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Photo by stock.xchng user surely

Here is how I try to explain to people who may not be convinced that they — or their company — should be using social media for business. Hopefully, this proves helpful to those of you in the position of reaching the decision makers who are ignoring social media outright and consider it a fad.

While this decision tree may seem a bit simplistic, it’s meant to illustrate that when using social media tactics and tools, you must:

1. Start with a deep understanding of your business goals; and
2. Make them part of an overall marketing strategy.

A good phrase to use with clients is: “Social media is not a silver bullet.”  Make sure they aren’t looking to social media — or any set of tools or tactics, for that matter — as the one thing that will catapult them toward business success. That’s reckless. But also let them know that putting their heads in the sand hoping this social media thing will just go away will put them at a disadvantage, especially if they don’t at least try to understand what it is and what it could potentially do for their business.

Those of us who engage in social media understand that it is first and foremost about conversations and connections, so if one isn’t prepared to engage closely, frequently and almost intimately with one’s customers or potential customers, then jumping feet first into social media may not be a wise business move. We need to communicate this to our clients without scaring the heck out of them. Anything different can be scary, and social media is vastly different from what most traditional marketers are used to, so it’s up to us to shine a little light down that dark tunnel of the unknown.

Not everyone who is dragging their heels about social media is being unreasonable. Try to pinpoint why they’re avoiding it. Is it a knee-jerk reaction or a reasonable decision based on the limited information they have at hand?

If you’ve ever been at the forefront of any adoption of new technologies, you’ll know that there’s an advantage to waiting out something newfangled: You can learn from other people’s mistakes. The flip side to putting something like social media on the backburner, as you know, is that your clients will probably miss out on first-mover advantages, and they may lose market share to companies that understand that today’s consumer is empowered through social media.

If a client is unwilling — or unable — to interact with their customers in new ways, those customers may turn to companies that have a presence where they like to communicate (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter). They may favor companies that listen, respond, engage, interact and respect this new breed of customers.

You know all this. It’s just up to you to responsibly communicate this to your clients. This isn’t about hype and hyperbole. This is about making sound, rational, strategic business decisions to identify market and communications shifts and to adapt sensibly to them in order to stay in touch with one’s customers.

Social media is a tool, just like email is a tool, and just like a web site is a tool. Guide your clients to at least consider the new tools that are out there and that are probably having a major impact on their companies today, not to mention the effects they’re going to have tomorrow. I pity the fool who doesn’t at least pull their head out of the sand and ask the right questions in an attempt to make sound business decisions. If you understand this and have clients who don’t, it’s up to you to do some gentle pulling so they can see the new landscape around them.

Why do you engage in social media? What do you tell people who don’t or won’t?

Photo credit: stock.xchng user kavitha

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So here are my 10 Golden Rules of Social Media to embrace, debate, pass around and refine. Have at it.

1. Respect the Spirit of the ‘Net. Since 1995, I’ve been writing about and talking about what I call the “Spirit of the ‘Net.” The Internet was not meant for marketing and selling but for communication and connection to people and information. Understanding this, even today, can flip your marketing and selling strategy on its head, but you’ll have far more success respecting the spirit of the ‘Net, rather than throwing money at hard-sell tactics.

2. Listen. In the ’90s, the Golden Rule of posting to a Usenet Newsgroup or other online community was to listen first before speaking. Listening thoughtfully gives you a better sense of not only what people are saying but also how they are feeling. In virtual spaces where there are no visual cues, good listening skills become a powerful asset. Listening also helps you map out your current social media footprint and measure your marketing campaigns over time. The key to successful social media marketing is listening.

3. Add Value. Enter any online conversation with the aim of adding value. Before posting a message as a new participant in a forum, ask yourself: How is this providing value to the conversation? To the community? In some circles, talking about your product or service can be considered valuable, but in most, it is unwelcome and intrusive.

4. Respond. From the early days of setting up the first web presences for clients such as Origins and Dr. Atkins, my company outlined the importance of timely responses to any feedback or queries generated from those sites. The burden of response can be great, but it can be lessened by using the right tools and crowdsourcing answers. A quick response is more important than ever, and thanks to search tools, alert apps and other services, it is possible to achieve. Don’t be a dam in a conversation flow.

5. Do Good Things. Back in the ’90s, a mentor and dear friend — Jerry Colonna — talked about “doing well by doing good,” sparking in me the confidence to build a successful business with an underlying mission to help others. Doing good things can really help you to succeed in social media, too. Just do a Google search for Social Media for Social Good to see the power of this movement. This goes beyond adding value online. It means fundamentally changing your business model from a single bottom line — profit — to a triple bottom line — people, planet, profit — and then perpetuating this social responsibility to all you do in business, including online marketing and selling. I’m working with a financial client right now who truly believes in doing good. My client’s messages and conversations around social good are getting much more traction than the regular financial messages.

6. Share the Wealth. When I used to talk about the Internet around the world, one key tenet I repeated almost every time was to share the wealth. “If you’ve got it, share it, spread it around,” I’d say, but I wasn’t only talking about money. I was talking about time, information and knowledge. In social media, sharing is the fuel of the conversation engine.

7. Give Kudos. Social media works when you are generous. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion, but things really take off when you give others praise or a moment in the spotlight. The rise of retweeting — real retweeting, not spammy retweeting — shows how far giving credit to others can go in social spaces.

8. Don’t Spam. And speaking of spam, there is also an ugly surge of spamming in social media, today’s equivalent of unscrupulous email marketers who inundated our email boxes with garbage and left a bad taste in our mouths for email marketing. On Twitter, I’m finding it a daily chore to delete people I’m following who send out spam messages, but I just don’t have the time, interest or bandwidth to tolerate the “Get Lots of Followers on Autopilot” spam.

9. Be Real. Authenticity is the secret ingredient behind any good and valuable social media marketing campaign. If you know your audience, locate them online, listen, add value, respond, refrain from spamming and just be yourself, you’ll have far better and more long-lasting positive results than if you try to be someone — or something — you’re not.

10. Collaborate. Before you dive into social media for marketing and selling, take a look at who is out there and who is doing it well. How can you work with them, instead of trying to muscle your way into the space with all of your dollars? Those will often be dollars wasted because people can feel that push and recoil from the hard sell, blog about your misstep, sign petitions to boycott your company, you name it. If you put your money in places where it can do good while generating goodwill for your brand, you’ll be much more likely to get a positive result from social media.

Social media tools are only that — tools. The real energy, spirit and power of social media is people. We are social media.

What are your Golden Rules of Social Media? What am I missing?

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HelloTxt, for example, allows you to post text messages, images and videos directly to Facebook Page walls. And while both Ping.fm and HelloTxt support the common hashtag (#) convention used on many microblogging and social media sites these days, HelloTxt has gone further in allowing hashtags to be used as a way to quickly and easily manage outbound status updates. By using the Settings page, HelloTxt members can set hashtags to apply to individual or groups of social media sites, so that when a hashtag is invoked (such as “#dealoftheday,” for example) only those profiles tied to that hashtag will receive the status update. As ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez points out, this should appeal to online marketers and social media workers who are managing multiple Facebook Pages at once.

Facebook’s aggressive promotion of new products such as Facebook Pages and Facebook Connect serves several purposes. Pages allows Facebook to become a more “open” platform for companies to market their products to its enormous online community, while Facebook Connect is vying to become a universal login that people can use to access social media web sites across the Internet.

While Facebook was already included in the services that Ping.fm and HelloTxt supported, when you updated your Facebook status, only friends of that profile could see it. Because Facebook Pages are not subject to the same privacy rules as regular Facebook profiles they can reach a wider audience and so are better-suited for being part of the social media strategy that online marketers are increasingly using to reach a large, yet targeted, online marketplace quickly and efficiently.

Are Facebook Pages part of your social media marketing strategy?

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I often give advice to people who are interested in starting online businesses. One of my “pupils” (so to speak) is new to social media, but after the recent media Twitter craze, he decided that he was going to use it to promote his site because, “that’s where everyone is.” A couple of days later, he emailed me and said that he wasn’t satisfied with his results, so he decided to follow the advice he read on a blog and try Facebook instead. Again, after only a minimal increase in his traffic, he wrote to me asking, “Have you ever tried StumbleUpon?” My immediate reaction was, “Social media marketing: you’re doing it wrong.”

This problem of constantly flipping tools doesn’t just happen with social media. I’ve had several clients who’ve spent weeks obsessing about Movable Type vs. Blogger vs. Joomla, for example.

So what should you be doing instead of obsessing about the choice of tools?

Define your goals. Goals give you direction, and without them you have no measurement of success. Do you want a one-time spike in your pageviews, or do you want to slowly build your subscriber base? In the end, your tool of choice (and how you’d use it) would depend on the goals you want to accomplish.

As much as possible, choose quantifiable goals so it will be easy to determine whether they’ve been achieved or not.

Find your audience. Who do you want to reach or help with these tools? Where can you find them? Answering these questions in detail will prove to be more helpful than telling all your email contacts to Stumble your latest blog post.

Keep it simple. You shouldn’t pick a tool just because it has 500 features while the others have five. Know your needs and look for a tool with features that support those needs; nothing more, nothing less.

Stay authentic. This is especially true if you plan to use  social media tools for marketing. It’s not enough just to have a Twitter account. What’s more important is whether your tweets reflect a consistent, authentic message. It’s easy for people to detect “spammy” self-serving promotion; if you don’t have an authentic message your marketing will be ineffective.

Know when to stop. If it’s obvious that a particular tool or platform doesn’t work, no amount of force or prayer will make it work. When the results fall short of your defined goals, it’s time to either pick a new tool or rethink your strategy. What will you do if your tools don’t work out? Will you ditch them altogether or find another way to make them work?

If you have clients or colleagues who are experiencing “analysis paralysis” when it comes to tool selection, remind them that without a proper strategy, the tool won’t function as well as they expect. After all, what use is a good quality wrench in the hands of a poor mechanic?

How did you choose your tools when you were starting out as a web worker? Were you overwhelmed with the number of choices out there?

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