By Matthew Spieler
Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. YouTube. Blogging. Flickr. SEO. Digg. Web analytics. And the list goes on and on. Whether you call this list social media, social networking or something else, it is all around us and growing by the second.

With the world quickly embracing the idea of social networking at a pace unheard of in human history—Facebook had 100 million active users in August 2008 and two years later the number is at 500 million and growing— the idea this is just a fad needs to be tossed away now. Similar to the environmental movement, social networking is not only here to stay it is a force that needs to be grasped and welcomed by all types of businesses.

Interestingly, the social networking craze is pretty much what is prompting the social media explosion—the tail wagging the dog. While many people and companies look at all this simply as people throwing their daily lives open to the world, there are just as many who understand this phenomenon has opened the door to a world filled with unlimited potential for a businesses— large and small—to grow and succeed.

Why would 1.5 million businesses have Facebook pages or help upload 24 hours worth of video to YouTube every minute if they did not believe this is the 21st century’s way to engage the customer?

These businesses understand that between the worldwide recession that started four years ago and the explosion of technology that has made it easier-than-ever for the average person to actively engage online, the way they market and advertise needed to change with the times.

As the authors of “The Social Media Bible” point out, “Modern technology hasn’t obviated the need to meet on the corner or at the water cooler, but it has greatly increased the amount of information available to share. Most importantly, technology has allowed everyone to participate in creating and delivering information to family, friends, and colleagues. Everyone has the ability to function as citizen journalists or market mavens. That is, you can capture a robbery at a local auto dealer on your camera-phone and send it to your local TV station within seconds. Or you can snap a few shots of the [pretty floor covering] on the showroom floor and send it to your brother who’s [remodeling his house].”

The point? The old adage about word-of-mouth advertising has never been truer. Today, the consumer is able to talk to and reach just as many people—if not more—than a business. What she says about how your company handled her flooring sale, installation, problem, etc., and how she says it can have more of an impact on future sales than all the advertising money spent in a year.

Isabel Walcott Hilborn, an Internet startup consultant, noted, “Social media is media by society—as opposed to the top-down publishing model where one person/company with a controlling editorial voice is in charge of…the channel.”

Confusion about social media

There is a great deal of confusion about social media as many people mix it up with social networking. In the hierarchy of things, social networking falls under the umbrella of social media. It plays a major role in social media, but it is only one component—just like running an insert in the Sunday paper is part of one’s overall advertising.

In addition to social networking, social media encompasses many avenues. Some say that in the truest sense, while the term has recently entered the world’s vernacular, the concept of social media has been around since the dawn of human kind as it involves the aspect of sharing and gathering information outside of face-to-face communication. Think of smoke signals and how they allowed people to communicate events over vast distances.

The reason to bring this up is to show that social media is a very broad term and can take many meanings depending on the source for which it is being used.

Most people have already participated in the digital social media universe. If you ever read a blog, watched a video online, forwarded an email with an attachment, sent a text message to a group of people, you are an active participant.

Social media in business

Looking at it strictly from a business perspective, “The Social Media Bible,” states it “is about enabling conversation. It is also about the ways that this conversation can be prompted, promoted and monetized.”

So just how can a business in the flooring industry capitalize? There are many ways and methods— some of which are detailed throughout this supplement. But before delving into it, keep in mind a number of things. For instance, as far as your business goes, most of what you do will center around social media optimization (SMO)—a set of practices for generating publicity through social media, online communities and social networks. The focus is on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Put simply, as a business you need to concentrate your efforts on the marketing side of the social media world—social media marketing (SMM). While advertising still plays an important role in the digital world, it is important to remember social marketing is not advertising.

“SMM can be a great arrow in your quiver of marketing tools,” noted Rob Jones of Search Engine Watch. “To leverage it correctly, you must consider first what you want to accomplish. How will it fit with, or complement your marketing plan?”

Like many, he suggests a three-step approach: listening, engaging and measuring. But even before you begin this strategy, you need to research which tools/outlets are best suited for you. Part of this is seeing which ones you feel most comfortable using; part is also dictated by where the majority of your customers and, to some extent your competitors, are in the social universe.

Return on investment

Like traditional marketing, you need to measure the effectiveness of what you have been doing and see if there is a return on your investment (ROI).

This is the tricky part. Since many of the SMM methods are free, it is difficult to calculate ROI. But, thanks to Web 2.0, numerous metrics and analytics have been developed to help companies get a grip on this.

A simple search for social media or web analytics will result in a bevy of resources—from free tools that give basic information such as number of visitors to a website, to more advanced ones that require a fee.

Some examples of what is out there include WebLog Expert (weblogexpert.com), Social Mention (socialmention.com) and SocialToo (socialtoo.com).

WebLog gives information such as your website’s activity stats, accessed files, paths through the site, referring pages and more in easy-to-read reports that include text and charts.

Social Mention aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information so you can easily trace and measure what people are saying about your company and products.

SocialToo lets you keep your follower lists in sync across networks. Features include the ability to create surveys to send to multiple networks to getting daily emails on who is following and unfollowing you on Twitter.

While the majority of social media sites deal with networking, some are designed to help users better organize and/or keep track of their social networking/media activities, still others are primarily search engines but have added numerous components to help companies with analytics.

For example, Google Analytics (google.com/analytics) and Google’s Website Optimizer (google.com/websiteoptimizer) give insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness, which allow for such things as better-targeted ads.

Some of the main social networking sites have also recently launched or are in the process of launching their own analytic tools to help businesses measure users’ response. And, many independent companies have developed tools that analyze specific sites.

For example, Twitter Analyzer (twitteranalyzer.com) lets you do such things as see who retweets your messages, what people are writing about you, learn about your own tweeting habits and more.

No matter which SMM strategy you employ, remember the most important thing: time. SMM is not a short-term deal. You must devote time and utilize the proper resources to make it work. If done correctly, it can become an extremely important component in making your company grow and succeed.