There is no doubt the internet has changed the social landscape and business communities worldwide. Think about it, can you name one person younger than the age of 50 who doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account? Or, who doesn’t research future purchases online? Or, who doesn’t air type as they’re telling you a story related to an online experience?

Ok, you may have thought of one person but 10 years from now I guarantee they’ll be online in one fashion or another and, if not, consider them to be the exception of the norm.

Just 5 years ago, pre-sale marketing focused nearly all project media budgets on print ads.  You’d round out the project media buy with the odd billboard, maybe a few 30-second radio spots or traffic tags and perhaps the occasional online banner ad.

Now all industries and businesses are paying close attention to the social media landscape, with a clear eye to capitalizing on this emerging market. In doing so however, all are faced with a quagmire of ever changing options:  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, Delicious, Reddit, Hyves, the list goes on and on.

So what do you do?

In general terms, social media functions the same as any form of media. No matter what industry you are in, you need to know your customer first and foremost.  Knowing your customer will help you clearly understand your business objectives and help to identify the options within the social media universe that best fits your customer’s unique needs.

If you understand your customers you know what sites they visit, where they spend their online time and who they are making key purchases through. The best advice is to choose a few social media websites and then make a strong business commitment to doing them well and keeping them full of relevant and useful information. Using too many sites will only bog down your resources, hinder your efforts, and dilute your message which will ultimately lead to losing online customers in a hurry.

Once you do choose a social media vehicle, it’s important to pay close attention to customer feedback, because whether good or bad, once a comment about your business has gone viral you can’t stop it; all you can do is accept it and react accordingly. It’s important to see this as positive, and use the feedback as an opportunity to engage your customers further in a conversation about their thoughts and needs. This will hopefully lead to greater company loyalty and strong word of mouth.

It would also help to understand what social media is; a great set of resource videos can be found here and is worth a watch.

Customers of MAC are made up of investors, Realtors, media, clients and most importantly, our end-users who actually live in the homes we sell. Considering these groups, we at MAC have identified our company Blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as the social media outlets to best reach our audience.

How to best utilize the social media options you choose to use is a whole other blog post.

Michael Connolly