Yesterday I attended Digiday:  Social - which was actually a great confab re: the state of Social Media today.  A lot of “platforms,” a lot of “agencies,” and a decent chunk of companies dipping their toes in the Social Media water (or lake or river or ocean depending on their manpower and appetite for the new.)  Some observations:

1.  Social Media is here - in that there are a lot of avenues out there for people to discuss things.  Reviews, blogs, comments, forums, and of course the biggies…Twitter, Facebook, Beebo, MySpace, and to some extent the Digg’s and Reddits and StumbleUpon’s of the world.  But various people depending on their time and interest interact to extremely varying degrees with each of these outlets.  My own (and your own) experience of course bears this out.

2.  Companies need to invest a lot (and probably more than they’d like) if they want to control their own social media destiny - because unfortunately despite some really good tools out there (Ripple6 for one), managing social media is a GRIND.  It takes real people posting real things, one by one, and then Listening and then Managing.   You can’t just throw up a Facebook Fan page and walk away.  Or nothing happens - or at least nothing good.  So if you want to play - you need to invest some people time, some strategy time, and some budget.  And that all costs some serious dollars with a definite return - just a return that you aren’t really sure of in terms of amount and time to payback.  Doesn’t mean that you should bury your head in the sand re: the medium, but you have to acknowledge the road is going to be fairly uncertain and be able to live with that.

3.  Lots of people want to help - Social Media agencies are where SEM agencies were about 5 years ago and the first Digital Ad agencies were about 14 years ago.  And that’s cool - if you can afford them then the help is certainly valuable and the people involved in running them really remind me of the first digital agencies I worked with back in the mid 1990s.

4.  Knowing that it’s fairly time consuming, tred slowly and carefully into Social Media.  Maybe you only bite off a Facebook page (I recommend that due to the conversational element among many versus Twitter’s broadcast approach as there’s more possibility for viral dialog), or start a blog on your company’s website.  Or you figure out how to get discussion boards working for you on your website (which drive SEO perhaps more cheaply than anything else IF you have enough UGC).  But if you’re a small or mid-sized firm don’t plan on doing everything at once - unless you’ve got a lot of $$, a killer IT department, and a lot of time to spend on it.