Social media is quickly moving beyond the realm of “buzz” and is being recognized as a marketing landscape game-changer. Twitter has exploded, and Facebook had more traffic on Christmas day 2009 than Google did. To survive in this new marketing world, you better know how to navigate it’s waters.

The Power of Twitter

Twitter has become a powerful medium through which people all over the world are connecting to each other for a multitude of reasons. It has become the pulse of the online community – and indirectly the offline community. People are using Twitter as their up-to-the minute news source; getting all of their information about current events in a real-time stream of data that keeps them so informed that the only ones that know more than them are the ones reporting the news from the trenches. It is used as a stock-ticker, with people following financial institutions the provide real-time tweets about specific stocks. It is used in countless other ways.

Why Care?

With over 18 million adults in the US alone who access Twitter on any platform (web, desktop app, iPhone app, Blackberry, etc) on at least a monthly basis in 2009 – and a predicted 26 million by year-end 2010 – the numbers alone should be enough to care. But beyond the numbers is the powerful grassroots environment that give Twitter is foundational strength. By merging the best form of marketing a company could ask for (word-of-mouth) with a streamlined online resource (Twitter), companies that choose to ignore the social media up-and-comer will in the end be ignored themselves by the market.

By listening to what people are saying about you and/or your organization on Twitter you position yourself to learn from their criticisms and raves to improve your message, position, brand, etc. When you proactively engage your customers and prospects as they raise questions regarding you and/or your organization, they realize that you have enough interest in their concerns to listen to them and sometimes, that in and of itself is enough to turn a negative customer into a raving fan.

Find Out What People Are Saying

Twitter offers an incredibly powerful resource in it’s built-in, real-time search engine (http://search.twitter.com). Perhaps said best by Twitter itself:

Every public update sent to Twitter from anywhere in the world 24/7 can be instantly indexed and made discoverable via our newly launched real-time search. What was that loud noise outside your apartment? Did you just feel an earthquake? What do people think about your company, your product, or your city? With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now.

Join The Conversation

People are probably talking about your organization/business, and if they’re not, they are talking about your competition, or they are undoubtedly talking about your industry. Listen to the pulse of those that are broadcasting their voice about you, your competition, your industry. Proactively engage the discussion participates, and learn how best to serve your market. Offer discounts via Direct Messages to people that have expressed positive comments on Twitter. Offer to do whatever is necessary to make right a wronged customer – again via Direct Message. Don’t directly engage specific customers via the public timeline as it may come of as self-serving, send them private, direct messages instead.

Have Class. Don’t Say Things You’ll Regret

When you speak, make sure you do what you can not to offend. Here are some resources for Twitter etiquette:

• A Brief and Informal Twitter Etiquette Guide – Chris Brogan
• Twitter Etiquette: Five Dos and Don’ts – CIO Magazine
• 10 Twitter Etiquette Rules – Norman Birnbach

An interesting thing happened this morning. After sleeping in past 7:30 (part of my Saturday traditions), I proceeded to get up and mosey into the living room where Lynne and Caden were already up watching TV. After sitting quietly watching Caden flip through the full cycle of channels without finding anything that he seemed to find worthy of watching, he asked if we wanted to watch a movie on Netflix (we have a home theater PC setup that makes watching Netflix streaming movies a breeze).

After flipping the TV input to VGA to receive the signal from the monitor output on the PC, I took a moment to observe how Caden (currently 9 years old) navigated his way to Netflix. I have him trained to use Firefox (developers rejoice), so he clicked the icon on the Windows quick launch bar to open the browser. On this machine, we left the default Firefox home page alone so the window presents a screen that looks like so:

This is where things got interesting. Instead of using the large Google search box in the middle of the screen (where the cursor is set by default when the page loads), Caden moved the mouse to select the small Google search box in the top right corner of the window. More interesting still were Caden’s steps after typing ‘netflix’ into the box and hitting enter. When presented with the Google search results, he selected the absolute first link he saw that he knew would take him to his destination. This happened to be a sponsored link for Netflix, not the organic search results found below it. For the visually inclined, he clicked here:

How children are being conditioned to use the Internet

It became clear at that moment that one of the things I have not paid much attention to is how our children are being taught to use the Internet, and more specifically, how to use search engines to find what they are looking for. Lynne and I proposed the notion that he had been conditioned to use the small box in the top right, thereby causing him to completely ignore the big search box on the middle of the screen.

On top of that, it became clear that even though he undoubtedly knows that Netflix is found easily by simply typing netflix.com into the browser’s address bar, he chose to go the “long way” by performing a search, which provides further evidence of some pre-existing conditioning.

The blind leading the blind

It dawned on me that he most likely had not been educated and therefore conditioned to the concept of going directly to his destination. Even more importantly for businesses, though, was his quick-clicking action on the sponsored link. At 9 years old, he doesn’t care that it’s a sponsored link, he just wanted to get to Netflix.

Granted, as he grows older and more educated in the ways of the Internet he may be less-inclined to click on sponsored links, but the lesson remains. The businesses that have opted to not promote themselves via Google and other major search engine sponsored links (at a minimum for those people that are searching specifically for their company) are most likely missing large opportunities every day.

As our children grow into this Internet and information age, it seems easy to forget about how they are taught to navigate these waters. Where we need to be careful is in realizing that many teachers may not have the knowledge of how to navigate the Internet themselves that our children need to be taught by. [As an aside: I have huge respect and appreciation for teachers, and in no way mean to belittle them in my previous comment] In many ways, those that are in teaching positions are still learning how to harness the power of the Internet themselves.

What to do

As businesses increasingly build relationships with customers via online tools (not just their website, but also social media, etc) they need to be especially focused on how the upcoming generations will look for and find them online. They are not buyers yet, but they influence the largest buying group (women) dramatically – don’t think they don’t. And in the near future, they will be buyers, and if they aren’t able to find you, they will not have the loyalty of your older demographic customers. Kids and teens are far more inclined to move on in an instant if they are unable to find what they are looking for – which means they move on past your business if you’re not prepared.

Ask 9,856 people on polldaddy.com the question, “Do you still use a phone book?” and you will find out that a whopping 7,498 (or 76%) people will tell you that they never do. 20% will tell you that they rarely use one, and a meager 4% of them will tell you that they still use the old fashioned tool for locating local resources. No, phone books have not yet officially received their time of death, but the evidence is clear: phone books are old, outdated, and unusable.

Why Do People Still Use Phone Books?

Simply put: habit. Consumers and business people alike have been conditioned for decades in the intricate dance that is finding a resource in the local yellow pages. Some claim their use of the phone book is caused by circumstances regarding a place of employment (i.e. their boss doesn’t allow them to use a cell phone on the job, or their “internet access” is limited to the company’s home page, etc). Others state that they are essentially too lazy to get on their computer to look up the number they seek and they don’t have a cell phone with internet access.

Interestingly, though, these comments all point to a recurring theme: people are aware that phone books are antiquated and that the same information (in an updated and more accurate format) can most assuredly be found online via a standard search on a major search engine. This does nothing more than provide further evidence of the ensuing demise of the recycled yellow papers bound together in a mildly organized categorization structure. About those categories: I’ve often wondered, who the heck comes up with those anyway? They sure don’t seem to make sense to me about 70% of the time.

Small Business Makes the World Go Round…

Especially in the phone book world. Most consumers don’t comprehend the expense that goes into the phone book delivery machine. Unless they are a small business owner that has advertised in the yellow pages, and/or they are involved in the marketing industry on some level, most people probably don’t know how much small businesses pay for the privilege of displaying their company information in bright colors on that full-page ad. In some cases, it may cost a small business $10,000 a year for a quarter of a page. That’s $10,000 to share advertising space with their competition. Ironically, most businesses aren’t comfortable spending more than $1,000 on their company’s web site­ – the very thing that all of their marketing should be taking advantage of to further engage the prospect after they have encountered the ad in the phone book (or anywhere else for that matter) in the first place. This thinking is backwards.

So why do they continue to do it? For several reasons:

• People that make the decisions to place ads in the local phone books are exactly that: people; and as I mentioned earlier, people (or consumers) are in the habit of using phone books.
• Comfort. Phone books have been in use for decades; people know they are there, they know how to find them, and they know how to use them. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of “going with what you know.”
• For some businesses, it may actually not make sense to get out of the phone book yet. For those with customers in older demographics, or otherwise non-technical people, the phone book is still a valid source of inbound business. Though not for much longer.
• They get sold. I’ve touched on this before. Business people that are otherwise smart make stupid marketing decisions because they have a well-trained salesperson telling them that the circulation numbers of the phone books “cannot be ignored.”

Business People: Consider Yourself Warned

The businesses that fail to realize the dramatic shift in consumer/business connections away from phone books to online and mobile will also fail to survive. People are increasingly not using phone books for their information gathering. Instead they use a multitude of online powered utilities, such as:

• Google (or Yahoo, maybe even Bing). The powerhouse search engine didn’t become a powerhouse by not delivering the best possible results when someone pecks the keys on their keyboard “Italian restaurants [insert city/town name here].” Less known, but just as powerful is Google’s free 411 service in which users may ask Google for information and have it provided almost instantaneously.
• Mobile Devices (iPhones, BlackBerries, Droids, and the like), in the last 3-5 years, have made the shift away from phone books move from a casual stroll to an all-out sprint. With the ability to pull up a map on a phone and type in a search for a restaurant nearby (using permission-based location services on the same device) becoming commonplace, even services such as a traditional Google search on a mobile device will become outdated. With apps on the iPhone such as yelp and urbanspoon, and many similar others, people don’t even have to think about what restaurant they are looking for, all they have to do is shake their phone, and urbanspoon will tell them what restaurant to dine at. If the user doesn’t like the choice, they continue the shaking until they do.

The Ensuing Gold Rush

Everyone knows that in order to make it big in a gold rush, being a first arrival is key. Businesses that realize now that phone books are dying, and online and mobile brand presence will be the key to success in the not-so-distant future, will be the businesses that people discover via their mobile devices when the itch to eat sushi hits them in a new city.

Doubtful? Ask anyone under the age of 30 if they use a phone book to locate resources in your town. You might be surprised what you find out.