• by Catharine P. Taylor , December 2, 2008

Get in line, follow the leaders, and don't sleep

1. Sure, the evil corporate overlords just destroyed your plan to invest in all sorts of listening technologies. Your customers don’t care and will expect you to hear their concerns, anyway. According to new data from Forrester Research, in the second quarter of 2007, 25 percent of the online audience called themselves “critics” who contribute to the social media discussion; in the second quarter of 2008, 37 percent did.

2. Don’t ask, “Where’s the money?” Find it. Even if your plan to build the ultimate Facebook app gets killed because of corporate cutbacks, you’ll still need to find funds with which to engage your customers. In a down economy, people may be spending more time in that cheap entertainment sandbox known as the Internet — and God knows they find complaining about corporations entertaining.

3. Register for Twitter, Friendfeed, et al., and actually check them out from time to time. This survival tip assumes you are already on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

4. Speaking of Twitter, start following @comcastcares. If you don’t know this already, @comcastcares is the Twitter handle of Frank Eliason, director of digital care for Comcast. “[Twitter] is a great customer service tool and a great way to provide value for customers,” says Alan Wolk, a creative strategist and author of the blog The Toad Stool. Comcast may be Twitter’s best customer-service example.

5. Start thinking about a social mobile strategy. The iPhone was just the beginning. With T-Mobile’s G1 — the first phone to run on Google’s Android platform — now available, and BlackBerry opening an apps store, mobile is about to get more social, beyond old-fashioned conversations and text messages.

6. “In today’s fragmented, mass-customized world, every small group of friends has its own brand evangelists,” says David Honig, cofounder of Media6º. The hard part in talking to these people is being genuine. “No one really likes to feel like they are being evangelized.”

7. “Social media isn’t a three-month ‘flight’ ” Wolk says. “You need to keep it up and keep on doing it.” If you have a corporate blog, it has to stay fresh, and your conversations with consumers have to be continuous. Tell that to the aforementioned corporate overlords (see No. 1). Maybe they’ll learn to listen to you, just like you’ve learned to listen to your customers.

8. Make your Web presence social. You don’t have to blog, but give your customers opportunities to give feedback through comments, reviews and other tools.

9. Learn how to unplug. Find out where the “off” button is on each of your digital devices and use it at least once a day. Occasionally, even let your battery go dead. Otherwise, you will lose your mind in a haze of posts, comments and feeds, and so far, there’s no other vaccine.

10. If you can’t learn to unplug, get a prescription for Ambien. It’s great to be immersed in the social world, but you have to sleep. Sorry — we can’t do anything about the fact that Ambien may lead you to unconsciously eat boatloads of Doritos (or worse) in your sleep. But you can use some social media tools to complain to the people who make Ambien.