Why should you bother with social media? We came up with 41 reasons, taken from various sources, why you should integrate Social Media into your marketing efforts. Here’s our social media list, redux:

1. Over fifty percent of the world’s population is under 30-years-old.
2. All but 4% of them have joined a social network.
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the United States.
4. Social Media has overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the Web.
5. One out of eight couples married in the United States last year met via social media.
6. Years it takes to reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year.
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it. (Ok, maybe some of us do have a choice).
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India.
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China.
12. 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; Percentage of these using LinkedIn 95%.
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama, which are in the couple of million.
16. Half of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook … people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé, some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts.
18. Instead they are distributing electronic readers such as eReaders + iPads + Tablets.
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube, though its not really a real search engine.
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube.
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English.
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs, a majority of them are inactive, but this is NOT one of them.
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth.
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour, which is a lot more than I make.
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top twenty largest brands are links to user-generated content.
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? Do you even know what they’re saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them.
30. 78% of consumers trust recommendations given to them by their peers. 22%, don’t.
31. Only 14% trust advertisements.
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.
33. 90% of people that can TiVo to skip through advertisments, do.
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas, but they didn’t outsell Chocolate Easter eggs on Easter.
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily, two of which came today from our two blog posts.
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us, via RSS and other formats that is.
38. We will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second.
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in five years, unless you’re a really bad businessman.

The biggest buzz in the advertising and marketing world this year is the invasion of social media, and how quickly social media has taken a dominant stance in the advertising world. We have seen some successful marketing campaigns centered on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, which have generated huge ROIs. I have engaged in many conversations about social media, and have been told, repeatedly,  that in the B2B marketing world, we simply can’t ride on the success of the social media as it is in the consumer world. Why is that?

“Because in this business, everyone knows everyone!” Many industries are operating in a small circle with very unique characteristics. In the particular industry that we are in, it is run by the old boys, who swear, smoke, drink and crack wise jokes. At least that is what I’ve heard. The images that pop into my head are the wise guys in “Goodfellas” and “Donnie Brasco”. How do I do business with these wise guys? The way Donnie Brasco did it, to become a wise guy myself.

In the past few decades, the way people do business with wise guys is through their sales force. They march to where the wise guys hangout and make a statement, so formal, so systematically trained, so bureaucratic, just like an army. Do you know what the wise guys are feeling about the army? “Army is about someone you don’t know sends you to whack someone you don’t know. It is not how wise guys do business, wise guys just hangout and have fun!”  So, if you want to do business, you better become a wise guy. How exactly did Donnie do it? Socializing! Laughing at their jokes and listening to what they wanted and giving it to them.

With the advent of social media, it is never been easier to know who these wise guys are, and what they want. Don’t be the one to march to their doors and make a statement, as wise guys resent it so much, they will whack your business on the spot and say “forget about it”. Have fun with them, laugh at their jokes, even if they were not funny. Today, you want to be introduced as, “he is alright, he is a friend of mine”, and tomorrow you want to be introduced as “he is a friend of ours, he is a good fella!” Why, because wise guys only do business with wise guys!

Have you talked to a wise guy today, my friend?

Relationships are critical in a B2B environment. It’s how we have and will continue to endure. We can never become complaisant or take them for granted as they are vital to our success. The way we initiate new opportunities and gain the trust of future clients is however changing and we need to keep pace with this evolution or face further revenue decline or extinction.

Since June of last year we have been fairly aggressive in promoting our company. We’ve issued press releases, had articles published in major magazines, used direct mail, poly bag insertions, e-mail campaigns, personal letters, testimonial campaigns, networked at industry functions, launched a new site, hired additional creative talent, cold called, implemented search engine marketing, utilized Google pay per click ads, put a video on Youtube, created this blog and networked through other available social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

We’ve done this so that we could knowledgeably recommend the most effective marketing methods to use for our B2B clientele. The answer is that in a cautious economic climate the results are not immediate. No single effort stands out as producing noticeably more results than another and patience is indeed a virtue.

What we have discovered is that through these initiatives we are increasingly staying top of mind with our market. We have been successful in getting asked to participate in more Requests for Proposals and have been successful in winning those requests. It has made us refine our capabilities presentation and dig deeper into what makes us a valuable resource for our customers. It has built our confidence. It has heightened the resulting service we can provide…all good things.

So today when a customer asks us to update their website and they see it as the sole answer to their lethargic sales we have to tell them “It’s just one more arrow in your quiver, one more spoke in your wheel, one more link in your chain.”

Although we truly believe the web is your number one marketing platform, today’s answer is an integrated approach across all media types. It’s being more customer centric and less chest pounding. It’s saying what we do best, what we stand for as an organization. It’s selling one idea at a time that resonates with your target and can be backed up and fully supported.

There are no short cuts or quick fixes. It’s being focused, deliberate and consistent with your message and your commitment to speak to the needs of your clients today. It’s knowing your business and your customers, so you can present solutions their current vendor or in-house experts couldn’t imagine. To quote the favourite line of our new senior creative, Sam Cockcroft, “…it’s blending out not blending in!”

Too many companies are still professing they are the one stop shop, or one call does it all, or the single source solution. We’re not buying it anymore and neither are your prospective customers. There is nothing unique, memorable or compelling about that message. And 99 times out of a hundred it’s just not believable, so you miss opportunity after opportunity…maybe without even knowing.

It’s still tough out there. We are all working harder than ever. Though it takes time to see the benefits, marketing can help. If you have the resources to advertise and you deliver the right message, you will rebound quicker doing it now then waiting till the economy fully recovers. History has proven it. It’s the approach we’re taking and the approach we recommend to our B2B clientele.