I was jotting down some notes the other day and creating some buckets for different ways brands and individuals can actually use social media. Far too often I hear people talking about it in the abstract, as if having a Facebook page is going to change your business. Certain people seem to imply that if spend a lot of money on Facebook suddenly people are going to be handing you money, for whatever your selling, hand over fist. Good luck with that.

Anyway,

1. Broadcast
   You create an account on Twitter, Faceook and YouTube and start putting out stuff, because that's what everyone else is doing. This includes most advertising, PR, community building, and content distribution. The problem is that this only effective for certain brands. It's great for large brands that can leverage their might. But for most brands, your message gets lost in a sea of other broadcast messages. If you're Coca-Cola you can do something awesome simply by allocating a massive production budget towards making original content. If you're a small soda company like Blue Sky, you can't.
2. Actually talking to people (& having something interesting to say)
   You have to find someone who actually wants to talk to people. You may have to hire someone new. And by suggesting that you hire someone to talk to your customers, I don't mean an unpaid intern who's a "social media expert" because he or she knows how to create a MySpace profile. I mean hiring a real person, who participates in all your business activities, actually knows what's going on and likes the brand. It has to be someone interesting that has something to say,  someone who can actually go back to the product guys or R&D team with community feedback, and someone who has the ability to actually fix customer problems. If everyone is ranting about how crappy your customer service is on Twitter, and your response is to pipe in the RSS feed from your blog, you might as well just not use Twitter at all.
3. Research and analytics
   If you understand what the Internet looks like for your industry, and you know how your consumers are using social media, you can gain a better understanding of consumer behavior and sentiment (with regards to both your products and your industry) by actually doing real research. Reviews and search trends have huge retail implications today, especially as we move into a world where everyone has a smart phone and can see what everyone else has ever had to say about a particular store or product at point of sale. Research, in this case, is a little bit more than just buying an out-of-the-box social media monitoring solution. If you sell spirits, you need to know where people are checking in on Foursquare, and how the number of stars on Yelp impacts your revenue. There are no simple solutions for this kind of analytics, so you're going to have to build a database from scratch.
4. Interaction framework
   Once you understand consumer behavior in your category, you can start using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as an interaction framework. Facebook and Twitter both have single sign-on services that allow you to create applications that leverage a user's network of connections. And once you start getting users to engage with you through one of these methods, you can start tracking them. You can ping them. When you want to conduct research, you don't need to host focus groups. All you need to do is ask.

Just a few thoughts I had.