Fair warning: This post is in-depth and a little longer than average, but very, very important.

As the dust begins to settle around the hype of social media, business are starting to take a closer look at the business case for using it. Clearly, without a return, no one (in their right mind) makes the investment. Take a look at what some in the industry are saying when it comes to failed social media campaigns:

“”(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail,” Sarner said. By a “mutual purpose,” he means a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it: finding that balance is not easy. The quirkiest and most addictive campaigns often provide little value for the company and turn out to be fads, whereas marketing efforts on the Web often don’t go over as well with the public.” Caroline McCarthy

“Most (social media campaigns) will fail for one of three reasons: (a) the strategy driving the idea sucks; (b) the execution sucks; or (c) the program provides no value to the end user.” Michael Lazerow

The worst thing we can do is to ignore this. Here’s how I take an approach to clients using buzzwords (ex: “I want a blog” or “I want my own Facebook”) to request our services: (more…)

Biznet is leveraging social media and continuing to build relationships with our target markets. As a small business, Biznet operates primarily in the Southeast Michigan area. To leverage our market we talk share our expertise in a social setting, which has lead to a fantastic network.

In fact, we moderate a Detroit Tweetups Facebook group and have hosted a hugely successful tweetup; pictured is @nevrus and @kasey22b from the event! (If you’re not already following us on Twitter, feel free to follow some of our team members (@shaunabiznet, @stevebiznet, @kevinbiznet, @davebiznet, @benbiznet, & @mpiccinato).)

Other businesses are reaching out for our help doing the same. Whether it be geo-targeting, demographic targeting, or whatever the identified market, we’re creating strategies to help maximize time spent and ROI. After the strategies are complete (which usually takes a few days), we launch profiles and content to help introduce the client to their new markets. Then the fun starts with maintainance–conversations light up, media flies everywhere, connections are made!

Social media was being leveraged prior to our business application. Originally, I met a few rockstars through twitter (@terrybean @charliecurve and @tomcurve). We all met up for lunch at a skevie taco joint when the conversation turned to my skills. That conversation turned into an interview with the Biznet team and soon after, I started!