Ahh and I see my mate Iggy has been here before me!!

Good post and thanks for sharing your thoughts. My view is that the key consideration for social media adoption for any business is integration, interaction and engagement.

If you have a website, congratulations – you’re one of a trillion websites promoting or presenting something to the online world. You better have some great brand recognition and SEO/SEM techniques to be “found” by prospective customers. However …

If you “integrated” your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – and Linkedin for B2B – to your site or blog, you now have 3-4 additional brand presences online. In fact, with the rapid rate of adoption and usage of these social media sites, you’re actually “going where people gather” which increases your chances of being found.

The reason its called “social media” is that it is interactive and hopefully, engaging. We all know the person who turns up at a party who sits in the corner or even the one who spends all their time talking about themselves. That’s not social, interactive or remotely engaging. Same with social media. If you’re serious about being on these sites, be prepared to be personable, listen and to share experiences MORE THAN talking about yourself, your thoughts and/or your business. Leave the latter for your website content, where you can direct interested parties.

On the subject of interested parties, I wrote a book about how we cope with all this connectivity called Connection Generation if you want to know more about participating in an increasingly connected world. Take a look: http://www.connectiongeneration.com

Cheers, Iggy