I think for those that are still hedging – you need to take a look at this attached post from Mashable.com.  Author Rick Burnes features five businesses who definitely do not fit the everyday consumer facing, mainstream profile and they are all leveraging social media. An Equine Dentist ( yes a dentist for horses) The Equine Practice Inc., steel building manufacturer – SteelMaster Buildings, paint company Idea Paint, a manufacturer of high-quality paper products Neenahpaper and online aviation maintenance Duncan Aviation. All of these businesses have leveraged different social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and video.

Social media is about engagement – as we always write about in our blog SHARE. Everyone - no matter the business, person, place, product or service wants to find like minded people they can connect. create and cultivate with.

Not using social media yet? After reading this you have no excuses! Keep us posted on how you do!

Best Nicole

Chances are, most of the businesses you interact with as a consumer are on social media. Your local restaurant is blogging, your grocery store is on Twitter () — even your favorite candy is on Facebook (). Companies in mainstream, consumer-facing industries are all over social media.

But how about other businesses? Manufacturers? B2B service providers? Equine dentists? Are they experimenting with social media?

You bet. Here are five examples, all at different stages of their experiments, and all indicating the breadth of business use of social media.

1. Equine Dentist Builds Relationships With Facebook

How do you turn a regional service business into an international destination for industry thought leadership?

Facebook.

At least that’s what worked for Geoff Tucker, an equine dentist based in Palm City, FL.

In a business driven by relationships, Geoff says that Facebook allows him to build new ones. “People do business with people who they’re friends with. Period,” he says. “And Facebook is a great way to get to know people. It allows people to see that I’m a person.”

As he builds these relationships using social media, Geoff is also expanding his company’s reach. He says it was his blog (), his Twitter feed, and his Facebook account that helped him win appearances on Horse Talk Radio and HorseGirl.tv.

So what’s this done for his business? Geoff says that over the last year, Facebook alone has generated about 100 leads and 10-to-15 customers.

2. Steel Building Manufacturer Taps New Verticals

As a manufacturer of prefabricated steel buildings, SteelMaster was initially hesitant to get involved in social media.

“It’s steel buildings,” explains Michelle Wickum, director of marketing for the Norfolk, VA company. “How is that going to tie to Facebook? It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but when we looked at the growth in Facebook and social media, we felt we had to get our arms around it.”

About a year ago, SteelMaster put its first toe into the social media water. The company discovered two important applications for their business. First, they found that Facebook is an excellent way to post pictures of customers’ steel buildings. Not only do the pictures engage existing customers — they also demonstrate to prospective customers the range of uses for SteelMaster buildings. “Photography for us is the hook,” Michelle explains.

Perhaps more importantly, SteelMaster found that social networks like Twitter and Facebook gives it exposure to and create demand in specific verticals where it previously had little traction. Chicken farmers and woodworkers don’t typically think to use steel buildings, but when friends and colleagues share pictures of their SteelMaster buildings on Twitter and Facebook, the farmers and woodworkers become interested.

3. Full Social Media Integration for Marketing Paint

Idea Paint is a Boston-area startup that sells paint that turns surfaces into dry-erase boards. The company uses social media throughout its sales and marketing process.

The company blog, where employees publish videos, images and stories of product installations, is the hub of Idea Paint’s social media activity. The company uses Twitter and Facebook to share content published on the blog — then to listen to, respond to, and interact with the community that content engages.

Marcus Wilson, Idea Paint’s head of marketing, says this system gives the company a level of customer intimacy and global reach and that was unheard of 10 years ago.

What’s this mean in terms of business results? Social media is now one of Idea Paint’s largest sources of leads and traffic — and it is growing steadily. Meanwhile, the company’s Twitter and Facebook reach grew 70% in Q1 2010, and is expected to grow an order of magnitude in Q2.

Idea Paint produced this video on their social media strategy, exclusively for Mashable () readers:

4. Integrating Twitter Into the Paper Selling Process

One year ago, the marketing team at Neenah Paper, a manufacturer of high-quality paper products, confronted a growing problem: It was becoming harder and harder to reach new potential customers. Their traditional channels — phone conversations and in-person meetings — were not working as well. Prospects were tuning them out.

Jamie Saunders, Neenah’s marketing communications manager, noted that most of the company’s potential customers — designers, graphic artists and printers — were spending their time in front of their computers, and that social media could be a way to better engage them.

So Neenah took a step into the social media world. While the experiment started with Neenah’s marketing team, its sales team was one of the biggest beneficiaries. They discovered they could do prospecting and nurturing via Twitter. Today the company has 10 sales representatives across the country using their personal Twitter accounts on behalf of Neenah to close new business.

Jamie says these sales reps are finding that social media is simply a more effective way of engaging with their prospects. “It’s an invitation to have a conversation. You’re getting permission to have a conversation — a conversation that used to happen in person.”

5. Leading the Online Aviation Maintenance Discussion

In November 2008, a handful of auto executives flew their private planes to Washington, DC to testify before Congress in support of federal aid for their industry. This perception of corporate excess created an outcry, and the private aviation industry’s image was damaged.

At that time, aircraft maintenance and support company Duncan Aviation had just started using social media. The company discovered that the new medium could be a way to positively shape the conversation — to add its perspective and improve the industry’s damaged reputation.

Beth Humble, now Duncan’s social media lead, explains that while social media is an important part of Duncan’s strategy, the company doesn’t aspire to create a Comcast- or Coke-like presence on the social web. Instead, the goal is simply to influence the right people.

“There are a lot of industry people that we network with that are on Twitter: Journalists, other aviation bloggers, and industry and media outlets,” Beth explains. “If you connect with the right few people, you can really get in there and connect with thousands of people.”

Ann Handley, author for Mashable.com, writes about what we can learn from these creative and resourceful businesses who understand the power of connecting and engaging with their customers!

Check out some of these incredibly innovative businesses. And they’re all related to street food (something we all love)! Take a break as we can all learn from them.

Hmm time to eat!

Best Nicole

“Twitter* is still a scary, untamed frontier for many businesses,” Fortune wrote last week. I hear a similar refrain from the marketers who are part of the MarketingProfs community: They know that they should be engaging online, but they don’t have the foggiest notion of how to do it.

Lots of businesses on Twitter are doing it right. But, lately, I’ve been finding inspiration less from those companies that have become the poster children for leveraging social media (this means you Comcast, and Zappos, and Dell) and more from the lesser-knowns: not just the little guys, but the littlest of the little guys. I’m talking about street food vendors.

Time was that lunch from street vendors meant limited options. But no more: Street food vendors have expanded both in number and cuisine. In New York City, this growth has recently led to a kind of food fight over turf. But elsewhere, it’s just meant that you can get vegan ice cream sandwiches or East Coast lobster rolls (in San Fran!) as easily as you can score a slice of pizza pie.

Twitter may not be the sole driving source (no pun intended) behind the growth of street food vendors—undoubtedly the economy has done its part to encourage the otherwise unemployed to find an inexpensive way to make a living. But, nonetheless, a growing number of street vendors have been leveraging Twitter in innovative and interesting ways, serving up lessons for any business.

1. Find your target market. (Sometimes, less is more.)

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The best use of Twitter for your business, of course, is to start gathering followers in your target market. Aside from a few exceptions, you won’t find street food vendors on Twitter with tens of thousands of followers, as their target markets are geographically constrained. Rather, street food vendors focus on getting the right followers.

Lunchtime lesson: 1,000 followers who will actually do business with you are ultimately more valuable to your business than 100,000 less-engaged people.

2. Create demand.

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New York City’s The Treats Truck writes updates so vivid that you can almost smell the cookies and brownies baking. It also does a great job of creating a sense of urgency in a purchase:

Others stay top-of-mind with hungry (or potentially hungry) customers, like the way Food Shark publishes its daily menu of Mediterranean-by-way-of-West-Texas food via Twitter:

Or check out the “food porn” photos shared by Vancouver’s Japanese hot dog stand Japa Dog:

Lunchtime lesson: Communicate the breadth and depth of your products or services on Twitter in a fresh, compelling way, and in a manner that speaks directly to your customers’ needs.

3. Humanize a brand.

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NYC’s Chef Shack (run by two NY chefs) does a great job of monitoring any conversation online. When caterer Molly Hermann praised the truck’s Indian spiced donuts, the Chefs responded:

Profound? Not really. But such simple efforts can go a long way to make customers feel appreciated, and to humanize your business.

Or consider the way Rickshaw Truck, which sells steamed and fried dumplings in Manhattan, fosters a personality behind the brand:

Here’s the way Big Gay Ice Cream Truck shows that the dessert circuit isn’t always a bowl of cherries:

Lunchtime lesson: Be real. Reveal a little bit about the people and personalities who run your business so that your customers can connect with you on a human level.

4. Share news and updates. (Even when it’s bad news.)

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Twitter offers a platform for regular and instant communication. The mobile bake shop known as the Cupcake Truck, in New Haven, CT, publicizes its locations and hours, which change regularly, of course. But even less-portable companies might consider regularly communicating business updates or other news (and how it affects your customers):

Or think about sharing some love by calling out awards and/or customer reviews:

Look at how Seattle’s Skillet Street Food used Twitter to rally customer support when it got into hot water with city officials over permitting issues:

And Durham, NC’s OnlyBurger (”the only burger you’ll ever want”) uses Twitter to keep its customers in the know when things literally break down:

Lunchtime lesson: It might be obvious to share the good stuff with your customers, but consider sharing the less-good, too. Doing so allows your customers to rally around your otherwise sound business. What’s more, your audience will likely respect you more for being honest and forthcoming. (Or, at the very least, you can tell your side of the story.)

5. Gather customer feedback.

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I particularly like the way many food vendors treat their clientele as resources, not just customers. Here, Washington DC’s Streetflow Mobile, which sells frozen yogurt, solicits street intelligence, literally, when it asks its customers about the best place to find city parking:

Lunchtime lesson: Use Twitter to solicit and listen to customer suggestions and opinions. Treat your customers as resources for the kind of feedback that informs product development or other business improvements.

6. Run fun promotions.

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NYC’s Waffletruck regularly runs Twitter-specific special promotions to its followers:

Lunchtime lesson: Take a page from Dell’s playbook on this idea: Use Twitter as a vehicle to run certain social media-based promotions and specials. Your followers will begin to readily anticipate them.

7. Create a sense of community.

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Organizing face-to-face tweetups for Twitter followers is one way of extending your community into the offline world, especially as it will connect your customers to each other (not just you). The nature of that event should reflect your market, of course. Magic Curry Man in San Francisco fostered that sense of customer community by organizing a singles meet up:

Or consider connecting your business to a larger cause, like San Francisco’s UrbanNectar does with its Twitter presence:

Lunchtime lesson: Creating a sense of a customer community around your business furthers your clientele’s engagement with you and your products or services. And connecting your customers with each other strengthens both their relationships with each other as well as with you.

8. Integrate your efforts.

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Twitter is only one tool in the social media shed—or, in this case, one dish at the social-media buffet table. Like any marketing effort by any business, it works best intertwined with other tools in a marketing mix, like a website, or Flickr*, a blog*, YouTube*, or whatever.

Lunchtime lesson: Done well, Twitter is plenty fulfilling for connecting customers with your business on an immediate and intimate level. But it’s even more nourishing when it’s served up as part of a bigger spread.

I find that the many articles I read and post provide a varied perspective; hence, I always include one with my post. I love the posts from Mashable.com as they often include a visual that shows you exactly what the article is speaking about in a step by step manner. Today’s post, by Soren Gordhamer (whose articles I have featured before), provides 4 ways social media is changing business.

For those who have not begun to add social media to the marketing mix, your competition is in the game and engaging relationships with your customers. As I always mention in my social media posts, I am a true believer that success comes with the integration of both traditional and social media. The question for you is: what can you do to succeed in this new era? In the article below are some ideas to get you started. Let us know what is working for you and how you are engaging with your customers to build those transparent, loyal relationships.

Best Nicole

To forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.

Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers. The old game is undoubtedly over, and the question now is, “what can businesses do to transition and succeed in this new era?”

Below are the top four broad shifts that social media is causing in business. Please feel free to share any others you have observed in the comments.

1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”

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In order to change the context of customer relationships from trying to sell to seeking to engage and connect with customers, companies need to use various means, including sites like Facebook* and Twitter*, to socially interact with people. The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Their goal is less about “selling” and more “engaging” — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.

Jeff Swartz, who is the President and CEO of the Timberland Company, is a great example of this. Swartz uses his Twitter account to show his personality by tweeting about his life and the social issues he is passionate about, rather than the shoes his company makes. He also links from his Twitter bio to Timberland’s Earthkeeper project that supports environmental awareness, rather than to the company homepage, in an effort to make a connection with people around something that goes beyond just the products Timberland sells.

Lesson: Release fewer “official statements” and more personal ones that help you make a connection to your customers and audience.

2. From “Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”

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With sites like Facebook and Twitter, we all essentially have our own broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.In the past, if we had a very bad or very good experience with a company, it could take days or weeks to tell all of our friends and relatives about it. Today, in a matter of minutes, we can let all our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter know about what happened. When every customer experience can be easily and widely broadcast, small issues become super important.Loic Le Meur, CEO of startup software company Seesmic*, once told me that one of the most important jobs of a CEO today is to hear what people are saying about the company’s product across social media channels, and to respond to them directly. In fact, much of his Twitter stream is @replies to people commenting on his company’s product.

Bigger companies, such as Southwest Airlines and Comcast are using Twitter in the same way, making sure customers’ concerns are addressed. Because bad experiences are broadcast just as fast and just as easily as the good, it pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.

Lesson: Instead of only relying on big campaigns, make authentic, helpful relationships and communication the new campaign.

3. From “Controlling Our Image” to “Being Ourselves”

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Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there Nis such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.I am not sure how NBC directs the social media efforts of their employees, but in watching NBC newscaster Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) on Twitter it is clear that she is not simply trying to get people to watch her shows. Curry is someone who speaks out about women’s rights, deeply cares about justice, and likes to quote the Persian poet, Rumi — there is a person there, not a company representative, and as such, I am much more likely to pay attention when and if she does talk about any of her television shows.

John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Photoshop at Adobe, offers another great example. Adobe is a company that smartly encourages and provides the means for their employees to blog, and anyone who reads Nack’s blog will notice that Adobe doesn’t put many restrictions on what people write about. Nack’s blog is focused almost exclusively on his area of interest — graphic design and photo manipulation — but he doesn’t post solely about Adobe products. Many of the interesting art projects and articles he links to have nothing to do with Adobe and some may even have been created using software from competing companies.

Lesson: Forget the unified company image, give staff the freedom to be themselves, and trust that the relationships that they build will help the company in the long run.

4. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”

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To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction*. If I want to communicate with a company, I tend to look them up on Twitter first. Knowing that I can communicate with a company on the networks upon which I am already most active makes me feel more comfortable doing business with them, because I know that if I have an issue, there is someone at the company I can communicate with through those means.

Companies like Dell, for example, have fully embraced multiple channels of support. Their community site lists all the ways customers can connect with them through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr*, YouTube*, forums, blogs, email, and more. Dell wants people to be able to connect with them through whatever channel is most comfortable.

Lesson: Rather than expect customers to communicate through your chosen means, allow them to do so through their chosen means.

The New Business Paradigm in the Age of Social Media

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In this new era of social media, companies are asked to be increasingly transparent and personal. Of course, traditional advertising and press releases will still have their place, but social sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow a whole new type of communication to take place that has previously been unknown to most businesses. Possibly more important for businesses than getting a large number of followers on social media sites, is following through on the opportunity to forge more genuine and direct connections with their customers.Businesses who choose not to adapt to the new culture will be at an increasing disadvantage, as their customers slowly build personal relationships with their competitors. We are now in the age of open communication, engaged dialogue, and transparency, and business success may now have less to do with the size of ad budgets, but on the quality of interactions with customers.

How easy can it be?

Best Nicole

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.

He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.

Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.