Google forgot the first rule of social media when it released its Google Buzz social networking service. They forgot to listen first. Worse, they didn’t even start a conversation with their Gmail users. Many people woke up to find practically anyone they had ever sent a Gmail to suddenly their Buzz friends. This is not a case of “suggesting” that you might want to connect to or become a friend of someone connected to your friends (like LinkedIn and Facebook do) but “wiretapping” you and exploiting the object of all your private communications.

I also discovered that people that I had never met – or emailed – were suddenly my friends. Yes, I could choose to block them – after the fact. There were some men whose pictures showed up on my Buzz page as contacts that I neither wanted to engage with on my computer nor potentially have knocking on my front door.

Social capital is to social media what a Google page ranking is to search engine optimization. The difference is that a high Google page ranking means that – if people are looking for a company that does what you do – your company can be found. It infers a level of popularity and increases the chance that people will check your company out. This is fine, and if your company website makes a good first impression, you then increase the likelihood of someone making direct contact with you.

However, we know that personal referrals and networking are how most business is done. This is where social media excels. In the social media, your company (and its employees) can build those connections that can ultimately turn into business relationships or referral sources.

This is where the concept of “social capital” comes in. It is not a new concept – sociologists were using this term long before social media came into being. It refers to the value of social networks and their ability to create bonds and support reciprocity among people.

But how do you measure this concept of social capital? At the Social Media Academy, the NCP Model was created to do just that.

What Makes the top 50 Facebook Fan Pages Work? In the case of Best Buy (#13 on The Big Money list), some real creativity and commitment.

Best Buy has often been used as a case study for how online communities can develop and improve employee performance. In the book groundswell, six pages are dedicated to blueshirtnation,  an online employee community credited with improving service at Best Buy stores. If you look at the Best Buy TV ads over the last few years, you will see that the focus is on their sales associates – supporting the premise that good employees = good service.

The Big Money published a list of the top 50 companies on Facebook the other day. They measured both the number of fans and the amount of fan interaction. They did not include pages run by fans – though the company in the top spot (Coca-Cola) has a site that was founded by a fan who continues to run that page with Coca-Cola’s support.

It would have been nice to have some more analysis from The Big Money so – over the next few days – I will try and drill down and provide some additional thoughts.

Facebook ads seem to work. This should be good news for Facebook since, from my outsider’s vantage, old-school advertising is their only real revenue potential at this time. The Big Money reported that JC Penney purchased Facebook ads for the back-to-school shopping season and its fan base went from 22,000 to nearly 500,000. Kohl’s (another retailer in basically the same category as JC Penney) ran a Facebook ad in August and grew its fan base from 10,000 to 350,000 during that time period.

As a former product manager who has launched literally dozens of products and new business lines, I had a checklist of all of the touch points needed for a successful launch. However, in the age of Web 2.0 and social media that checklist now has some new steps with more extended new timelines, and some old steps have either been eliminated or diminished in terms of the amount of effort put into them.

The rule in the past was to line up everyone within your organization to be trained and ready to go on Day 1 of a product launch. It still holds true that sales, customer support, and operations need to be fully trained and ready to go when a product is put on the shelves. For services and software that go through a Beta release stage, there is often a more extended launch period, not just one day when everyone symbolically cuts a ribbon. How to roll out a product internally has not changed that much.

What has changed is the external process. The communication to those outside the company is now a slow roll and there are multiple ways to get your story out. Gone are the days of a press release that creates a story in the old-style media. A direct mail push seldom happens anymore. And a big advertising campaign is only for people with excess cash. (In 2009, there aren’t many companies that fall into that category.)

The matrix below was first posted on Social Media Today and was create by Ogilvy (an ad agency) for IBM. Although the original post was called “Have You Considered Segmenting Your Social Media Strategy?”, the matrix primarily speaks to how you can use Twitter and, secondarily, who you will be speaking to.

Twitter Strategy

One of the commenters to this post asked how you go about segmenting your followers. I believe that Twitter is a good prospecting tool, so I gave the question some though thought and wrote the following:

Customer Relations:

The closing of Gourmet and Modern Bride magazines just hit the newswires today. Two more publications that have a clearly-defined audience but weren’t able to provide enough ad revenue. (Some reports say that Gourmet’s ad revenue was down 50% over last year.) Gourmet’s editor, Ruth Reichl had moved the publication beyond just the print media to websites and a television series, but that wasn’t enough to save it.

Quoted in the AP release the celebrity food editor, Bobby Flay, seemed very stoic:

"The transition from hard paper to the Internet is not as easy as it should be. We just take it as a sign of the way things are going to be now."

AP writer, J.M. Hirsch, put forth this opinion:

“Gourmet's demise also illustrates the change in how power is held in the food world. The ability of print media to make — or break — anything is waning. Increasingly, it is the viral aspect of social networking and blogging that gives rise to new faces, places and flavors.”

Both reactions paint a pretty grim picture of the future of print publications, even with a fairly robust internet or social media strategy. Gourmet had the following:

One of the puzzling things is how Obama used social media to his advantage during the campaign but has failed to use it successfully now. The techniques that the campaign used were fine when you had a large group of people rallying around one idea. However, once the presidency was in motion, the real conversation should have begun. Every cabinet secretary, under-secretary, administration policy wonk should be in a dialog with the public through social media. None this has happened. It’s like they read Chapter 1 of ‘How to Develop a Social Media Strategy’, but never finished the rest of the book.

This is analogous to a company that used social media for a marketing campaign, with Obama being the product, but never took the next step. At this point virtually every “consumer” (i.e. the American public) is a subscriber to this product – at least for the next four years when we all will have to decide if we want to “renew our subscription”. All smart CEOs know that it is better to keep your customers engaged positively throughout the contract cycle than to try to woo them, at the last minute, just before they have to make another buy or no-buy decision.

The FTC has made what some may see as a controversial ruling – that bloggers must disclose if they are getting paid by or are receiving free goods from companies whose product they have reviewed. These rulings are meant to protect consumers, but they also protect the overwhelming majority of companies that are using the social media honestly.

Transparency in the social media is the only way to gain trust. If a relationship is based on manipulation it will ultimately fail. As it has often been said, it is not a matter of if you will be exposed but when you will be exposed. Not only is there –ultimately – no place to hide, but the news of your transgressions will fly fast over the internet.

If some companies see this as a reason to not get involved, then they shouldn’t get involved in a social media strategy. It means that they are still thinking in terms of creating a promotional channel where paying to get their message out is part of the game. The social media is – to them – a channel to be exploited. I don’t fault companies for this old-think, it is difficult to do an about-face when traditional marketing and advertising concepts are more than a century old and very ingrained in our collective psyches.