MACK COLLIER.COM — If you think about it, a lot of the ‘best practices’ for using social media can seem completely counterintuitive to companies that are new to these tools. Take linking, for example. On the surface, the process sounds absurd: I’m spending time every day as a social media consultant purposely promoting what OTHER people are writing, doing and saying about social media. And what’s worse, I’m using this as a strategy to increase my OWN exposure! How many companies would balk if you suggested that they promote their competitors, and as a way to promote YOUR company? But funnily enough, it works amazingly well. Here’s why...

MACK COLLIER.COM — We’ve all seen the studies and have heard the hype. Social media is taking over the world and every company will have to have a full-blown social media strategy by 2011 (originally it was 2008, then 2009, then 2010…), or they will be obsolete and left behind. Give me a break. Right now CEOs and business owners all across the country, no all across the world, are wringing their hands about social media. Because they don’t understand it, but are being bombarded with messages that claim they HAVE to understand it in order to succeed in the future. These are people that like carefully crafted plans with predictable outcomes, yet we are telling them to get moving NOW with a set of tools that are completely new to them...

MACK COLLIER.COM — Here are the 8 most popular search terms yesterday for this site. So it’s pretty obvious that companies are looking for information on how much they should expect to pay for social media services.  If that’s what you are looking for, then you should definitely check out this post on how much you can expect to pay for social media services. After looking at those search results (and I get similar results almost every day), I decided I needed to write another post about the cost of social media services.  But this time, I wanted to talk about ways that you can LOWER the cost you pay for social media services from consultants and agencies...

MACK COLLIER.COM — Recently, a ten-year veteran of company blogging said he was throwing in the towel on his company blog.  So when Joel on Software goes up in smoke, does that mean that it’s finally time to pronounce that company blogging is dead? Hardly. What it means, is that there are now a LOT more companies blogging. And unfortunately, that also means that there are a lot more very crappy company blogs out there. But a well-written and positioned company blog is just as effective now as it was 10 years ago.  Probably moreso.  The key then, as now, is to create a company blog that your customers will actually read...

MACK COLLIER.COM — Remember that game where a group of people sit in a circle and one person whispers a rumor to the person next to them? Then that person whispers it to the next person, and so on until the rumor has worked its way around the circle. Then the last person tells everyone what the rumor is, so they can see how the story changed from start to finish. I was thinking about this game when Kevin Smith recently had his very public spat with Southwest Airlines...