If you make and keep one New Year’s Resolution for your business it should be to make this year the year you really get stuck into social media. I have waxed lyrical in previous blogs about the benefits to small businesses - it is low cost although does require the time resource. Unfortunately time is a scarce commodity for most small business owners and directors, so despite its potential I know it can be a struggle to find the time to fit it in.

So I thought I would put together some tips and strategies to help you fit social media into your day. I cannot add an extra couple of hours to your day, but I may give you a couple of ideas that can help.

As someone involved in marketing no one can ever accuse me of being shy of using the odd buzzword and it can be very difficult to avoid certain terms and words that are just so commonly used. Think of how many companies profess to offer ‘bespoke solutions’ or ‘quality that counts’. I call these ‘weasel words’. Words that are not untrue, but are either so overused that people stop listening to them, or are bland and generic.

Well it seems this phenomenon is spreading to how we present ourselves online, specifically with our LinkedIn profile. This week, LinkedIn released its list of 10 most overused professional buzzwords .

With Halloween fast approaching and all sense deserting us as we decide that severed fingers and dodgy fancy dress outfits are appropriate purchases, it got me thinking about what is the most scary social media platform.

The answer definitely has to be Twitter. It is one of the most talked about yet least understood social media platforms I come across when talking to businesses. And, because of that, it can seems to be an alien place full of its own language and connected to crazy things such as the disgrace of football players or the incitement of civil unrest. For many it feels like a dangerous place and not one that is appropriate for them, especially in the B2B market.

So I thought it best to address these fears with tips about how to use Twitter for your business and, like all good ghost stories, with the lights on it is never so spine tingling as first appears.

One of the biggest impacts social media has had on how businesses market themselves is not about low cost routes to market or the ability to ‘engage’ (I hate that word) with your audience, I believe it is the shift is emphasis from pushing out controlled sales messages to sharing knowledge and expertise.

But for many business owners this does not sit comfortably.

I have had conversations with business owners who do not want to publish case studies in case there competitors see them (not that most of us don’t have a very good idea of who our competitors are working with anyway). I also come across the argument about the giving away of knowledge for free, especially for service companies where their knowledge is usually attached with a fee or charge.

So what is the happy medium? What are the arguments for being more open with the sharing of your knowledge be it through blogs, forums or free guides or white papers?

How Vodafone's social media campaign turned into a media disaster.

The big brands have long recognised social media as a fantastic way of building quick and personal relationships with their customers. Relationships that traditional media just cannot make.

For Vodafone this Christmas, one such PR stunt went horribly wrong!

In a clever pre-Christmas social media campaign to make Vodafone seem like a fun, generous and warm company – it was giving away free handsets to lucky Twitter users who used the hash tag #mademesmile to tell the company what things gave them a warm, fuzzy feeling . Launched on 11^th December the company invited people to “use Twitter to share something that made you smile today”.

Sounds great. What could possibly go wrong?

You’ve got yourself a website. You’ve had a dabble on Facebook and an ex colleagues keeps asking you to join their LinkedIn network and every celebrity seems obsessed with tweeting. As a business owner social media, as it is collectively known, may be on your radar but for many what to do with it is still a mystery.

On the positive side it is cheap. Compared to traditional media such as press, radio, and direct mail it is as cheap as chips. In fact it’s free so that should bring it to the top of the marketing agenda. But on the other hand, it seems to be full of people with too much spare time on their hands and not enough going on in their lives. Does the world really need to know that it is ‘three more sleeps till the weekend’ or that they are just about to eat a bacon sarnie?

The problem with Social Media is that it has grown exceptionally fast, yet unlike traditional media which had a clear purpose – to promote brands or get a response and sell stuff, the role of social media is fuzzy and mixed in with non commercial uses. In fact its very label, social media, seems to devalue it for businesses.