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.

So if you are the owner of an SME, can social media be made to work or is it a big black hole to waste time? The answer, like so many things in life, is that it can be both. I know of an example of a sole trader working from their back bedroom who has built a business using only twitter that has landed contracts with blue chip brands they would never have even got through to on the phone. But, and it is a big but, there are also lots of instances where businesses have launched into social media and have not really understood what it can do. Have replicated their marketing and sales messages and wondered why they have got nothing from it.

The key is to forget what you know about traditional marketing and media. Social Media is not a good tool for direct selling - although there are examples such as Dell who are bucking this trends with their Twitter account @DellOutlet selling computer bargains. In June 2010 it revealed that it’s 600,000 followers had generated £1.8m in sales. But generally overt sales and marketing messages are an anathema to this channel and nothing is sure to tun people off quicker.

Social Media is good for building relationships. Relationships with your customers, your suppliers, your industry peers. And like good business networking it is nurturing these relationships that can often give you the biggest rewards.

If we forget about the buzz words and lingo for a moment and think in simple business terms … would you like to have access to the friends and colleagues of your customers? Would you like to have direct access and dialogue to industry experts? Would it benefit your business to be able to demonstrate some of your knowledge and expertise to your target audience? Would you like to be able to react instantly to news, trends and the latest buzz in your sector? If you have answered yes to any of these then social media tools, whether it is a blog, business Facebook Page, LinkedIn group or twitter account could help you achieve these.

The reality is it will be a combination of these that will have best effect and this is where ‘new media’ does start to have parallels with old media – it is the ‘halo effect’ of using multiple media across integrated campaigns that has a much greater effect than any one media on its own.