I was at Social Fresh a couple of weeks ago. It is a conference for marketers to exchange stories about social media. Here are some of my take aways:

Social Media is still young yet. Even the "Social Media Gurus" haven't figured it all out. (And are there really any social gurus?)

There are still at least 10 things to avoid in Social Media, including being in a rush to a social platform to replace traditional marketing that still works.

Case studies were presented including one from the keynote that sounded like this: Honda has 2M followers on their Facebook fan page. That means that they can cut media spend and broadcast to those 2M fans. First off, that FB term Fan is annoying. You don't beg to get fans. Does NASCAR beg its fans? No. It provides a product that they find entertaining, exciting, and worth talking about. The driver personalities draw in people, who become fanatical - tattoos, clothing, bumper stickers, etc. - about the driver, team, car, race. That's a Fan. They will listen. They are vested. 

So the whole numbers game about social media is kind of flawed. You need Listeners, Customer Evangelists, Raving Fans, or at the least a cult-like following. Not 100K people that don't pay attention. (You have TV commercials for that!)  Listeners can be engaged. Engagement leads to sales and referrals. Referrals is part of that whole Word-of-Mouth marketing thing. Viral is all about WOM. But there's no formula for viral any more than there is for a best seller.

So again we are back to marketing on social platforms like they are a replacement for the newspaper or billboard. Marketing is becoming more and more like a networking event. If you failed at those, you will fail online. 

I haven't seen much correlation between sales and social media, except for Dell Outlet and travel sites (specifically JetBlue and Marriott). All the telecom case studies of Twitter have to do with customer care. And that is important because as the pie flattens out, and you are fighting in a Red Ocean for customers, customer retention (and the correlating churn number) starts to affect stock price.  

Side note: no one had a Facebook strategy. A Fan page strategy to get fans and advertise to them, but that was all I heard. Oh, and to target advertise on Facebook can be effective. 

So how does social media fit in? One way is SEO. Good old fashion search engine optimization. If you put enough good, relevant content out there, people can find you. Social media like twitter, slideshare, blogs, Linkedin are all available in a Google search.

If you had a comprehensive online marketing strategy - TMC portal, blog, website(s), twitter, LinkedIn, slideshare - you would have big Google juice. And if kept current would probably drown out most negative comments. 

Where does Google Adwords fit in? Lead generation. Sales if your Landing page and website are designed properly to do sales process. But think about this: you are buying keywords. You could spend that money on organic search results. It would be more effective and you'd have Listeners.

Join. Listen. Engage. Give Value. No different than offline.
 

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made enough of an impression at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week that Yankee Group blogged about it. Google at the MWC.

Much criticism against Google is that they steal from book publishers, TV and movie producers, and newspapers. TechDirt regularly provides case studies of how much malarchy this is. How would anyone find your book, article, etc.? It requires a search engine, especially today where PEW statistics show that people are only visiting the 10-12 websites they know regularly.

Then there's Google Voice. Like other mobile VoIP applications, VoIP on a cell phone replaces voice minutes with data packets. It mainly replaces International minutes.

But don't call Google a thief. "His fastest comeback in the interrogation he received was to this question: "Why is Google stealing the operators' talk minutes?" Referring, we all supposed, to Google Voice as an app riding on flat-rate data plans. His immediate response: "If that's the way you think about it, then operators are stealing their own customers' talk minutes by selling them SMS."" [Yankee Group blog] 

I don't think that it is about voice revenue. I think it's about the bandwidth issue. The cellular network was built around voice - under 10K streams of voice. The problem is that VoIP uses anywhere from 30K to 100K packets. Each voice call on VoIP G.729 will use up 3x what a cell call would. That's one of the worries for the cellcos - spectrum usage. Spectrum's finite.

On the other side of this coin is call quality. The reason VoIP is even considered today (versus 2005 or 2006) is because people have been conditiond to accept crappy call quality and reliability via cell phone usage. Skype-to-Skype calls give better call quality than cell to cell. If HD voice ever comes to the cell phone (like is happeneding with Orange in France), the networks will bog down. It's their own fault though. The handsets are being designed to take advantage of SAAS, email and other apps - effectively becoming a small computer. There has not been much innovation in the cell phone call quality. Where's the BOSE designed handset for great speaker-phone and call quality?

They opened Pandora's chest -- and then didn't do enough to offer consumers an alternative to VoIP (Google or otherwise) on the cellphone, like better call quality, International rate plans, better handsets equipped with noise cancellation and speakers of BOSE quality.