The statistics for the social media market are staggering. Social media sites are attracting visitors like mad with minimal amounts of effort.

Here are some numbers to consider (thanks to Nateonk ):

• Facebook is growing by 600,000 to 700,000 users per DAY .  The site has 150 million registered users today and is obviously growing.
• Twitter has 6 million users. I love this statistic: 11 percent of Internet users are on Twitter.
• LinkedIn , the professional social-networking site, has over 35 million users.

I have said this a number of times, but there is a whole generation of people who are turning on their computers, opening their social-media application first, leaving it on and living their Internet day in the application.  Recently I was out with a bunch of social-media loving twenty-somethings, PSOGLE and Meadball . Somehow, I ended up arguing against the power of Facebook and Twitter with these young guys. But they were confirming the points I make every day: social media is incredibly relevant as more and more people manage their Internet experience out of these applications. I don't have the statistics, but I honestly believe no one under the age of 27 has a @yahoo email address or goes to Yahoo! or MSN. They use Facebook and have GMail.  They are "doing the Internet" differently than my generation, and it's all about social media. It seems like my peers are more likely to live on LinkedIn and Twitter.

So, you would think that this would translate into an entirely new paradigm for Internet-revenue generation, but it doesn't. The revenue generated from these social media sites just does not come close to their popularity. Everyone tells me not to read Valleywag , but I do and do so religiously. Anyway, they had a post on Facebook's inability to generate revenue commensurate with their enormous number of users . Do the math and you realize social media might be headed for trouble:

1. Facebook is trying desperately to justify the $3.7 billion dollar valuation and failing.
2. Twitter just has to get bought; I can't see anyway out for them. They're going with the old-school Web site model — building traffic now and figuring out the rest later. There have been a lot of posts on how Twitter can make money and none have resonated with me.
3. I have hope for LinkedIn , but I am not hearing much about their revenue.

The net-net: I was asked by Steven Woods from Eloqua : Can social media scale? According to him, the market is growing and frankly starting to dominate, but won't scale without revenue.

Stay tuned.

I don't want to sound like a salesperson here, but in these uncertain economic times there are certain ways that you can weather the storm and come out the better for it.  One way is investing in EMS software.  KODAK EMS Software is for managing the entirety of your business, from quoting and estimating to production, shipping and accounting. It has a single database that collects information throughout your business and gives you real-time information on any aspect of your business: the status of a job; the size of your sales pipeline; who are your best customers or sales people; where you're making money or losing it; the actual vs. estimated cost of any job... and more.

Here are 5 ways EMS software can help:

1. Better Control Costs Your Costs - Analyze the profitability of your jobs and your customers to discover where you are making or losing money. Many business owners simply do not know—or do not realize that "cash cows" or top customers of yesteryear might no longer be profitable. You should also regularly compare job costs against estimates so that you can avoid under-pricing your work.  You should also create daily end-of-month and end-of-quarter projections to stay on track with your financial plan or be able to take corrective action before it's too late.
   
   
2. Optimize Business Performance - Set key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you meet your primary business goals, whether financial, sales-oriented or even service-oriented. There are literally thousands of KPIs. You need to find the right ones that will help you hone your business strengths. Sample KPIs include revenue per quarter, the value of your sales pipeline and the number of rings until a customer call is answered. But it's not enough to set and measure KPIs. When you don't meet an important KPI, you should analyze the cause and take corrective action. You should also post relevant KPIs throughout your business and share the results with employees.
   
   
3. Create New Opportunities - Use customer relationship management (CRM) on a daily basis in order to improve customer service and to ensure that customers know all of your products and services. You should continually analyze your best opportunities and monitor progress. An MIS/ERP system like KODAK EMS Business Software will generate follow-up tasks so that opportunities aren't missed.
   
   
4. Capture More Revenue - Identify the 20% of products that bring you 80% of your profits and focus your sales team on selling your profitable items. You should also use automation to quickly produce accurate quotes which has been statistically proven to improve win-loss ratios. You should also enable online services using KODAK InSite Storefront which can reduce labor costs on relatively simple items. Manage both your offline and online businesses with daily financial analysis and with KPIs.
   
   
5. Better Manage Your Finances - You should consolidate financial data so you can easily get a real-time view of your business and react faster when you need to make a decision. You would be surprised how many printers simply don't have access to real-time data. You should expedite invoicing processes to improve quote-to-cash while improving liquidity. A faster invoicing process will also let you convert "free" last-minute job changes into revenue by being able to add changes to an open invoice or to quickly issue a supplemental invoice. Or you could even issue a no-charge invoice of last minute changes buy your customer's allegiance and demonstrate what great service you can deliver!

Although marketing and sales principles have remained unchanged for many years, a lot of companies still find it challenging to apply theses basics in today's market place.

Companies look at a market and create a product/service which that market will value and therefore want to invest in.  They also look at their potential competitors to see what they sell, how, when, how much and how often.  Then they identify what will differentiate them from the rest.  This simple exercise helps with two critical aspects; what to sell and to who - the how is then the next natural step. 

The how is all about communication - this sounds simple enough as we have been doing it for centuries, however just capturing the attention of the customer is extremely hard to achieve in today's climate.  It is clear that effective communication starts with a relevant message, and if you are not relevant people ignore you and walk away.  The good news is that once you achieve relevance you will be heading for success, the bad news is that you need to maintain  relevance throughout the marketing cycle otherwise you will fail.   

Conversations are crucial to provide information, and valuable information is imperative to become even more relevant and moves you ahead in the marketing/sales cycle. More importantly it helps you show the value of your product/service to your different prospects/customers.  

Some products/services also need trust to be sold, which can also be obtained through these conversations which eventually develop into relationships.  By building awareness, information, relationships and trust this leads into sales, and each company moves differently throughout this building process depending on their product/service and market positioning.

Even though information is one of the most critical aspects in a sales/marketing cycle, it does not guarantee success if not used properly.  What do I need to know from my prospects/customers in order to show them the real value of my product/service better than my competitors do?  In some cases answering this question will not be the biggest challenge - this will be how to get the information as well as having the time/patience to get/build it or the money to pay for it. 

Some people are still not taking this seriously enough, despite the fact that in simple terms if  I do not know you how can I show you the value of what I am selling, so that you are inclined to buy it. 

When we ask for databases they are often in bad shape.  Why? This is probably your biggest intellectual asset. Databases cost money, they always have. In the past in order to build a database you had to talk to your customers and that time was money.  Today the market is so different that companies need technology to keep up with the information that they get from their customers. 

There had always been three ways of building information and each of these costs money.  The first option is to interact with your prospects utilizing the available channels to get the information you need.  Secondly you could pay someone that has the information.  If you apply this to today's market you could be buying a database from companies that sell them.  And finally you could buy the information from your customers by offering them an incentive - for example, you could send someone to register on a website or fill in a questionnaire, in exchange for a gift or discount.

Promotional items are a good strategy for obtaining information.  Interestingly enough these items are not often used for this purpose, but in some cases are giveaways that support branding.  In others, they have been used as an incentive for consumers to act upon an offer, but rarely utilized to buy information.  But the promotional gift strategy is very powerful if used properly.

Sometimes communication projects do not work because we do not pay enough attention to the basics of selling, we might even ignore them while under pressure trying to speed up a sale cycle.   Then we wonder why the project failed. The great news is that all the new technologies/channels have been developed to help us sell more in a very saturated and competitive market place.

Just knowing what to say and to whom is insufficient; how a marketing message is presented and how it is sent to your customers is most important. First of all, you need to communicate your message in a creative way. However, if the content is not relevant to your audience, creativity will only capture their attention but struggle to sell the value of a product/service.  Sensitivity is also critical and relates to how you use the information that you have.

Secondly, there are many ways to send your marketing message to customers.  New channels are quickly emerging whilst existing ones keep changing, maturing and improving. You need to consider which channels to use and when so that recipients will listen to you. 

Mass communication channels worked very well in the past and were developed at the right time. In order to grow their businesses, companies had two choices - either increases their portfolio to make up for any losses against competition and/or expand to other territories.  Mass communication channels such as TV, radio, newspapers and even traditional printing helped these companies market and sell in bigger territories keeping human resources (sales/marketing people) costs down.  These companies utilized their best sales/marketing pitch and hit thousands, even millions of consumers in a matter of seconds via these channels.  They used one unique message to all, which was a relevant message based on generic customer buying criteria and it worked very well.

What happened then?  The market changed, became more saturated/competitive and that unique marketing/sales message that was the same to all recipients did not achieve relevance anymore.  A relevant message when it is overused by everyone in the market becomes irrelevant, as it is either taken for granted or loses creditability.  It no longer captures the attention of the consumer and therefore they are unlikely to make a purchase.

Let me give you a quick example.  Visitors to Belgium like to buy chocolate, and their buying criteria is real Belgian chocolate.  The center of Brussels is overflowing with shops that sell chocolate, and predominantly all of their marketing messages are the same and are linked to the consumer's generic buying criteria.  However there is a problem with the same marketing message, as the consumers take the message for granted - "of course it is Belgian chocolate as I am in Brussels", or "sure but who has the best genuine Belgian chocolate here" (loss of creditability).  In order to overcome such a challenge, marketers need to personalize their marketing messages in order to show the specific value to a customer.   The challenge here is to know what to say to the different individuals in your target audience.  This task is clearly related to the quality of information that you might have.  The more relevant information you have the easier it will be for you.

So which technology/channel is better for you today?  It is important to understand that every technology replicates a human being.  Not only that, but in most cases it enhances the job of a human being, making them more productive, effective and efficient.  The technology in a car park that gives you a ticket and opens the barrier is replicating a person.  A DVD showing a concert of your favorite singer not only replicates the singer but it multiplies him/her by thousands.  In a warehouse, a company might need hundreds of people to move boxes within a set period of time, but now forklift trucks reduce the amount of people needed.  So who are we trying to replicate when we talk about communication technologies?  Of course it is a sales/marketing person, but why is this important?

• First you need to know if the technology that you are using will guarantee success on its own or not.  A technology will guarantee success as long as it is replicating a predictable job where a human being may have been doing things the same way over and over everyday. Communication technologies do not guarantee success by themselves as they tend to replicate a sales person - and a sales person is always unpredictable.  You can broadcast a TV commercial or send 50.000 flyers to the market, but this still does not guarantee that you will get the return you are looking for.  This is important because just as the automatic pilot technology on a plane needs a real pilot behind it, so will these communication technologies fail unless there is a good sales/marketing person behind them.
• Secondly, you need to decide which technology is the right one for you in each case.  A clear example of this is that all technologies available help you communicate, but which one is best and when should you use what?  It is critical to use the right channel at the right time, and to determine this you will have to take into consideration what an effective sales person would do, and then decide which available technology replicates him/her best as he moves through a sales cycle.  All channels fit a particular situation that is why they are here, but most of the time it is about the right implementation of more than one channel.  Some technologies/channels will allow you to change your marketing messages when you communicate with your target audience, just as a good sales person will do in a competitive market place.  Others might not give you such flexibility but will give you other benefits such as lower price per print and quicker time to market.  In our competitive markets today personalization is very powerful if used properly. 
• Last but not least, when you understand who you are trying to replicate, you can copy them better.  If a flyer is replicating a sales person, perhaps sometimes the content of the flyer says things that a sales person on a face to face call will never say?   Sometimes the biggest failures I see are related to this.  If a sales person on a first call does not talk too much but listens, how is it that when we utilize other channels we ignore this basic principle?  If a sales person takes five visits on average to sell his/her product, why do we sometimes think that with just one impact we are going to achieve the same result as the sales person?  Successful sales people never speculate with things they do not know, so why is it that sometimes we speculate while using other channels? We put things on paper that we would never say on a face to face call and then we wonder why our project failed.

A good rule of thumb when putting a marketing communication project together is to think about those successful sales people.  Ask yourself what they would do, how and when. 

Looking at today's technology, web2print is very interesting.  Marketers have been struggling as they try to decide on centralized or un-centralized marketing, but now this technology allows them to get the best of both worlds.  They can upload all of their marketing materials into a personalized web portal where their distributors and/or sales offices can print the exact content of what they need but personalized to their target audience, and at the same time maintaining brand consistency across their sales channels.  Web2print also enables the relationship with your printer to be automated, by again uploading all materials into a web portal so your employees can order on line what they need, where and when they need it. In order to do that securely you could give access to select employees who are able to order certain materials in limited amounts.  In both previous scenarios a new file ready to be printed could be uploaded and sent to the printer at any given time via the internet.

The market is talking about interactivity and permission marketing, again what is new about that?  We are just going back to the basics - interactivity leads to personalization and personalization is very powerful today.  However it still does not guarantee success on its own.  We should not personalize for the sake of it or because it is the latest trend, a personalized communication project needs to be thoroughly put together just the same as any other important project.  Just because it works for others does not mean it will work for you if you do not do it correctly.  When you personalize and make a mistake, the mistake is more visible.  If you tell me something irrelevant in a non-personal communication, I would think, well it was not meant for me anyway, but if that happens while personalizing to me the impact will be different.   If you are not sure about something do not relate to that at all.  Invest to find out first, and then use the correct, relevant information.

To me it is all about showing the right audience the value of your products and services better than your competitors do so they choose yours. It is also about doing simple things better than anyone else. I am excited that even though we are in a very competitive and saturated market place, the new communication technologies/channels will help us grow our businesses, if utilized effectively.