Today I spoke at the Foodservice News Restaurant Business series, a conference created to provide smart business techniques to restaurants owners, operators, and chefs.

As I do at the beginning of every speech, I asked the audience a bunch of questions about their use of both the traditional and new communication tools in order to grow their businesses. Never before have I spoken to a group so “with it.”

Nearly every single audience member (180 of them) has a LinkedIn account they actively use. About 75 percent have Facebook pages. And more than half have Twitter accounts they actively use. Most are using traditional PR and advertising offline and combining their efforts with online activities. This is really good for an audience that size. Usually I get lots of hands for LinkedIn and a few here and there for the others. And, typically, only half do any PR, advertising, or marketing. Pretty savvy group!

But what I learned in talking with people after the speech was the most interesting. Keep in mind the audience members all are in the restaurant industry, but I’ll bet there are some ideas here you can steal.

A restaurant is opening in six months and doesn’t have budget for a big launch. What do they do?

* They create a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page, and an eNewsletter database.

* They begin to build their community by asking people in and around their restaurant to become enthusiasts. Once an enthusiast,   you have the opportunity to vote on certain aspects of the restaurant and have access to special events, once they open.

* They ask for feedback on everything from fabric for chair covers and paint colors to menu items and flatware. Once open, the enthusiasts dine with them and see their opinion actually implemented!

* They develop menu items and ask their enthusiasts to vote on their favorites…and those are integrated into the concept.

* They have more than 2,000 enthusiasts who are active in crowdsourcing ideas.

Imagine the brand loyalty they’re creating by asking for their guest’s advice, listening, and implementing their ideas! What if you were one of their enthusiasts? Would you continue to go to that restaurant? Would you take family and friends when they were visiting from out-of-town? How cool would it be to say, “Look at that plant. I chose it for them!”  Their guests feel like they own a part of the restaurant and that is very good for business.

A meal preparation company has lots of moms who come in weekly to create meals for the coming week. Lots of their customers also don’t understand this social media “thing their kids are using”. But what does that have to do with the meal preparation company?

* They create social media education courses moms can take while they prepare the week’s meals.

* One week they focus on Facebook. The next Twitter. And so on.

* They provide safety tools and help moms understand how to monitor what their kids are doing.

* They teach the various ways kids can get around letting mom and dad see what they’re doing.

* They help moms understand the nuances of what it is their kids are doing – from Facebook and MySpace to texting and games.

This has nothing to do with meal preparation, but it creates brand loyalty because they’re focused on the needs of their customers, not just on what’s in it for them.

A bakery sells only to restaurants, and pretty much to every restaurant in the greater city where they are located. They have the monopoly on bread in restaurants and even have a retail sale once a month, for two hours, where people stand in long lines waiting to get their loaf of bread. Why would they need to do any marketing, communication, or social media?

* The CEO said 20 years ago he read a paper Andy Warhol wrote about marketing. He quotes it as saying, “You need to be in people’s homes every 12 weeks” and this bakery CEO lives by those words.

* This CEO also believes people buy from people they like (smart man!) and he uses social media to create a face for is company. He is the brand. People buy from him.

* Like Tony Hsieh at Zappos and the Kogi Korean truck in LA, the bakery has a face at the top who people relate to and feel like they know.

* He believes social networking is just that – social and networking (duh!). He said, “I have friends I want to see, but I don’t have time to see everyone all the time. If I do have time, it’s money driven so I’m going to choose where I make money. Social networking allows me not only to grow my business, but also to keep up with my friends.”

What are some of the online tools that you use to create brand loyalty or grow your business?

I’m having an identity crisis and I need your help.

It’s no secret we’ve changed our business model this year to incorporate social media into our traditional communication firm. All along I’ve been saying that PR deserves a place at the social media table, that so much of it is about relationships and messaging, which is what our industry has been doing for centuries.

So why is it, then, that the PR industry isn’t all over this? The global PR firms have begun to hire social media planners or experts to help them, but it seems like it’s just a “have to do this so we’ll hire someone” kind of thing. I’m not sensing a strategy or a change in the way the businesses operate, mostly because I think even the big firms look at social media like most companies – they don’t get it and don’t like giving up control of the message (which we know is just a perception).

Am I off my rocker or do we have a severe competitive advantage now that our business model completely incorporates social media….and has for a year?

I’m pretty sure it’s career suicide to take on one of the PR industry’s top media outlets, but you’ve never known me to back down from a fight, have you?

Jeremy Probert, a guest columnist with Ragan , yesterday wrote an article titled, “Why letting staff remark publicly is an idiotic idea.” When I read that title, two thoughts flashed through my brain: 1) Surely this title is sensationalism and I’m going to buy into it by reading the story and 2) The wise words of my friend Amber Naslund, “Why would you let your staff answer your phone, but not let them use social media?”

And then I read the story.

You simply do not allow employees free rein. You don’t; that’s accepted.

Then along come the social media strategists. “It’s all about content, it’s all about dialogue, it’s all about the quality of the      conversation”—free spirits in the digital age. Not for them the rules of the old guard—no, the rise of the Internet and Facebook and Twitter has changed the world, and we must move on or wither and die.

It appears that their lobbying—and the continuing spread of Shiny Object Syndrome—has convinced even the most conservative of organizations (Coke, anyone?) that they should be allowed to let employees post directly to the social media sites, without passing the sense/health check that is the PR department.

On first blush, it’s quite intriguing that a “20 year communication veteran” is so adamant against anyone not messaged or well briefed working with the media. That Coke and Ford would actually ALLOW someone not in the internal communication department to be brand ambassadors is insane.

And then I realized the poor man is old school.

He thinks people aren’t already talking about their company, their bosses, their peers, the products or services they provide and that those that do, publicly, have been messaged and briefed. And he thinks the social media strategists (some of whom ARE communication professionals) are advocating staff talking publicly because social media is the next new thing.

Here are the facts: Employees complain about their managers. Managers thinks executives line their pockets with what should be their bonuses. Customer service listens to customer complaints all day, every day. Some staff drink the kool-aid and believe strongly in the vision and the culture. Some don’t. But what all of these people have in common is they are brand ambassadors, the good and the bad, no matter if you give them “free rein” or let only those who are messaged and briefed speak.

They are telling their friends. They are telling their family. They are telling potential customers. They are telling potential colleagues. They are talking about the good and the bad. But now you have the ability to SEE and HEAR what they are saying.

Probert points to the Domino’s video incident from a few months ago as an example of what goes wrong when you let staff talk publicly. Those employees were not given free rein to speak publicly to the media. Their manager was not in the store. They created the video. It went viral. They got fired. Without social media and an easy way to upload video from a phone, this would have happened, but the only people who would have known about it were their friends. They would still have jobs and they would still be sneezing and spitting on your food.

I’m sorry Mr. Probert, we do not read your column and think you are “miffed that you’ve been edged out of the frame and that stuff is going on without you.”

Coke and Ford are two great, big corporations who know these kinds of things are already going on. Now they have the opportunity to decide what to do with the detractors (fire them?) and how to reward the brand ambassadors.  I think NOT allowing staff to speak publicly is idiotic.

It’s been a few weeks since I answered social media questions here so I’m going back and looking at some of the things people asked during the Vistage social media Webinars I hosted in July.

Q: With increased popularity, so many people are jumping on the bandwagon and there is more noise than actual value. How do you yell over the crowd or is there another way to not get lost?

A. I want you to think about social media as a networking event. What do you do when you go to a networking event? How much time do you spend listening? How much time do you spend asking questions? How much time do you spend talking about yourself? How do you invest in building relationships with people you met at this event? Why do some of them end up becoming life-long friends?

Social media is a networking event; one you can attend every day. Use programs such as WeFollow and Twellow to find the people you are most interested in meeting; those you think you could do business with at some point. Then build your community. Find common interests, ask questions, send surveys. And when you feel like you’ve gained some momentum (you’ll be able to tell, but it’ll take at least 30 days), then you can begin talking about yourself.

Q: Why do I really need social media? Isn’t this just another time sucker created by the Web?

A: I’m not going to lie – social media CAN be a time sucker, if you don’t manage it properly. But managing it properly is easy to do. What do you already do to communicate to your audiences? Do you advertise? Do you send direct mail? Do you do any PR? Do you do any email marketing? Do you have collateral to support your sales team? Social media is just another way to distribute your information, once you’ve built your community (see answer above). It’s another way to communicate with your target audiences and to monitor what your competition is doing.

Q: Which social network sites are most appropriate for Vistage members?

A: There aren’t social network sites more appropriate for Vistage members than others. If you take the time to listen (see my blog post about that here) and figure out where YOUR target audiences are already living and playing, that is where you should spend your time.  For instance, a business-to-consumer company may have better luck with Facebook. But a business-to-business company will succeed with Twitter. If you’re looking to recruit talent, LinkedIn is a great resource. I like to use the Groundswell profile tool when we begin consulting a new client. It provides you a quick analysis of what, by demographics, your audience is already doing on the social networks. You can find it here.

Q: When beginning to use the social networks, what would be the best approach to inform your customers and/or potential customers that we are active in these areas?

A: If you’ve spent some time listening and monitoring where your target audiences are already playing and working, your customers and prospects will know you’re out there because that’s who you’ll have started with to build your community. We also like to use this blog and our bi-monthly newsletter to keep ourselves top-of-mind as we continue to build our community. We create contests on Facebook in order to draw in more fans and we stay topical and selfless as we communicate.  Use social media as another way to communicate the great things that you are doing – it’s just another distribution channel as long as it’s not all about you and you’re connecting and engaging with people as honestly and authentically as you can.

Yesterday morning I moderated a discussion on social media measurement at #SMBChicago. We started the discussion with some of the free tools I blogged about a couple of weeks ago (see it here).

Then we spent some time discussing additional tools. They are as follows:

* su.pr: I personally love this URL shortener because it’s much more accurate than bit.ly, plus it shoots your content into StumbleUpon, which helps with your search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

* Double Click: I don’t know much about Double Click from my own experience, but maybe @earthbelowus can guide you.

* Hootsuite: There is a debate between Hootsuite and TweetDeck for a desktop application. I use TweetDeck, but have been playing with Hootsuite. The only reason I haven’t fully gone Hootsuite is because I have too many groups set up in TweetDeck and it’ll take me a full day to transfer them. But those in the discussion today swear by it!

* TubeMogul @Big_Teeth was telling us he uses this to track video users.

But the biggest take-away was not in the free tools we discussed, but in the five areas that offer the most ROI, measurement, and dollars and cents:

1. Brand awareness: Hard to measure straight to dollars and cents, but you’ll know from siteVOLUME, Google searches, popuri, and other tools whether or not your brand awareness has increased. You’ll also be able to tell from gut, if you’re really paying attention.

2. Thought leadership: You’ll know whether or not this is successful if you’re invited to speak at conferences, on panels, interviewed for stories, or people are linking to your blog/Web site when they publish content. Unless you eventually get paid for these things, it won’t automatically translate to dollars and cents, but everyone wants to work with the popular, smart kid and the more you’re out there, the more business you’ll drive.

3. Prospecting for new business/customers: Create referral networks or (as much as I hate them) affiliate programs to drive business to you. Use social media just like you would a networking event. Go often, network, connect, and find people to work with. This is the best way to drive dollars and cents because new business means added revenue and bigger profits.

4. Recruiting new talent: I’m sorry to headhunters out there, but social media is going to put you out of business. You absolutely can recruit new talent just by being open and transparent about a day in the life of your company, what your culture is like, and what the vision is for the business. You’ll attract people who want to work with you just by being out there.

5. Brand loyalty through engagement: It doesn’t matter what your business is – B2B or B2C – if you’re engaging with your customers, you are creating loyalty. Today people EXPECT to have a personal relationship with the people who work at the companies they buy from, including the CEO. And if people are loyal because they have a personal relationship with you, you can make a mistake, apologize, and not lose the customer.

Thanks to @monicaobrien, @Big_Teeth, @tamcdonald, @julibarcelona, @tektitegroup, @lindantonio, @cgrab34, @earthbelowus, @dockane, @chiarchitecture, and Akanksha Hoskote, for the lively, and informative, discussion!

Do you have additional measurement tools that you use?

One of the things I love about social media is it’s SO easy to measure! It’s so easy to set benchmarks and goals and then you can get as much information as you like (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually) to watch you get closer and closer to your goals.

Many people are intimidated by setting goals that are measurable, especially from a communication standpoint. But social media allows you to do it so easily and I’m going to give you some free tools to do just that.

* Use Twitter Grader to determine where your Twitter account is right now (most people begin in the 50th percentile) and set goals for increasing the number.  If you tweet consistently and if you engage and connect daily, it takes six or seven months to get to, and maintain, a grade of 100 percent. Keep that in mind as you set your Twitter grade goal.

* Use popuri.us to quickly check your popularity on bookmark sites (such as Digg or Delicious), the ranking on the search engines, and through number of subscribers.  For instance, take the first listing, which is Google PageRank. You want that number to be a one by the time all is said and done. The way you will set your metric is determine how long it will take you to go from where you are now to a number one.

* Darren Williger just introduced me to TwitterAnalyzer, which I LOVE! I love pretty graphs and charts and this fulfills that need for me. It gives you analytics for pretty much everything, including tweets, chats, popularity, reach, subjects, friends, mentions, and groups. Use this to benchmark where you are right now and then build metrics from there.

* If one of your goals is to increase your connections through  new followers each day (without the use of an auto-follow app), then Twitterholic is a great place to start. It crawls your stats for you once  a day (but you have to go there daily and click the “crawl my stats” button in order to make that happen) and it tells you how many followers you started with and shows a growth graph.

* Socialmeter scans the major social sites to analyze a Web site’s or blog’s social popularity. It gives you a score, which becomes your benchmark, and you can set goals to increase it from there. It also shows you which site(s) link to your Web site or blog the most and you can use that data to benchmarch your growth on additional sites.

* siteVOLUME allows you to enter keywords to see how many times they appear on Digg, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr. I like this site because you can enter your keywords against your competition to see where you benchmark against them.

* Compete is a great site to analyze your Web site or blog against your competition. It’s a great tool to overlay on your Google analytics to determine unique visitors, change in traffic from previous months, search terms used to find you, top referral sites, and it does the same for your competition.

* Web site grader is a free SEO tool that    measures the marketing effectiveness of your Web site or blog. The site gives you a score, plus a ton of great information on how to increase your percentage. This is a great way to determine what your benchmark is now and what you need to do in order to get a 100 percent score. Plus you can compare it with your competitor’s sites, which is always fun!

Using these eight sites to determine your benchmarks today will help you create your goals for one month, two months, three months, six months, and 12 months. You can check back daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Figure out what your goals are and how often to measure, set up your dashboard, and have at it!

In the past couple of weeks, we’ve had a lot of conversation about WHYyou should participate in a social media program. So you want some tips and tools on HOW to actually do that now?!?

The very first step is to LISTEN and that’s where we’re going to focus today.

* Go to Twitter search and enter your name, your company name, any of your brand names, even your competitor’s names. Write down anything that is alarming or interesting. You can subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t have to do the search every day.

* Or, if you’d prefer email alerts, go to TweetBeep, enter the search terms, and set up your account that way.

* Part of your listening should always include monitoring blog posts. But sometimes that’s not enough. What if someone is writing about you (positive or negative) in a blog’s comments? Use BackType to search the comments and to search for specific people who might always try to bring you down. For instance, if “IMAJERK” always comments about you, you can set up BackType to track them.

* BoardReader lets you monitor discussion groups and forums. This is great for knowing when a new group or discussion begins about your company. I have a friend who is the CEO of Bojangles. They have more than 20 Facebook pages set up by avid customers that are not supported by the company. Anytime a new fan creates a page, they are able to track it via BoardReader. Likewise, if someone were to create an “I Hate Your Company” page or discussion group, you’d know it immediately through BoardReader.

* I love Trendrr (as opposed to Google Trends) because it gives me pretty, shiny charts and graphs. I love numbers and I watching charts increase so this is perfect for me. Trendrr allows you to track and compare the trend of any keyword, including your company, you, or your competition. You can then compare them to other keywords to figure out where the trends are and what you should be including in your social media strategy.

* But if you do only one thing, use TweetDeck. This easy-to-download and free desktop application allows you to create searches. So just like you would do with Twitter search, this gives you real-time results right where you tweet. I have searches set up for each of our clients, Arment Dietrich, and Gini Dietrich. Anytime anyone tweets about anything I”m searching, it automatically aggregates them into columns in TweetDeck. It’s a lifesaver and I’m able to respond immediately.

I use a combination of all of these tools daily to be certain I don’t miss anything. It allows me to connect and engage, but also to monitor for any issues or concerns. AND it sets benchmarks for social media campaigns, based on trends.

At some point, you’ll need to graduate from free tools and look at services such as Radian6, Sysomos, Rapleaf, Infegy, or Scout Labs. But if you’re just getting started, or if you don’t have monitoring tools in place, the above are a great place to start!

We’ve spent some time here in the past few weeks talking about how much time to spend on social media, how to build content, and how to drive traffic. But a lot of the questions I’m getting from clients and prospects are along the lines of “What is social media?” or “Isn’t social media just another time waster developed by the Web?”

Because of these questions, I’m taking a step back to explain social media.

Social media is NOT about Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Digg…or whatever is new right this second.

Social media is a shift in how we communicate. It’s a shift in how we share news. It’s a new way to discover, read, and share content. It’s how we develop and foster relationships, one-on-one, with people.

We use the available technologies to develop and foster those relationships. We use online social networks to discover, read, and share content, news, and information. So it doesn’t matter if Friendster is now defunct and that Twitter is eventually going to be a bunch of PR people talking to a bunch of PR people. It’s NOT about the technologies; it’s about relationships.

Think about this:

* Does your customer service department take incoming calls all day long?

* Do you have a sales team that makes cold calls?

* Do you spend quite a bit of time and money with clients – traveling to see them, buying extravagant dinners, playing golf?

* Do you have marketing, PR, and advertising programs?

* Do you have a formal (or informal, for that matter) way to communicate consistently with your employees and other stakeholders?

* Do you attend weekly or monthly networking events? Do you go to conferences and trade shows?

What if you could continue to do all of this, but much more efficiently…in terms of both time and money? Social media allows you to do this. It’s just another way of communicating. It’s not going to replace what you already have in place – it’s makes it all much more efficient.

Social media provides a way to attend a networking event every day. You’re meeting new people (prospects or talent), you’re developing relationships (clients), and you’re sharing information (thought leadership and expertise).  You don’t have to wait until an organized event happens. You can jump on your computer right now and attend an event. You don’t even have to brush your teeth, if you don’t want to because no one (but you) will know!

So my question to you is…how can you afford NOT to participate in social media?

Our newsletter was released yesterday and, in it, we described how to start a blog, create content, and drive traffic once you got going. If you don’t subscribe, do so here.

It got me thinking.  Trust me when I say it’s hard to write compelling content every day. So hard, in fact, this very blog used to have multiple authors, just because the thought of my writing it every day was too overwhelming. But then I realized I had something to say that might be useful to many different audiences, including business owners, executives, entrepreneurs, new college graduates, clients, prospective clients, and even communication experts. And I realized that even though our blog is titled the Fight Against Destructive Spin, I didn’t have to find examples of “spin” every day.  I figured out that I can write about what it’s like to build a bootstrapped and growing business from scratch and what I’m learning about social media, as well as what’s happening in the PR industry.

So I thought I’d share some of my secrets here on creating compelling content consistently (wow – nice alliteration without even trying!) in order to make you a thought leader in your industry.

* I use Fridays to participate in #FollowFriday on Twitter, but I do it here instead of listing a whole bunch of Twitter handles in my stream. It does two things: It gives people a real reason to follow the people I’m recommending and it drives traffic to our blog. I know that I don’t have to think of a topic every Friday and, instead, can have fun with the 20 people I recommend each week.

* I read like a madwoman. I read everything I can get my hands on. I read most everything online and I do it quickly, looking for thoughts or ideas that spark some creativity. It doesn’t take as much time as one would think. I subscribe to SmartBrief newsletters and I pour through my Twitter feed looking for great content. Most days I have 20 or more tabs open in Firefox until I can read them all. Sometimes they stay open for days.  I read. And then I think. I use my cycling time every morning to create the blog posts in my head.

* Sometimes I read something that gets me all fired up and I get on my soapbox. If this happens, I don’t wait until it’s time to write another blog post. I just write it.

* I’ve learned A TON about starting, running, and growing a business. Some of what I’ve learned, people have told me I’d figure out on my own. Some of what I’ve learned no one tells you and I think it’s important for other entrepreneurs to know. I’m VERY transparent about what I’ve learned, what works, and where I’ve fallen. These posts are easy to write because they’re things I live every, single day.

* I do quite a bit of speaking. I also spend time with our clients on strategic and innovative opportunities and challenges. When I do this, I listen more than I advise. I ask a ton of questions. I get them thinking. Then I use the questions they ask me (I get a lot of the same questions) and answer them in blog posts.

* We host Webinars and it’s impossible to get to every question during the hour time period. So I answer a lot of the questions in blog posts. I don’t have to think of a new topic, but it allows me to connect and engage with every person that partipcates in our Webinars, even if it’s not during the session.

So there you have it. My tricks for writing blog posts nearly daily. What are some of your secrets?

I get this question ALL THE TIME! How much time should I spend on social media?

How much time do you spend on your email? Do you have it down to a science that you can manage it effectively, while still doing your job?

When email first entered our work lives, none of us knew how to handle it. We all thought it was evil and we didn’t know how we were going to manage it. But we’ve figured it out and technology now allows us ways to manage it efficiently.

Same goes for social media. This is a new way of being able to communicate. Of working more efficiently and personally with your customers. Of interacting on a more personal level with your employees and stakeholders. It creates PERSONAL relationships with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people you wouldn’t otherwise even know.

All this being said, you should spend an hour a day on social media. You can do it in as little as 15 minutes a day, but to have true influence, create thought leadership, prospect for new business, recruit talent, and create customer loyalty through engagement, it takes an hour a day. No more.

Here’s how to do just that:

* Sign up for an account at TweetLater.

* Spend 15 minutes every day finding industry articles, news you find interesting, and thought leadership pieces that have nothing to do with you or your business and set those up to be distributed throughout the day. A good rule of thumb is that 60 percent of your tweets should not be self-serving. I set up my tweets 30 minutes apart.

* Spend 10 minutes every day setting up your “self-serving” tweets – these are links to your blog, white papers the company has written, any articles written about you or that quote you, Webinars or podcasts you’re hosting, etc. A good rule of thumb is these should be only 40 percent of your tweets and you should space them out so they don’t come out all at once.

* Spend 10 minutes going through your groups on TweetDeck and find things to RT (retweet) for your followers. This expands your follower base, shows that you listen, and provides great influence.

* Spend five minutes setting up ping.fm and using that to distribute your content to your other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Delicious.  I only use ping.fm for our daily blog content. I use Twitter for everything else.

* Spend 10 minutes going through your LinkedIn groups and answering questions where you have expertise and can position yourself as a thought leader.

* Spend 10 minutes responding to people on Facebook and Twitter.

It’s a science and this method works, if you stick within the limits and use your time efficiently.  What other tips do you have for managing daily social media time?