Advertising Age says you are the Social Network you use...

Advertising Age had an article about the work of Anderson Analytics identifying Social Network users' likely interests, buying habits, media consumption and more for marketers. The research shows that restaurants, and other social facilitating businesses should participate in Social Networking

Below are some interesting excepts from the article

...Today 110 million Americans, or 60% of the online population, use social networks, and that number is fairly conservative, because instead of counting unique users or everyone who has an account, as many estimates do, the Anderson study counted only people who have used a social network at least once in the past month....

...Some 52% of social networkers had friended or become a fan of at least one brand.....

....Anderson's research breaks down general social-media users into four categories: business users, fun seekers, social-media mavens and late followers. Of those, social-media mavens are the key group, not only because of their high incomes and decision-making power at companies but also because their large social-media footprints can make them brand allies and evangelists....

.....they (Non-users of social networks) say they don't use social media for three basic reasons: They don't have the time, they don't think it's secure or they think it's stupid. While the first two groups -- which Anderson labels "time-starved" and "concerned" -- may be swayed to join eventually, don't hold out much hope for the last group: 94% said they will never use social media.

About 22% of time-starved people said they'll be using social media within three months, and another 27% said they probably will within a year -- when they get the time that is; they're more interested than all others in pursuits such as exercise, entertaining, music and movies...

....Twitterers are the super-user group. Twitterers are more interested than the others in many subjects but skew particularly high in all news categories, restaurants, sports, politics, personal finance and religion. They also especially like pop culture, with music, movies, TV and reading, ranking higher than average. And their buying habits mirror that. They're more likely to buy books, movies, shoes and cosmetics online than the other groups.....

Where does the best Advertising Come From?

The single most powerful form of communications is word of mouth.

The Corporate Culture Customer Trust Index 2006 showed that comments from trusted acquaintances topped the poll of trusted channels of communications.

In simple terms, successful businesses continue to strive to make the customer experience memorable so that each customer becomes your advocate. The more advocates you have, the better your business will become.

Social Networking is one of the strongest tool for small business to keep in contact with their advocates and compete in today's down market.

Growing Your Business in 2009 - Case Study #1

Results:
The client's industry (U.S. Specialty Retailing) saw sales drop 13% for Q4'08 and looks to be down ~20% for Q1'09. In this down market, working with me, my client sales:

• Grew 14% Q4'08 over Q'407
• Were up 5% Q1'09 over Q1'08

Background:
Specialty retailer with one location, that has been in business for over 30 years and has a great reputation within their customer base. They have maintained best practices including the business systems they use. They have excellent IT integration from vendor ordering, POS (Point of Sales) systems, to their website. Being a small business owner, the client was focused on the day to day activities and was not able to spend any time marketing their business other than historic use of yellowpages advertising. Q1'08 business was down compared to Q1'07 and I was brought in to bring a fresh look at bringing new business to the store.

Goal:
Leverage in-store personnel, existing IT systems, and NEW Internet Tools to:

• Effectively compete against three larger multi-store competitors
  
• Bring increase in new customers to the store

Tools used:

• Email Capture in POS system
• Updated Website
• Monthly Email Newsletter
• Controlling Web presence / Social Networking
• Google Alerts
  
• Google Adwords
• Google Analytics
• Google Blogger / Facebook / Twitter

Conclusion:
The tools and framework that I provided were only a part of the clients success. The client put a significant amount of sweat equity (Employee Time) creating marketing programs for their customers including product sales, and free demonstrations of their products and services.
What I was able to do was guide the client in the use of free to inexpensive internet tools (Less than the cost of his old Yellowpage advertising - Which they dropped) to get the word of the client's marketing programs to existing and new customers.

Other indicators:

• Web activity increase of 3.5-4.5 fold increase in hits / page views from Q4'07 to Q1'09
• Email capture grew from ~200 to over 2500 in 12 months
• New customers grew from 22% of business in Q1'08 to 43% of business in Q1'09