Don’t be one of the 64.5% of marketers who say, according to a survey from R2integrated, that their companies have not increased revenue or profited from using social media. They’re doing it wrong.

MarketingProfs said 60.1% “marketing and business professionals cite lead generation as their primary source for using social media”, followed distantly by conversation monitoring at 26.9% and keeping up with the Jones at 5.1%

Generating and monitoring conversations about your business/products/brand are both good ways to be using social media, but that’s small potatoes compared to the potential. R2integrated’s survey sample was a mere 262 professionals, but I’d be willing to guess most businesses out there aren’t thinking big picture when it comes to social media. So it’s a good thing you’re here; you’re already ahead of the game.

Today, Matt from the team at 37signals posted a quote from Merlin Mann on the company blog that I think illustrates what’s going on here:

“I really feel like that combination of little, easy motor skills and clicking combined with feeling a little less bored for a minute is completely addictive to people…if you’re not mindful about the amount of your attention that goes to thinking about and consuming those things, you’re not going to be making good stuff, either for that medium or elsewhere. That’s what I got kind of hung up on, when I finally realized that all I was doing was eating and producing potato chips all day long.”

Are you producing (and consuming?!) potato chips?

Do you spend hours of your day refreshing your Google Analytics results? Are you feeling crispy from the unfocused effort you’ve been putting into your business’s social media marketing plan without many tangible results? Instead of trolling networking sites, spamming members, and scraping the bottom of the barrel for ways to make social media pay -

• develop meaningful content and
• cultivate a community that will promote it for you;
• think about ways to use social media within your business to increase efficiency, buy-in, or morale;

And if you need it, we can help…..