At the World Economic Forum in 2004, Bill Gates made an interesting promise. “Two years from now, spam will be solved.”

The rise of social media has had others making other predictions for years. One such prediction has been in the form of bloggers and technology experts declaring that email will be dead by 2009, then 2010, then 2011… and on… and on.

Spam and email both persist. They have both improved as well. According to Litmus, email was still the most popular online activity of 2012 despite Facebook taking up the bulk of our online time. Is your dealership using it? Are you improving on your practices, trying new technologies, new techniques? Did you fall into the trap of believing that email is the past and you have to put your focus elsewhere?

Take a look at this infographic and then make your decision about whether you should have email as part of your strategy or not.

Communities, we are all a part of one, whether it be the community within our local area, the one with family and friends, or our online communities, they all play a vast role in who we are and what we wish to accomplish, in life and in business.

It’s no secret that humans are social beings. It is in our nature to share our feelings of happiness and sorrow, to articulate our interests and pursuits, as well as to express our opinions and views. With the introduction and growth of social media, it has become even more apparent that what most of us want, is to not just exist in a community, but to actively be a part of one. The most difficult part, which many of us struggle with, is in knowing where to start.

Unfortunately, this struggle ends up causing one of three types of “blockages” to occur, whether it be a “sharing blockage,” when you feel stuck on not knowing what content is share worthy; a “writing blockage,” that leaves you feeling wordless and without any stories to offer; or an “off-topic blockage,” when you are sharing items that are not relevant to the type of audience you are seeking. For some, these “blockages” causes them to stop investing their time into social media, which ultimately makes them miss out on huge opportunities that social networking communities have to offer.

Remember, customers are looking for your dealership on social networks, if you are not there investing time in them, that may be the only factor they need in deciding whether or not to invest time and money in you. Therefore, before making any rash or quick judgement calls on whether or not social media is right for your business, analyze and assess your current state to see if you are indeed experiencing any of the three blockages mentioned. The key is to recognize, identify, and to adjust, in order to break-through the blockage(s) and to get your dealership back on the right social media track.

Once you have identified the type of blockage or blockages your company has to break-through, don’t give up, instead, break- right on - through them. This by no means implies that you “start over” it only suggests that it is time for your business to “Adjust.”

Adjust the type of content your dealership shares, the information you post, and its relevancy. This does mean change will need to occur, however, communities are used to change, therefore the ones you want (which is the keyword here) to stay, will stay. If you see a drop in number of followers, don’t panic, for your company is in the “Adjustment phase,” which means you are going to be building a “targeted” community that may result in having, none, all, or some of your already existing community in it. The important thing to remember is that of your overall goal; to have a community that works.

A “targeted” community is the same as a target audience, which is a formation of a specific group of people, of which marketing message; product, plan or program is aimed at. In other words, you want to attract people with the same interests as your business, i.e. what it sells, in order to build a “targeted” and relevant community for your company.

This is when the conversation begins. Success comes from starting out with a few words, intriguing questions, relevant images, informative videos, and useful articles.

Being that you are a Car Dealership looking to build a “targeted” community, your conversations on social networks should include, but not be limited to, the following:

Type of Topics:

• Car Facts
• Car History
• Car Tips
• Car Care
• Car Maintenance

Type of Content:

• Videos: Introduce your Car Dealership through a video, showcase features of cars on your lot with a unique video, and/or share the personalities that work there. (Add to YouTube Account and share on other networks)

• Photos: Post photos of Classic Cars, The chosen employee for “Car Dealer of the Month”, and snapshots of Customer’s with their “first car.” (Add to Instagram, Facebook, Google+, Twitter Accounts)

• Articles and Infographics: Find and create articles/infographics about the history of cars, car tips, maintenance, and care. (Add to Facebook, Google+, Twitter Accounts)

• Questions: Ask questions that include something about cars, like - What are your favorite vehicle features/options? Do you prefer driving a standard or automatic? and/or What year did you buy your first vehicle? (Add to Facebook, Google+, Twitter Accounts)

Type of “Targeted” Communities:

• Car Enthusiasts
• Luxury/Performance Car Enthusiasts
• Car Clubs
• 4x4 Drivers
• Car Forums
• Economy Drivers

The key is in finding commonalities through conversations, resulting in stronger, more effective communities.

The quality of the conversation is also highly important, meaning, share content that has substance, is in good quality (picture sizes and videos) and post status updates or tweets that are long enough that others will want to engage with it, but short enough that will invite them to share it with their communities too. This means, putting time and effort into what your dealership is “Saying” or “Sharing” on its social sites and to not always rely on others to provide the content for you, i.e. – Google, you may need to devise a plan or team that can create content, i.e. – videos, photos, articles, and so on, on behalf of your company.

Quality of content also includes staying on topic, meaning, majority of the content you share should be car related, but not limit you from conversing about other topics. Being that you are a car dealership, then most of the time you should be talking about cars. This does not imply that you should only focus selling, by solely sharing promotions and discounts you offer, (although you can share these from time to time) instead, social networks provide you the opportunity to humanize your business and to provide great content that no one else, including your competition, is supplying. In order to create a “targeted” community, you must deliver “targeted” content.

Don’t be alarmed if at first you don’t receive any responses to the content you put out on your various social networks, but ensure that you don’t stop. Keep the content flowing no matter if you get 100 comments, likes, retweets, or none. There has to be activity on your part and a willingness to get involved in reaching out and in wanting to discover the shared interests your company has with others and vice versa, otherwise, the “community” will cease to exist.

Granted, building and sustaining a “targeted” community does not happen overnight, but it will happen, and growth of that community will occur, as long as your dealership keeps talking, sharing, participating and “targeting”, eventually, people with the same interest as yours will begin engaging back. It all starts with a conversation.

When Facebook announced last week that Insights, their page-level analytics platform, had been reporting the wrong numbers for several months, most took it as a growing pain of a company growing into its own. It was a minor negative, something that caused a handful of "Facebook advertising has a long way to go" blog posts but one that will be forgotten tomorrow (if it hasn't been forgotten already).

Put on your conspiracy theory hats, kids, as I tell you what may be really happening here.

Since Monday, the numbers have gone up as expected. In some cases, they've gone way up. Some of the pages that we manage are seeing 2X increases in post impressions, an unexpected rise considering that Facebook's reporting flaw was only affecting mobile app-based impressions not being shown while ad impressions were being counted twice. The increased numbers should have been noticeable but not that substantial. 2X is much more than anyone anticipated, particularly for pages that had been using advertising the whole time.

More importantly, engagement is way up. Without changing the strategy on any of the pages we manage, we've seen significant increases in likes and comments. This isn't a reporting issue. This means more people are seeing and interacting with the content through their news feed.

One might wonder why Facebook would hide this. It would be great news for businesses if their posts have received a boost of exposure. That's how it would appear on the surface, but once you dig deeper you can see that Facebook would not want this known and why they would want to camouflage the change with a supposed bug in their Insights.

First, it's like they took a page out of Google's playbook. Google has been known to make multiple changes to their search algorithm while announcing one. It's a way for them to test things without the SEOs of the world focusing on the changes and learning how to game them. For example, the Penguin update of 2012 was about the quality of inbound links, but at the same time they rolled out another algorithm update that increased the power of social signals. Had they announced that portion of the change, SEOs would have attacked. Had they rolled it out without the camouflage of the link-based Penguin update, SEOs still would have figured it out and attacked. By rolling them out simultaneously, they kept their foes guessing.

The same thing is possibly being done by Facebook. Had they announced that they made a change, social media marketers would have been out there trying to exploit it immediately. By announcing a bug in their insights, it should not even make it to the marketers' radar that a change might have taken place. If anything, they'll be focusing on seeing how significant the bug fix was and see if it will make their performance numbers look better to their clients.

More importantly, they would not want this type of change to get out to the public because it would counter the strides they've made in recent months towards getting more businesses to use Facebook ads. If organic exposure is increasing, ad spend would likely decrease. Today, there's a perception that Facebook is "pay to play" and while this is bad from a PR perspective, it's good for the bottom line. The last thing they need is more companies going back to organic-only freebie promotions.

There are no facts to support this conspiracy theory, only numbers that we've seen from the dozens of Facebook pages that we manage. Engagement is up tremendously. That cannot happen as a result of an analytics bug fix.

Okay, you can take you're tinfoil hat off now. I'm done.

In one sentence, the advice that business owners and marketers need to hear is this: “Everything on your Facebook page should be centered around the real world.”

No, I don’t mean the reality TV show that launched it all in 1992. When The Real World launched on MTV 27 seasons ago (yes, it’s still going strong in case you weren’t aware), it set in motion a genre of television that many people claim to hate but that still gets millions of viewers every day. Today, the day to day version of “the real world of marketing on Facebook” should take one concept from the original show intro: “…start getting real.”

There’s a reason why you won’t hear this from people in the social media industries. The gurus and specialists who rely on Facebook management services to make a living don’t want businesses to know that the most successful local business pages are run from the stores themselves. The ability to stay real, organic, and authentic through social media is arguably the most important component in a successful business presence. To gurus, it means that their services cannot be as good as the real thing happening at the physical locations. To businesses, it means that all of the tools are either at your fingertips or scattered across the physical world around you.

As someone whose company offers social media products, one might wonder why I would give this advice. It’s simple – what can be done and what does get done are two different things. I wouldn’t be honest if I said that services offer the best possible results when the reality is that a well-guided and properly-deployed strategy by employees at a local business can be more effective than anything remote. However, the combination of a lack of updated knowledge in this constantly-changing arena mixed with the lack of time of the employees at a local business mean that sometimes it’s best to settle for second best.

Thankfully, when done right, second best isn’t far off from being the best. There are more failures happening from homegrown campaigns and strategies than from agency-run strategies because of both of these points. It takes time. It takes research. These are things that are easier left to those who do it on a regular basis for most businesses. However, if a business has the time to stay on top of the campaigns as well as the changes happening in the platforms, trends, and attitudes in the real world, they can have the greatest level of success.

There are three main social networks a business should be utilizing to increase their brand awareness and relationships within their local communities as well as those who are willing to connect. Those 3 main social sites are Facebook, Twitter and yes, Google+.

It is no surprise that 80% of users prefer to connect with brands through the Facebook platform; however, although businesses are present on Twitter, 56% of consumer tweets are still being unanswered, so even though you are there your actual presence is required to be interactive or your efforts are pointless. Businesses certainly cannot complain on how social networks are not working in their favor if they are not using them correctly, right?

The statistic you may find more surprising is that of Google+, some say that its site is a ghost town, but as I have stated in prior articles, it should not be your social media write-off, in fact, not taking Google’s social network Google Plus seriously, is most likely hurting your business right before your eyes.

The reason is due to many businesses not realizing the true power Google’s social network has within the Google search engine. The two tie in with one another and together help boost your businesses relevance within search. Just by adding a +1 button to your website actually increases page traffic by 350%. (You may need to read that last part again).

Of course it is not just which social networks your business is on, but who from your business is taking part in the social media experience, this is including the social activities of your CEO, since 49% of corporate reputation is attributed to the activities of your CEO’s online presence.

And finally, timing, timing is an important aspect in knowing when to post, but it is not set in stone since you need to pay attention to your analytics and insights for each individual social network. However, in order to gain that relevant data you should be aware of certain times that have been known to work for your particular industry when posting to social networks.

You can learn more about What Businesses Need to Know to Connect Successfully in the Digital... in the following infographic.

They say you learn something new every day. I learned something about Pinterest the other day that blew my mind a little. Users like links. This might seem like a no-brainer to some, but it goes against what I’ve learned in my years on the various social networks. On most networks, there are images and there are links. Images normally perform the best across the board. Links, on the other hand, do not. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all prefer images over links. It isn’t just the algorithms on Facebook and Google+, it’s also the overall community sentiment on all three, including Twitter.

Pinterest is different. People like links. They click through when they find something that interests them. It’s as if Pinterest itself is a large-scale thumbnail checker to give users a way to find links through which to click. I hadn’t been applying that to my own Pinterest. I’ve been uploading images directly the way that I do with other social networks. As a result, my profile’s performance wasn’t as good as it could have been.

If you have an image that you want to post to Pinterest, don’t upload it directly. If you have a blog or other website that you can post to that falls into the appropriate niche, that’s the place your images should go. From there, you can pin them onto your page and “double dip” between exposure and traffic to your websites. If you’re posting images that simply don’t have an appropriate venue through which you can post it, use Google+. Post it to G+, click through to the post, then pin it from there. It’s not as good as sending traffic to your website, but it’s better than nothing and people will be more likely to like or repin your post as a result.

Of all the networks, Pinterest has the highest potential in many industries for direct traffic generation. The idea that it’s all purses, hairstyles, and other things of interest to women is not true. This is a diverse world. The sexes have evolved. Some of the most popular pins I’ve seen have been classic muscle cars. Just because the majority of users on Pinterest are females doesn’t mean that you can’t have success with content that isn’t traditionally considered female-centric. Follow JD if you want to see these practices in action. You might as well follow my pins as well.

Pinterest is a site that not only lets us discover cool finds and interesting images, but provides us with the ability to form collections of items that are of interest to us. To say that there is some-what of a pull and fascination that takes over immediately after the first repin occurs would not be an exaggeration, for often times, what was supposed to be a few minutes of looking at images on Pinterest, usually ends up being a few hours. For businesses, this makes marketing a much easier process for they can be easily found and their products discovered through pins, repins, and boards on Pinterest.

If you are a brand, understanding who uses the site is of importance when trying to target a particular audience. Having the ability to build a community that chooses you and your products based on your brand being what they are interested in, is invaluable and is what makes Pinterest an important tool for businesses.

This infographic provides some insight to how users interact on Pinterest and several reasons why your brand should be using it too.

[Infographic via: Wishpond]

Twitter is still the most used social network by businesses. This surprises some, but the latest statistics showed that 77% of businesses were on Twitter versus 74% on Facebook. It’s not a big difference, but it’s still at least a little surprising to many who view Facebook as the big social network and Twitter as the other guy in the field.

Twitter is easier. It requires less time. It’s more about communication than popularity and there are no algorithms that can make your efforts meaningless like they can on Twitter. I’m not suggesting that businesses should be on Twitter and not Facebook. On the contrary, if someone said they would only put their business on one, I would recommend Facebook for most. However, there are some major advantages to Twitter and businesses need to know about them to succeed.

You're not Justin Bieber

Just because the teen star is popular on Twitter doesn’t mean that you should emulate him with your business. He can post as often as he wants or as little as he wants. You can’t. You have to stay consistent.

He can leave Twitter alone for days at a time and come back to be even more popular than he was when he left. You can’t. You have to check it and contribute every day.

He gets so many direct messages and @replies that he couldn’t possibly reply to everyone. You don’t, so reply to everyone.

Most importantly, he can post whatever he wants without ramifications. You can’t. You must be thoughtful, courteous, professional, useful, entertaining (sometimes), empathetic, and relevant. It sounds like a lot to fit into 140 characters but it can and should be done if you want to be successful on Twitter.

Stop feeding the feed

Twitter is a communication tool and we’ll cover that shortly. The exact opposite of being a communication tool is using it as a broadcasting tool. This is a bad thing. If you have various feeds plugging away at your account to keep it updated on a regular basis, stop. It’s not so bad to have a feed or two posting from exceptionally trusted sources on an infrequent basis to save a little time, but that should only account for 20% or less. This means if you’re Tweeting 10 times a day, you can afford to have one or two of those as automated RSS-fed Tweets.

For many, Twitter is nothing more than a glimpse into your feed. It’s a way for prospective customers to check you out and see if you’re active and communicating or if you’re one of those businesses that is simply posting stuff for the sake of having stuff posted. They can tell the difference and while many people may expect businesses to act this way, it’s an opportunity to show that you’re truly communicating to your followers through your Twitter account. You’re replying to them. You’re commenting on the posts of those you follow. You’re retweeting those you follow. You’re offering “hand written” advice or comments rather than feeding the feed with links.

Last but not least, there are two feeds that I never recommend using: your Facebook page and your blog. Your Facebook page has the ability to post to Twitter every time it gets a new status update. This is not a best practice. Assuming you’re not feeding anything to Facebook (you better not be!) and posting only content that you’ve vetted, there’s no reason why you can’t manually post it to your Twitter feed as well. Remember, the content that comes to your Twitter feed from Facebook links back to Facebook, not the original piece of content. This is an extra step. Those who think that they are going to get more Facebook fans by feeding their posts to Twitter don’t have an understanding about how social media really works. It doesn’t happen that way. As far as your blog, this should be the most important Tweets that you post. To do this, you want to manually craft them. Surely you’re not posting so much to your blog that you can’t spend the 20 seconds it takes to then post it manually to Twitter with appropriate hashtags and an engaging comment or question added to the post.

POSTING WITH ALL CAPS IS BAD

This may just be a pet peeve but I can’t imagine that Twitter users in general view this as a good thing. If you’re posting in all caps, please stop.