Before you take the Social Media plunge…

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the list goes on. Social Media is all the rave right now, but is it worth anything to your business? Sure there has been success stories, like Dell’s $1 million in revenue over the ’08 holiday season. But are you Dell? Can you realistically look to make that kind of revenue on Twitter or any social network for that matter?

Regardless of whether or not you can make money via social networking, the bigger question is, do you have the time to commit to it?

Everything in life takes work. You can expect to get nothing in return if you put nothing into it. So try this, before you take the plunge of signing up your company’s brand on Twitter or creating a Facebook fan page, sign yourself up. Yea, you personally. And instead of tweeting about random things such as what you had for lunch, try to tweet about things related to your industry. How many tweets can you come up with? How many followers can you get? How many useful conversations can you have?

I think you might be amazed at how hard it is to stay on topic in a social network. There are a lot of companies who’s social networking presence is either just a “me too” dialogue or is just used to spam users with promotions. Social networking is about being real, well as real as you can be in the digital space, and people quickly see through fake and feeble attempts of companies just trying to push their brand.