The other day I was talking with an acquaintance who told me that her children had recently starting texting her with their cellphones. I asked her if they knew how to actually use the phone to call her if they needed help and she told me they did. She also told me that she had purposely spent time explaining to them the difference between texting and calling and when each type of communication would be useful and when it wouldn’t be. I wish more people educated younger generations in that way.

While all the new technology is useful for communication, it is important to remember that sometimes no amount of texting will really be that useful if you are in a situation where you are lost or in danger. And sometimes you need to have a conversation that can’t occur via email or text, because there’s too much to say that won’t be captured in such limited mediums.

Another acquaintance recently told me that her son shipped off to basic training. He’s been learning the fine art of hand writing letters to his family. Apparently he enjoys it a lot and has found that it makes him spend time really considering what he will write. Pretty valuable lesson, especially in an age where you can quickly type off a 140 character message without thinking about it.

New media is great, but so is traditional media and teacher younger generations to appreciate it can also teach them the value of context and knowing what medium to use and when to use it. And sometimes that could make a big difference, especially in a situation where calling on the phone will get you a lot further than updating your facebook status.

I met with another entrepreneur, who like me, offers social media consulting to businesses. And I learned a really good lesson. He had with him a flyer and he was going to spend the day walking around PDX handing that flyer to businesses to advertise his services. And initially all I could think was, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

The reason: I’ve gotten so used to social media, and even the phone that it hadn’t occurred to me to think about using his approach. He also has a decided advantage of being about a decade older than me, and so his experience includes that concept of taking a flyer and walking door to door with it.

And it makes me realize as well that it’s rather easy to discount tried and true methods of marketing when we have the glamor of new technology in front of us. Don’t get me wrong: social media has value and can do a lot for your marketing, but as I’ve advocated before it needs to be complemented with traditional marketing. I’ve done that with written letters and cold calling, but actually beating the streets with a flyer? It’s not something you see as much anymore, and yes that’s what makes it precisely so valuable to do. When people aren’t doing something, and yet it can be effective, its worth your time to do it.

I consider this a lesson learned for me, as well as a valuable recognition of how important it is to meet with other people and learn what they are doing, that you could also be doing. Find out what other businesses do to stand out and see if you can adapt what they do to your own methods. You’ll be surprised at how well some of it will work and also how you’ll continue to be challenged in all the right ways to improve your business.

Some social media “experts” treat social media as the replacement of traditional marketing, arguing that companies need to forgo traditional marketing in favor of social media marketing. I think this is a mistake to make, especially given that many businesses are still reluctant to embrace and use social media because they feel it is too time consuming or too much of an information overload.

In order for social media to be accepted those businesses need to learn how it can be utilized in a timely manner, with effective strategies and processes for automating the activities that people do on the social media sites. At the same time, we must also acknowledge that just because something is old doesn’t mean that it no longer has value. In fact, if anything, sometimes a traditional approach can be more effective.

While I use social media to keep up with people and make new connections, a lot of my relationship building occurs in person. I also send cards to people as a way of thanking those people their business or their help. A card can be much more personal than a direct message on Twitter. At the same time, having a customer service rep on a social media site can be more effective immediate than trying to pick up a phone and wade the automated options designed to weed people out, as opposed to genuinely helping them.

Traditional media and marketing has its place in your marketing strategy and ideally what should occur is a complement of social media marketing with traditional marketing, using both to reach out to a diverse array of people who use different mediums to do research on their wants and needs. By combining traditional marketing with social media we can do more to reach out to people than just using one or another.

Social media isn’t the ultimate solution to marketing. It is just another form of marketing that can be as effective as traditional marketing. We shouldn’t discard traditional marketing out of hand, nor should we ignore social media for too long, as more and more people use it to do research on what they want and need.

With the integration of social media into other communication platforms such as cell phones, I’ve noticed with some interest how social media is changing our behavior. Recently I posted about the art of following-up and asked if it was lost in this age of social media. As I argued following-up wasn’t lost because of social media, but because of poor strategies for managing time.

That said, social media can be considered a time drain if it isn’t managed effectively. And for many people social media is initially a gaming platform (how many people do you know who play mafia wars on Facebook?). At the same time because social media is integrated into our cell phones and other mobile devices, it makes it increasingly easy to post to social networks from anywhere. The stream of information consequently has risen as a result.

Social media is changing our behaviors in some ways. We see this with the increased reliance on social media for communicating with people, the choice Pepsi made to spend 20 million on social media campaigns instead of TV commercials for the super bowl and in how more businesses are starting to use social media for some of their customer service efforts.

While social media will never replace traditional marketing, it is influencing the choices businesses make in how they reach out to people, and also in how we interact with each other. As it becomes more integrated into our lives, it will also become more of a major marketing platform, and as a way to schedule meetings, holding conversations, and connecting with businesses that offer things we want or need.

Why do businesses fail at social media? One of the reasons is because businesses aren’t using social media sites effectively. They under use the features that could allow them to network, market, and promote themselves more effectively.

To learn more about this subject, listen to my latest social media coach show.

One of my favorite aspects about social media is the ability to cross-promote people in your network by tweeting about a blog entry or special one of those people is offering. The value of such cross-promotion is that you can help other businesses out by mentioning what they are doing and also help out people in your social network who may need to know information that the other business is offering.

The real value of cross-promotion is that it also creates a tighter network. What I mean by that is that you are more aware of what your network is doing and that way you are able to remember someone in your network when a conversation comes up that tells you someone needs that person’s service.

With someone promoting you, you also don’t need to worry that you’re spamming people. That person is promoting you instead and it’s just part of the rest of the information s/he is putting out there. People will be a bit more receptive because that person is vouching for you when s/he promotes your services.

Cross-promotion works best if you do it frequently. If you see someone in your network post some information about classes or an article s/he wrote, promote it. Get the word out for that person and do it consistently. That person will then start to consistently promote you as well, and the benefit will be that both your networks know a bit more about the classes and articles that each of you is putting out there.

Here’s a good example of cross-promotion: I was recently featured in an article on business owners and their resolutions. The author promoted me by writing about me and I’m promoting him by including a link to the article and his blog.

One of the elements that makes social media so powerful is how helpful people can be to each other, if they choose to be. Social media sites provide a proliferation of information, which can seem overwhelming, but you can also get a lot of helpful advice if you ask a question or explain a need you have, because its much easier to connect a person who needs something to someone who can help that person.

To make social media effective, it’s important to cultivate a helpful approach to it. Ask yourself what information you can provide to others, what connections you can help make happen, and what else you can do to help people succeed, while also becoming more visible and credible to those same people.

The benefit of being helpful in social media is that you become a resource on those networks that you participate in. People start to rely on you for help. Being helpful shows people that you are involved and that you treat your social media connections as part of the community that you network in. Remember just because a network doesn’t mean its not a community. It is a community and if you treat it as such you can then help people out in that community and also get help from them, when you need it.

Being helpful leads to success because people will gravitate toward a person who is willing to help them. You consequently create a network where people come to you for any of their problems and then you can refer them on to someone else, if you can’t solve the problem. The same applies on social media networks and the connection can happen a lot faster due to the real time conversation aspect that is employed on social media sites. This creates success for you because you become more well known and more people come to you as you are referred to them, because of your helpfulness.

One of the common mistakes I see on different social networking sites is a tendency toward sending out a stream of advertisements, in what is often a vain hope of attracting business. The reason it’s vain is that every single tweet is driven toward a goal of getting a sale as opposed to providing genuine and useful information. It should be obvious that social networks aren’t sales platforms, but many businesses try to treat them that way.

The reason this occurs is fairly simple. They are too busy thinking of the bottom line, of trying to make money, to consider the process by how that actually occurs. Instead businesses use social networks without a clear understanding of what the technology allows them to do. In fact, the tendency is ultimately to focus on the technology, without recognizing what the technology does: Namely connect us closer to other people.

Nobody likes an infomercial, so when put your status updates and tweets out there, spend a moment reading what you wrote and ask yourself, from the perspective of a reader, whether you would actually be interested in the message, whether it would actually speak to you. If it doesn’t for you, why would it for anyone else?

Look through your last thirty or so tweets and then ask yourself how many responses either on twitter or on your website you got from those tweets. If there’s no traffic and no responses then you have to question whether the activity is really productive. In fact, it isn’t productive if you aren’t getting a response.

Spending time looking at what you’ve written can help you determine if you are treating your audience like people, or like sales numbers. Can you guess how your audience would prefer to be treated?

As social media continues to evolve, businesses that employ it also need to evolve. In this article I’ll discuss some of my recent changes to my social media presence, based on how my understanding of it has evolved with the technology itself.

First up is plugins and wordpress updates. If you’ve downloaded a wordpress.org file and created your own blog, remember that you need to stay up to date with the latest version of wordpress. For many people this is as simple as a click of a button, but make sure that before you click that button, you back up all your data, so if something goes wrong you can re-apply all of that data to your wordpress blog.

Personally, this is why I prefer a manual approach. It’s obviously not as quick as pushing a button, but the manual approach allows me to go in and do the update from the backside, as well as learn from any mistakes I make in the process. It can be a little time consuming, but what I learn as a result makes up for the time. The benefit of doing the updates is that you do get security updates and other relevant updates for your wordpress account.

Just as you want to update wordpress, you also want to update your plugins, so you have the latest versions. Usually the latest updates will include solutions to bugs and/or improvement in the service the plugins offer. One plug-in I downloaded recently was the Disqus comment plugin and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to keep track of not only the comments, but also reactions to your blog posts on the social media web. With the reactions feature, I can see who retweeted my blog posts, even if they include my name in the retweet.

The other big change to my social media strategy has been the incorporation of more video. Video is an underused resource in social media, but its increasingly going to become relevant as people use it to create information videos, video blogs, or comedic video entries. I’m planning on making more videos, because I know they provide a level of interactivity that people will want more of as time goes on. After all, if you can see how a product works, as opposed to just reading about it, which will interest you more?

Look for further updates in the future for the changing social media strategy I’m incorporating into my business.

Social media is sometimes touted as a replacement of traditional media. Some social media strategists even say that traditional media is dead and that traditional marketing is going the same route. I disagree with both assertions and feel that if anything discounting traditional media and marketing is foolish. Social media is here to stay but traditional media and marketing are also still viable parts of a business strategy and likely will continue to be.

What needs to be realized is that social media is a complement to traditional media and marketing. Social media enables businesses to create closer relationships with consumers, while allowing those same consumers to research businesses, but part of that research inevitably will deal with how the business also shows up in traditional media and marketing. To discard that piece of the equation would be to ignore the effect it has on the research people do. It’d also ignores older generations who still rely on traditional media to get their information.

Traditional media is adapting to social media, but social media also needs to adapt to traditional media. This means that social media users need to recognize when using using traditional media can be useful as part of their marketing strategy. While Yellow Pages will probably not be a viable marketing method anymore, sending a greeting card can still be just as powerful as having a twitter presence, and in some ways moreso, because it’s much more tangible.

Social media allows us to participate in the conversation, share ideas, and otherwise educate and inform each other while strengthening relationships. At the same time, it can’t replace in person networking or traditional marketing. Social media instead increases the frequency of connection you make with people, so that you can stay visible and build stronger relationships with them. So it has it’s place, but it’s only one tool among many