In The Financial Times today there is a feature about how companies are using social media experts to help them understand the blogosphere and engage with bloggers in order to boost sales and strengthen relationships with customers.

Hopefully the piece will reassure some corporate sceptics about the value of social media!

The piece  points out that Dell is generating $1m in sales through Twitter (the micro-blogging service). The company has 80 Twitter accounts and 20 Facebook pages. Also 59 of the 100 leading US retailers have Facebook pages.

The FT piece shows that companies who want to be customer-centric need to be where their customers are. I can’t imagine there is any company that is not getting attention through social media. A lot of companies are still holding back from engaging even though conversations are going on now about their products and services.

Rather than allow conversations from your customers to go on behind your back, we strongly recommend that companies begin to listen to what social media networks are saying about their products and services.

Then companies can begin to engage with and become useful to those networks. If companies value word of mouth then they should be on services like Twitter which is in effect global word of mouth.

A lot of the fear or barriers to engaging with social media reminds me of the nineties when companies were fearful of having web sites because they always thought they would be hacked.

One word of caution though, once you have understood clearly what customers and stakeholders are saying about your business through social media, it is important to carefully think through your strategy for engaging with social media and how it will impact your relationships with stakeholders and customers. Simply setting up a presence on Twitter or Facebook will not necessarily work unless you have a clear purpose and have thought through the value and usefulness you can offer through your networks. It is also critically important to observe and be sensitive to the cultures of social media channels which are fast-evolving!

This is being hailed as the first true internet inauguration. Internet traffic is said to have spiked to levels 54 per cent above normal worldwide, and as much as 60 per cent higher in North America.

Particularly noteworthy is the flurry of activity on social media networking sites. CNN tied up with Facebook for the event, providing a facility for viewers of its online video coverage to see which of their Facebook buddies were watching, and share their reactions.

CNN says nearly 14 million people tuned in, topping its previous record of over 5 million for election night in November. Around 4000 Facebook users updated every minute, a total of 1.5 million status updates through the CNN portal alone.

President Obama’s official Facebook page was deluged with visitors, and his MySpace page now features more than one million “friends.” Some 40,000 photos of the inauguration were posted to Flickr, and Twitter said activity jumped five-fold.

All in all, it’s an excellent indication of the popularity of social media sites. More details here.

Companies are starting to wake up to the importance of social media, but they are still mostly in the dark about how consumers use it. The international online research agency YouGov plans to shed some light on that with a new quarterly survey.

The company has announced that its first Social Media Tracking Study will be released next month, based on 2,000 interviews. The aim, says head of media consulting David Lucas, is to give marketers an insight into the habits of internet users who frequent social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

This should give advertisers some valuable information about user behaviour and insights into how best to optimise their marketing activities. One key bit of information will be what users think about the way companies present themselves on social media sites.

More details here.

We like to look a lot in this blog at the ways social media can  benefit businesses. But it’s also proving valuable for third sector organisations wanting to keep in touch with their stakeholders.

Today our attention has been drawn to a press release from the American Red Cross, which is using a wide range of social media tools – including blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook – to inform people about the organisation’s work, to offer advice where needed and to ask volunteers for help in emergencies. It’s proving an effective way of reaching a huge number of supporters quickly and cheaply.

Read the full release here.