With all the hubbub of social media and the “you” generation, you are bound to be excited about the impact social media can have on your business. Sites like YouTube, Flickr, Digg, and MySpace garner a lot of attention and a ton of traffic.

Traffic and attention, in a traditional media sense means exposure, which leads to brand awareness, which typically leads to profits. Right? Not so fast.

Although anyone can jump in the arena of the most popular social media sites but few have really figured out how to exploit it for business purposes. In this post, “Can Social Media Work in Big Business?“, the author talks about using blog posts, MySpace buzz, cool videos, and creating a community to translate to real dollars and real justification to the head of marketing or the CEO.

The harsh reality is the common consumer sees right through that “manufactured buzz”. 999 times out of 1000 if you try to make a cool viral video, it will fail. The most successful viral videos have been the ones that start out as a guy who emails it to his friends and then it explodes from there. The famous kid-getting-Nintendo64-at-Christmas video would not have been successful had it been staged.

Think you can gain exposure from a controversial blog post? It might get some attention for a few days, but as quickly as the fire burns white hot, it will burn out if you don’t consistently post content of equal thought-provoking caliber.

Social media success in the blogging field requires consistency in quality and quantity. But even with blogging there is potential for very little return immediately. Even if you fail to convert your efforts to real dollars, however, you gain it in the evangelism of a focused, strategically-branded, thought.

So how do you capture lightning in a bottle? Do something you feel passionate about and be willing to take a loss on it. Then be prepared to not advertise it. If it’s good, it will get noticed and it will become successful. If it isn’t, you lose. If you advertise it, people might feel it’s a sales ploy.

Remember, for every Subservient Chicken there are thousands of wannabes.

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