A line in an article I read recently  stood out in neon:  Even an executive never sends a tweet or posts a status update, they must know what social media is and what it means for their business.

2011 was a breakthrough year for social media.  There was so much hype and hyperbole that many businesses rushed to put up Facebook pages and open Twitter accounts only to be faced with the very real question of “Now what?”.  Others still immediately blasted out their advertising messages only to be met with derision and ghost town followings.

2012 will be the year of social intelligence as I outlined in this blog article.

This article referred to being savvy to the multitude of conversations taking place moment to moment about your brand, industry and competitors.  But this will also extend to executives at senior level being intelligent about social.

Know what it is, know how it works, know what it is doing to your business. Even if an exec is not personally active (but seriously, the time is now) he or she cannot be ignorant about how it is evolving and how this evolution with affect their business.

And the greater the smarts at the top, the greater chance there is of those smarts translating to every level of the organisation.

It all comes back to the mantra of social business:  Be Smart, Be Engaged.  Be Human.

Use your Facebook lists!

As our use of Facebook evolves we are building up “friends”  in very different areas of our lives.  We have our close family, our not so close family, close friends, business associates, work colleagues and on and on.  Each plays a specific role in our lives and what we do.

And as these friends grow it becomes important to deliver the right messages to the right people. By not paying attention to this you may be offending or upsetting groups of friends or you might be getting blocked by people that you may later want to engage.

Say you’ve had a particularly bad day and want to vent a little.  No problem, but let those closest to you know about it and not your business colleagues.

If you want to talk business make those updates available to your business network (and it is quite possible you have friends for different areas of business).

In this way you are talking to the right people about what is most real to them. Our personal and work lives have become blurred, as I wrote about here but the fact is that your poker friends may not want to know about the goings on at work and your important business contacts may not need to know about your family get together.  When you are talking to all your friends about what they care about, your network will increase in value.

Ok, great so how do you do it?

First you need to assign all your FB friends to lists. This is the hard part and may take some time if you’ve never done it.  But once done, maintaining it is pretty simple.  Every time you send a friend request you are able to add the person to a list right away.  The same thing when you accept a request. How do you edit your lists?

On your profile on the left hand side you’ll see a heading “LISTS”.  Click on this and you’ll be able to create lists and add friends to lists.

Now, every time you write a status update you have the option to select who sees it:

Click the button next to “post” and click the list you want to include in your update.  Now only those friends will be able to see that post.

IMPORTANT:  Facebook will save your last selection and assume it for your next update, so remember to change it as needed.

Using lists will take a long way in building an even better network.

2011 was the year that social media went viral in South Africa: The number of “experts” in the field mushroomed, there were seminars, talks and a scramble for business.  Out of the confusion came one, unassailable fact:  Business must go social.

In 2012 the international trend will be Social Intelligence with an emphasis on knowledge, intelligence about your business, industry and competitors.  This is and always has been the first step in developing a social media programme that is sustainable. Monitoring the social web and knowing what is being said about you, your industry and your competition.

And through this intelligence, real and effective social strategies will evolve.  The greatest effect of this will be seen in the office environment with the introduction of social platforms as part of every day workflow, much like email is used now.

Dell had great foresight in this regard.  Already in 2010 they put 5000 employees through social media university.

2012 will see social begin to dominate as communication platforms for business. We may even see email numbers go down for the first time since 1994.  At 260 billion emails a day, who can stand to get any more?

This will require a re-engineering of communication systems and training at all levels, including the C-suite (more accurately, especially the C-suite).

We will see marketing departments no longer being the sole custodians of social communication.  To be sure they will continue to be key players but for a business to go social every employee in every department must know and make use of it.  Only the most backward and resistant will still block & ban social access in the workplace.

It’s going to be a dynamic world in 2012.

Nandos most recent triumph, their “Last Dictator Standing” is indeed a triumph.

When I first saw it last Friday I was quite literally gobsmacked.  A stroke of genius.  I couldn’t stop watching it.  I instantly annoyed several friends and colleagues, insisting they stop what they are doing and watch.  And I would watch it with them.

I posted the following status update on Facebook: For my money the Nandos Last Dictator ad is a stroke of genius that is difficult to comprehend. Truly amazing.

I shortly received a comment asking “Why do you feel that, Ryan?” That sort of stopped me dead.  Why do I feel that?

Firstly, taking a non personal look at it, there was clearly something right about it, since it went viral quite rapidly and was on You Tube’s front page by the end of the day.

But getting into a bit more of a personal analysis: Advertising, as we have known it, has left us.  I cringe at the stupid and ridiculous efforts on radio and TV to keep us buying.  More and more, we consumers, if we are to be advertised to, want to be entertained. We want to make a connection and somehow we want to be moved.  Does this help sell more product? I sincerely hope so as that is the only way we will continue see things as amazing as this ad.

In the space of one minute I was taken back to my own “those days”, the innocent fun of playing with friends that were important to me.  But then I’m struck by the  pure ridiculousness of dictators enjoying such innocence which brings home the seriousness of the harm and destruction wrought by the regimes they created.  However all but one of those depicted have fallen which reminds me that there is hope in the relentless progression of the human race.  Perhaps we are, indeed, going to overcome.  And not to mention it was just plain, hilarious fun.

Most remarkable is how such a message can go global in 24-48 hours with the campaign receiving coverage by the Huffington Post and TIME and many others.

Is advertising dead? Not when it’s like this.  I might even get a meal for 6.

I attended the MyBroadband 2001 conference today at Vodaworld.

There were some incredible data that came out of this.  Some of the more impressive numbers:

There are currently 4 billion connected devices in the world.  This will reach 15 billion by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020.  Staggering

Vodacom has spoken about a minority of people that have figured out how to abuse the Blackberry Internet Service.  The record for abuse is someone who downloaded 342 gigs of data in a month through the service (not bad for R59).

In two years Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys predicts that every phone sold will be a smartphone.

In 2010 the amount of internet traffic recorded was greater than all data since the beginning of the internet.  An impressive 245 exabytes, or 245 billion gigabytes.

But hands down the best presentation of the day was by Lars Reichelt, the former CEO of Cell-C.  He painted a picture for the future of connectivity or what I like to call the Communication Revolution. And it is truly remarkable.  By 2020 it will be almost impossible to function without being connected.  Quoting from Intel, the vision of the future is if something consumes electricity it will compute and if it computes it will be connected to the internet.  Thus being connected is as important as electricity. But from a South African perspective we must face some hard facts.

We cannot ignore the 40% of our population who do not live in urban centres.  Those in the countryside cannot be left to wallow with no electricity and thirsting in the digital wilderness.  With connectivity comes a world of education we could scarcely imagine.  Lars quite rightly trumpets the point that education is the key to any kind of future success for South Africa.

One point in particular that struck a cord with me is the possibility of placing powerful technology in the hands of our kids.  Tablet computers were all theory until the end of 2009 when the iPad arrived and changed everything.  Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, a $199 tablet.  India have now produced a $60 tablet that runs on Android.  A functional tablet.  At $60, or R500, you can put the power of Android in the hands of a student.  Imagine the possibilities for education with all texts required pre-loaded in addition to a world of video and other educational tools freely available in a connected world.  It would radically change the future of our country.  Nothing else can have that much impact for just R500 a head.

For just 1.5% of our defense budget (defending a country with no actual enemies) we could accomplish the technological quantum leap in our education of having a tablet in the hands of all 12 million children in our country.

Yes, of course I realise this is simplistic and a lot more money would have to be spent in distribution, training and infrastructure.  But the point IS simplistic.  This is not an unrealistic Utopian dream.  It is a tantalisingly reachable goal.

And certainly one I would like to be involved in.

When I tweeted this concept I got a bit of flack so I’d love to have your thoughts.  Let me know in the comments.

By far the most frequent refrain from business people when I talk to them about going social is “I just don’t have the time.”  The implication in this statement of course is “who has time to wade through the drivel that people post on Facebook”.  And fair enough.

The simple answer to the conundrum of time and social media is this:  A business will spend time on anything in direct proportion to its return of value.  Of course you’re not going spend time on anything that isn’t growing or helping your business.  A solid and obvious policy.

Having said that though if you’re not getting a measurable return from your time on social media then simply the time you’re putting in is being misappropriated. When the time you put in is focused toward a stated goal you know if you’ve made progress or not.  Otherwise it’s quite easy to lose an hour and then wonder where on earth you’ve been.

All this comes down to planning.  Know before you go.  What do you want social media to do for your business?  What has to be achieved for your programme to be considered a success? Who are you trying to communicate to?  Answer these questions and then spend your time efficiently taking strides in the direction of the answers.

When you see the results it will justify investing further resources and over time you will build a healthy community that contributes bountifully to your bottom line.  Remember, you don’t make money from social media.  You make money from people who use social media.

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments.