Tweet – once such an innocent little word – is seeding anxiety among even the most buttoned-up business women. As a professional, you may be wondering if you should be Twittering, tweeting, following, friend-ing, You-Tubing, Facebook-ing or just lying low and hoping the new media frenzy dies down. That’s not likely to happen.

While the avalanche of news about social media can be overwhelming, there is no mistaking its power to potentially reinvigorate a company and its brand. Professional and personal service firms, consumer products companies, entrepreneurs and non-profits have experienced its unmatched ability to build loyal customer relationships, generate brand buzz, mobilize constituencies, expand prospects and generate leads.

Admittedly, social media is also time-consuming, distracting and, when done haphazardly, potentially damaging. Entering the social media environment requires careful planning and monitoring to make the most of its business-building power.

At our software development company, we work with mid-sized and larger corporations to create, implement, and monitor the effectiveness of social media strategies. This enhances word-of-mouth marketing capability, and the ability to identify, interact, and engage key brand and company influencers. But the same basic ground rules apply for small businesses and start-ups:

Smart Social Media Tactics

1) Increase your social media IQ: Even if you can barely stifle a yawn, you need to put aside your opinions about social media and get educated. Social media is no longer just for teens and college students. In fact, statistics show the sharpest increases in older adults, with social networking growing 60 percent last year in people between the ages of 35 and 64, who are using it primarily to connect with business and personal contacts. Only 11 percent of Twitter users and nine percent of Facebook users are between the ages of 12 and 17.

• An entrepreneurial start-up venture seeking help in developing a sustainable business strategy
• A dynamic emerging small business seeking advice on how to best finance and capitalize your company in these turbulent times
• An established mid-size firm targeting future success by breaking into uncharted markets seeking business and customer intelligence critical to creating new innovative business strategies
• An entrepreneurial minded mature company, aware of the changing and uncertain environment, seeking fresh perspective to make strategic portfolio tradeoffs and decisions
• A non-profit enterprise seeking assistance to formulate a new “business” strategy that strengthens, enhances and sustains the mission

We get PR firms and/or heads of emerging companies calling us all the time to “pitch” a story idea to us. Most often we never get to the next step because the approach to us is so bad.

In many cases the people calling us with editorial ideas know nothing about our organization, our objectives or our audience, have not taken the time to visit our web site, have never tried to meet with us and have not really thought through why the idea they are “pitching” would be important to us or to our audience.

In one classic example of mis-managing a media contact, we were contacted by a PR firm to suggest we do a major article on one of their clients, a very important woman heading a major commercial real estate firm. It sounded like a really good opportunity for us and for our Garden State Woman readers. When the day came to do the phone interview with the woman executive the interview got off to a really rocky start with the woman obviously fumbling for her responses. Finally our interviewer asked, “Why do you want to be interviewed by Garden State Woman?” The answer stunned us, “I don’t know anything about Garden State Woman. I was just told to be prepared to be interviewed by a New Jersey women’s media company.” Our reported suggested politely that the interview be discontinued until the PR firm and their client had taken the time to learn about Garden State Woman. We never accepted another call from this firm again.