In advertising, you add $ if you want to continue your campaign. It’s a (structured) marketplace where you buy and the currency is money.

In social media, there’s an illusion that it’s free because some of the tools available are free but you need to add TIME to the equation or you won’t go very far. It’s a (maze of) community where you exchange ideas/content and have conversations and the currency is People’s Time.
(for those thinking about “automated commenting system” to avoid spending time, and I’ve been asked if it exists at times,  it’s a No No).

A couple of pick’s from my reading of the week illustrate what I just said:

1. Can blogging be less effective with less time? Sure it does! As Douglas illustrated ” If I don’t blog for a single day, my traffic drops by half”.
2. “Social media takes time and money” as Mark said.
3. A business that relies on social media to grow will suffer if it put less time into it.  We’ve seen it here at eCairn, we have so much to do that they’re (few)weeks where we do less listening/engaging. It translates automatically in less exposure, less demo, less chance to grow our business. Plus we get this feeling of being disconnected (the worst that can happen in social media)

So how much time is needed? And the answer is: “well it depends”. duh!

For us, it is:

- two people – spend 1.5hour a day each in reading the 250-300 post we got per day.

• First we scan a post (takes 5-10 seconds).
• 10% of the time, we think it’s relevant so we read and try carefully to understand (takes 1-2 minutes).
• 10% of the 10%, we comment because we think we can add value by providing additional data or a different point of view (takes 10-30 minutes).

In this 1.5 hour we also review potential comments on our comments and while doing it we build list of bloggers that we want to reach out one to one.

At the end of the month, we go 1:1 with these bloggers thru LinkedIn or Facebook. This, only if the blogger has made his profile public and we’ve been able to automatically id their profile