As a throw-away comment I suggested that social media marketing is not that different from other types of promotional activity in many ways.  From my work advising clients on marketing and promotional strategies my observation is that when businesses have issues with getting to grips with social media tools, many of the problems are not to do with these media themselves but are underlying issues that would arise if the business was considering traditional promotional methods too (and even if the internet had never been invented).

Here are three mournful complaints I often hear:

"I don't have the time to spend on social media"

Many small businesses are under-resourced when it comes to promotion.  For reasons I'll never fathom too many business owners seem to think that customers just appear out of the blue.  The reality is that you need two basic things to make a business: something to sell and someone to sell it to.  And both need investment.

Social media is often seen as being "free" and much that you can do with these tools can be done with little or no financial outlay - and it's easy to see why business owners might get excited about that.  And then the dreadful realisation that instead of spending money, you have to spend time...  Oh dear.  Not exactly the "something for nothing" they'd hoped for.

But even if they stuck to traditional methods of promotion there would still be a need to invest resources - money and, yes, time.  Time to liaise with designers and copy writers, or to write brochures themselves, and to liaise with printers, and to find things to do with their literature (post it out, take it out networking, find places to leave it around...) and to talk to their PR consultant, and to create something PR-worthy in the first place, and to write letters, and to... insert your own time-consuming promotional activity here.  Somehow, because they're spending time as well as money the time doesn't get counted as a cost.  But spending just time, that's a problem.

As I've said before and will no doubt say many times again, marketing does require investment - money, time, energy and thought - and the social media sphere is no different to any other.

"I don't know what to say"

I'll agree that social media presents plenty of new and creative opportunities when it comes to communication and does require a different approach to traditional techniques.

With advertising, once you've got a model that works, you can get away with placing one advert over a period of time and just letting it run.  With direct mail a successful letter can be sent out in batches to a mailing list.  Often with these tools an intensive last of work to get it started can then become more routine in its application (but no always, please don't assume you can become complacent).

Social media, on the other hand, benefits from a "little and often" approach to keep things fresh and keep people interested. It's also about a conversation with your customers, listening to them and giving them interesting things to talk to others about.

But, again, I'd say there are common factors.  If you don't know what to say about your business on an ongoing basis, how well are you really equipped to talk about it at networking events, identify good PR stories, make relevant advertising offers?

The crux here is being excited about your business.  Excited enough to want to share your news through whatever mix of media you choose to work with.

"I tried Twitter (or insert social media platform of your choice) and it didn't work"

What, a couple of tweets and no sales?  This isn't really any a different a complaint to those people who spend a large chunk of their marketing budget on a single advert and wonder why the phone isn't ringing off the hook (even when they have remembered to put the phone number on the ad).  It isn't any different to getting one piece of press coverage and expecting it to generate long-term awareness.  As with any other media you need to know:

• How its use fits into overall, business, marketing and promotional strategies;
• How the different media you are using can optimally work together;
• What the dynamics of each media type are;
• What objectives you are actually expecting to meet.

What I'm not saying with all this is that social media does not have plenty of advantages.  It's great for enabling conversation and dialogue and it can open up unexpected opportunities (a client of mine is having some very interesting talks with an old contact who picked them up on Twitter).  But what we shouldn't do is apportion issues to social media (because it's "techie", it's time consuming, etc.) when that disguises underlying concerns that need to be addressed long before your choice of media.