Part 1 of 3.  The KickApps seminar I attended last month yielded a wealth of information, from both advisors and corporate marketing people, about what to do with social media if you're a company.  For the next three posts, I'm sharing what I took away from the afternoon.  [To become a member of KickApps own social network, click here.  You'll be able to watch the videos of the seminar presentations.]

These brief points are compiled from the excellent presentations made by Alex Blum of KickApps, Dylan Boyd of eROI, James Mastan of Blue Rain Marketing, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester, and Sandy Carter of IBM. 

Three reasons to incorporate social media into your market and website plans

• It enables deeper engagement with your community.

• It automatically makes your digital footprint more dynamic.

• It's cost effective.  In many cases, existing staff can easily participate, and many of the networks are free.  And the money you budget will buy a lot more than traditional media buys.

Understand what social media is doing to the website and cyber communications

• Registration pages are going away, to be replaced by social
  features that capture information in a way that is useful for the
  visitor as well as the company.  Any contract-esque feature will become
  informal and behavior based, not statement based.

• Email will begin to merge with a social inbox

• Branding will become more contextual — in the context of the user's point of view, mindset and purpose

• Your product and brand will achieve relevance based mostly on its
  usefulness to the customer — and much of that will be gauged not in
  terms of the information you gather via interrupting the experience,
  but in the information you share through the experience of using your
  website
• Be ready to go where the most customers are — to the most popular
  areas of the website — not necessary where you think customers should
  be
• Aggregate conversations and behavior to make the user experience more valuable to them and to the company

Manage your risks

• Privacy

• Noise

• Insularity around narrow interests