Soon after starting to track ‘social media’ on twitter I realized that almost everyone was writing almost in the same way:

23 Signs You are Addicted To Social Media
5 ways brands fail in social media
The Social Media Marketing List: 45 things you should be doing but probably aren’t
10 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Karma
9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing
Ten signs you may be a social media addict
10 Search Topics That Require Further Discussion
Top Ten Titans In Social Media
Are you addicted to social media? Here are 20 symptoms to look for
28 Lame Excuses Why The CEO Doesn’t Want To Use Social Media
12 Social Media New Year’s Resolutions For 2010

… and so it goes, on and on… But wait! also available with ‘How To’ flavour:

How Social Media Marketing Can Work For You
How to Twitter: Different social media have different uses
How Social Media is Simplifying Workplace Collaboration
How to use social media
…etc…

Social Media is not as complicated as it’s made look. There’s no number of secrets hidden to the general knowledge. Social Media is not that special or elitist. Social Media is important and needs spending time. That’s all. But Social Media is a question of common sense and also a question of tools to work with. Reading these tweeets it seems getting involved in Social Media is difficult and requires a lot of knowledge… That’s not true.

Now that we all got the “knack” of getting people to click we want to learn about all those “hidden secrets”, how do we stand out? How do we get something useful out of these posts with such promising titles?  The answer is, we can’t. But this doesn’t matter at all. Reading about Social Media is one of the most boring things I know. There’s great interest in Social Media, and that brings those who want to know “the secret recipe” and others wanting to share “the secret ingredients” of that recipe under the heading of “expert” or “guru”, to the forefront. But there is no secret recipe. The vast majority of the time the articles simply say the same thing but in different words. Working with Social Media is 10% knowledge (in the most part, common sense) and 90% work.

Working with Social Media is not something which requires supernatural know-how. It involves doing a handful of basically logical things reasonably well: deal with those who want to talk to someone from the company, provide them with information about your products, follow and participate in their conversations to create a deeper link than pure interest on the part of the company, and be nice and clear. It’s no great mystery, except for the fact that you have to begin step by step in a new environment.

The difficulty is with the large companies who are used to working on a big scale. Big communications, big clients, big impact…but even they couldn’t have imagined that establishing relationships with thousands of people was going to become one of their communication strategy needs. And the small and medium companies, which have traditionally had very few worries in this kind of communication, suddenly find that it affects them too. Social Media is real, it’s here and it’ll go far. So how can we adapt to this environment? More than knowledge, we think it’s a matter of work & tools. For that reason, we’ve created Noteca.