Despite the wide spread adoption of social media on a global basis, most companies remain clueless about how digital technology is changing the way people communicate and share information.

How else do explain the ineptitude that spurred articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about these events:

• Burson-Marsteller’s email smear campaign against Google for Facebook. Seriously? That’s the best they could do?
• A famous British soccer player’s lawsuit against Twitter to unmask his anonymous critics. You’re kidding, right? Does he think he’s going to gag Twitter?
• Comcast’s threat to cut funding to a nonprofit that criticized its hiring of a former FCC commissioner on Twitter. And they did so via email. Did they think that was maybe a little risky? <sarcasm>
• JC Penny and Overstock.com’s decision to employ black hat SEO tactics, resulting in their websites being manually demoted in the search rankings. Guess that’s what happens when senior management is clueless about organic search.

The cold, hard truth is that these lapses in judgment are so sophomoric, all you can do is chalk it up to digital illiteracy.  And by the way, if the errors they made aren’t clear to you, you’re digitally illiterate too.  But don’t feel bad.  You’re not alone.  And chances are, it’s even not your fault.

You’ve probably been to a few social media conferences where you learned just enough to be dangerous.  Speakers took the stage and told you how well they did with social media to promote themselves and generate new business.  They avoided the gory details.  No one’s ever actually sat you down and explained how these channels really work, or how to master them.  Why would they? They want you to hire them.

The fight against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or panel sessions. What’s required is practical, applied knowledge.  You need to know how to:

• Build a social media monitoring dashboard to find, listen and engage with your existing online community. You may not know it, but you’ve an online community already.
• Use white hat search engine optimization tactics to make it easier for your customers to find you via search. Coming up forst for the name of your company doesn’t count. Google gives you that one for free. It’s about coming up for early-stage, buyer-oriented keywords. Has anyone ever actually showed you how to find them? It’s not that tough.
• Or how to optimize a website or blog for social sharing.  Can you install Facebook “Like” button, “Tweet” button and Linkedin “Share” button on your corporate website?  And can you optimize your Facebook status updates from maximum engagement so you rank high in the social newsfeed?

Over the next few days I’ll be running a series of posts to help you stamp out digital illiteracy in the workplace. I’ll lay out specifically what you and your colleagues need to know, and how to teach it to those with only minimal exposure to social channels. And if you want to take a short cut, join me for my Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011.

Or just stay tuned to my blog.  I’m going to share my recipe for bringing digital immigrants up to speed and for winning resources and buy-in from disengaged managers and clients.

If you’re a past attendee of one of my trainings, what did you learn?  Was it valuable?  And how, if at all, has what you learned helped you avoid a major mistep?

This post (written based on the presentation embedded above) explains how the Facebook “Like” button is poised to kill online display advertising as we know it, and help you understand why the social networking giant has been valued at $50 billion.  It is the second in a series of posts about marketing with Facebook. The first post with about marketing with Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads.  Let’s get started.

At first, the web was about surfing the information highway. Then it evolved into a place where the focus was on web content, pages, databases and documents. Today, it has become a place to connect with friends and trusted colleagues.  The web of tomorrow will be about finding relevant content from our friends, signaling the end of algorithmic search as the dominant means of locating relevant content online.

Facebook is a platform, which means third-party software developers can create applications that run inside the service. Since the launch of Facebook in May 2007, more than 550,000 Facebook apps have been created.  Today, more than a million developers are creating Facebook apps. And, as you probably know, the social network counts 500 million users.

Facebook “Like” buttons are the killer app for achieving the kind of reach that up until now, had been the exclusive province of mainstream media. “Like” buttons are the most used and easiest to use of Facebook’s Social Plugins and they provide a practical way for filing URLs and other online objects as nodes on the Facebook social graph.  But if you count all Activity Feed (meant for news sites), Live Stream (meant for Live Events) and other Facebook  widgets, more than 2 million websites are extending Facebook functionality to their sites and roughly 10,000 new sites  are joining them every day, using Facebook social plug ins.  Today, 250 million people use Facebook through destination websites without visiting Facebook.com, every month.

Life is Short. You’re Busy.  Why Bother?  Three Reasons:

• Traffic - Getting people to your website who wouldn’t otherwise have found it.
• Engagement – Like, comment and share functionality results means they do more and stay longer.
• Insights – The ability to see exactly how people are engaging with your brand, get demographics on who they are, and improve your efforts over time, whether its at Facebook.com or via your destination domain using Facebook Connect.

How Do You Do It?

What’s the easiest way for a nontechnical person to extend Facebook functionality to their website?  Here it is.

“Like” Button – This is by far the most important Facebook Social Plugin.  It’s how Facebook users can attach an object, like a web page, to their newsfeed and social graph.  They click the “Like” button and create a feed story, which can be seen by their friends at Facebook.com.

Their friends can “Like” it as well, attach a comment to it or forward it to their Facebook friends by clicking the “Share” button, extending the object’s reach and adding social relevance. “Liking” an object also means it becomes a node on the Facebook graph, so it appears in search, and if it’s a product, brand or service, it also appears on the Facebook profile page of the “Liker.” On social optimized sites, the “liker” or recommender’s profile picture appears beneath the “Like” button. So in this case, if you like the movie The Social Network, your Facebook friends will see your “like” as a recommendation on IMDB as well.

Last summer, Facebook director of media partnerships Justin Osofsky launched a campaign to get more news media outlets to integrate Facebook functionality, so their audiences can share articles in their newsfeeds, and find articles that their Facebook friends have “Liked.”  The Independent newspaper in the UK has done so by positioning the “Like” button in the upper right-hand corner beside every article on their website.

The advantage of integrating the Facebook like button in this manner — rather than just using a simple share button such as Add This — is that if any of my Facebooks friends “Like” an article, I wind up seeing their profile picture on the Independent’s website. In the example above, if my Facebook friends happen onto this story on the Independent’s website, they can see I’ve recommended it.

The article also gets posted to my newsfeed. The more of my friends who “Like” it and comment on it:

• The more people who see it
• The more social relevance it gets
• The broader the reach
• And the more referrals to your website

When installing a “Like” button, you can elect to show faces, and set the width . Given the amount a real estate the default settings require, the inclination is to go adjust the setting and so with the smaller “Button Count” or “Box Button” options.  But these are not nearly as effective because profile pictures do not appear.  The options shown below right, which are the default “Like” button widget settings, are much more likely to encourage engagement.

Seeing faces amplifies the likelihood of getting click recommendations ten times, says Facebook partner engineer Simon Glass.  As the research from Facebook shows, once just two Facebook friends have clicked a “Like” button, the likelihood that others will click it as well increases exponentially.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica is using the Facebook “Like” buttons to let users subscribe to their content in their Facebook newsfeed.  Instead of relying on users to come back to their destination website to “like” content, La Repubblica readers can use the “Like” button to subscribe to news by subject-matter, and any stories the published on that subject appear automatically in their newsfeed at Facebook.com.

Readers can “Like” their favorite football team, and links to stories about their team are syndicated directly to their Facebook newsfeed in one click. La Repubblica got 104,000 “likes” in the first 5 weeks of deploying their new “Like” button subscription integration.  “You can kind of think if it like RSS, but that people actually use,” says Mr. Cross, who formerly worked as a developer for the Beeb.

What are the benefits of using Facebook “Like” buttons?

• Distribution on Facebook.com
• Collect social recommendations
• Reach new people through personal recommendations
• Drive inbound traffic and user engagement

Half of Facebook’s users visit Facebook.com every day, and many of them do so multiple times daily.  Before La Repubblica integrated Facebook, readers had to go to the website to check for updated content but with this new integration, the newspaper can get links to it’s articles in front of readers where they spend the majority of their time on the Net.

Facebook users spend on average 5 hrs 25 mins on Facebook.com per month, versus 2 hrs 17 mins on Yahoo, 1 hr and 52 mins on AOL, 1 hr and 41 mins on MSN, 1 hr 17 mins on YouTube and 1 hr 14 mins on Google.

This blog post was written using source material from a special session at Le Web 2010 presented by Facebook partner engineer Simon Cross, a complete audio transcript for which is available at On the Record…Online. At the time of this writing, the PowerPoint presentation he used was also available.

When I demo all these services in my Social Media Boot Camp, people get excited. Their first reaction is that they’ll be able to leverage these tools to syndicate their messages everywhere. After the eyes glaze over with just how many places there are to communicate on the social web, at first blush these tools appear to be a magic bullet for social media engagement.

The problem is, these tools are made for talking. And that’s just what they do. As just like that Nancy Sinatra song, if you’re not careful, one of these days these tools are going to walk all over you.

Some, like Seesmic and TweetDeck, are starting to include some degree of listening. But for the most part, these tools make it easy to talk, or perhaps I should say scream, for the highest mountain through as many canyons as possible.

Syndication tools will continue to improve, but as it stands, there’s no one tool that allows you to syndicate what you say and get everything you need to hear back, without significant blind spots. In fact, I’ve often thought they can may actually work against you by serving as social media ear plugs, or creating duplicate post feedback, as we FriendFeed and Twitter App our way into our very own echo chambers.

If you rely on these services to display your content on multiple social media networks automatically, it is much more likely you’ll forget to actually log into Linkedin or Facebook in a reasonable amount of time to see if you get questions that deserve a reply. If you have, and don’t respond, you’re using social media as a publishing platform, instead of building stronger relationships with people and organizations.

As long as you remember to listen, these tools do offer new efficiencies. But remember, you can’t have conversations if you don’t listen to what people have to say. And as it stands now, social media syndication tools need to learn to listen as well as they talk.

B2B sales cycles exceed those of B2C, because the former requires someone be walked through a process, learn best practices and see relevant case studies to arrive at a purchasing decision. And currently, PowerPoint presentations are the popular media used in business to get that done.

Google Adwords and online display ads may bring the horse to water, but before a B2B customer drinks, they need a more comprehensive understanding than ads can provide, and presentations solve that problem.

But just what kinds of presentations work best at actually generating leads on SlideShare?

That’s one of the questions I asked Rashmi, in a conversation that also touched on the shortcomings of user-ratings, making sharing beneficial to community members and encouraging high quality business conversations by discouraging anonymity, which is available as a special episode of my “On the Record…Online” podcast.

But if you’re looking to generate leads on the SlideShare, and you want to know how to do it, here’s a cheat sheet directly from SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha:

1. Get Personal — SlideShare may be a business-to-business social network, but the service’s real strength is its ability to promote business with personality. To see how this works in practice, check out SlideShare’s homepage on any given day and see what types of presentations rank high. You’ll find dryer, text-heavy presentations — though packed with useful information — are much less popular than those with a strong dose of personality and individual flair.

2. Visual Essays Work Best — In the real world, when you use PowerPoint as a visual aid, you are able to to narrate your presentation. But on SlideShare, your deck has to speak for itself. Using imagery to add visual punch works to communicate more information with fewer words. It’s more attractive to viewers because it requires less effort to look at pictures than it does to read.

3. Serve an Underserved Audience – Most of the content on SlideShare is tech-oriented. So if this is your addressable audience, you’re prospecting in the most competitive of SlideShare’s markets. If, on the other hand, you’re visual essay is about some type of subject-matter that’s less prevalent, you may be appealing to much a smaller audience, but there’s also much less competition, so the probability of converting members into leads is higher.

4. Presentations as Media – On SlideShare, your presentation is media. And good media is different from a good presentation. While good presentations include all the ins and outs at the expense of requiring more time and attention, effective media typically promises quick gains for a small time investment. A SlideShare presentation that works as a lead generation tool, is less about driving actual purchasing decisions than it is about sparking someone’s curiosity. Lead generation is about opening doors, not than closing them.

Rashmi says SlideShare is fixing the broken “white paper download paradigm,” one of the more common ways B2B marketers generate sale leads online. The problem, she says, is that in the white paper download model you have to forfeit your contact information before you know whether or not the content is any good. By introducing a social layer of comments, embeds, favorites and downloads within an active B2B community, SlideShare lets members use a social filter to more efficiently identify what might be compelling content for them.

Are you using SlideShare to generate leads? is there anything I’ve missed that can add to this post?

But after a discussion with Mark Yolton, the senior vice president of the SAP Community Network, a B2B social networking site nearly 2,000,000 members strong and growing monthly at the rate of roughly 30,000 new members spanning 200 countries worldwide, I’m convinced that social networking just may be the killer app for B2B marketing online, and here are 4 reasons why.

1. Faster, Better, Cheaper
According to Yolton, “If it can make our customers more successful than our competitor’s customers, then our competitor’s customers are going to come to us. Or our customers our going to buy more, upgrade faster, extend their capabilities and so forth.” And that’s precisely what the SAP Community Network does.

2. On-Demand Subject Matter Expertise
By providing stakeholders with free access to subject matter experts, the SAP Community Network helps its customers implement its solutions and resolve issues faster, decreasing time to market. “Our hope is that if they can reduce some of the burden of day-to-day operations, adopt best practices and overcome challenges faster, they’re going to have to budget left over to buy more stuff,” says Mark Yolton.

3. Self-Serve Professional Development
Customers can use the SAP social network to increase their knowledge within their organization at a very low cost. These savings extend to SAP as well, because customers share knowledge directly with other customers, reducing the demand on SAP’s salesforce to educate the marketplace. The scale of the SAP B2B social network is also beneficial, since it’s sheer size increases the possibility that there will be customers within the same industry to share best practices.

4. Reputation Management Opportunity
For SAP’s customers, many of who are system integrators, participating in the B2B social network allows them to procure sales leads and actively build their reputations to attract new business opportunities. The social network has become a primary channel for customers and partners to demonstrate their expertise within a focused community, and in so doing, attract qualified leads.

Want More?
To listen to an in depth, one-on-one interview with Mark Yolton of SAP on the benefits of B2B social networking, visit “On the Record…Online” and download the audio transcript, or subscribe to the podcast via RSS or Twitter.