All that most businesses really want to know about Social Media is how to use this latest and greatest toy to make more money selling products or services.

Performics, a Publicis-owned unit, wanted to find out the same thing so it conducted an online survey of U.S. consumers who access at least one social network regularly. The objective: to determine what kind of impact social networking has on the purchase process.

Here’s what they found out, from 3011 consumers:

• 34% have used a search engine to find information on a product/service/brand after seeing an advertisement on a social networking site
• 30% have learned about a new product, service and/or brand from a social networking site
• 27% are receptive to invitations to events, special offers or promotions from advertisers communicated to me through social networking sites
• 25% have gone directly to an online retailer or ecommerce site after learning about a product/service/brand via a social networking site
• 25% have recommended a product/service/brand to their friends via a social networking site
• 20% have discussed products/services/brands on social networking sites after seeing an ad elsewhere

If you’d like to tap into this social revenue stream but are not sure where to start, grab the free ebook on “Adventures Into The Unknown World of Social Media” from http://MarketersFears.com

Social Media is the hottest topic in marketing circles right now and many businesses are feeling pressured to get involved with social outlets such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. Small wonder — eMarketer is reporting that social media has reached the tipping point, with more than half of all U.S. internet users now frequenting social spaces in a typical month.

So at least half of us can now be found hanging out on social networks. Should marketers be there too? Absolutely, notes eMarketer, channeling the results of a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a market research firm. According to their data, 33% of U.S. Facebook users have become fans of brands on the network.

And plenty more social network users are talking about brands online. Whether it’s good news or bad news, if it’s hot it spreads in milliseconds across the social networks.

An unfortunate example? On September 26 2009 Kraft Australia launched its glorious new line extension to the iconic Australian Vegemite brand. Vegemite iSnack 2.0 was launched in the quarter-time adbreak of the Australian Football League Grand Final (roughly equivalent to the Superbowl in terms of national sporting importance) down under.

Before the adbreak was even over, tweets of death were resounding across Australia and thence across the world:

NO! Vegemite cream cheese product CANNOT POSSIBLY be called “Vegemite iSnack 2.0″. Bad joke or most epic FAIL in FMCG branding history” - tweeted by downesy

I said “do you speaka my language?” She just smiled and gave me an iSnack 2.0 sandwich. #vegefail – tweeted by jmappellekim

On the rather more positive side, a recent Nielsen/Facebook joint study showed significant uplift in Advertising Recall, Awareness and Purchase Intent amongst those brands “liked” in Social Media.

Nervous yet? Worried about your brand? Or just eager to take advantage of the added value if fans ‘love you’ socially?

It’s time to upskill yourself on social media — it’s too late to be an early adopter, but now would be a good time to start getting yourself socially adept.

For many marketers, however, the social media space is fraught with danger. Recent studies have shown that marketers have three basic fears about social media — and those fears can be crippling (on a professional level if not personally) if the right actions aren’t taken to deal with the problems.

Author and marketing specialist Michael Carney has put together an ebook on “Marketers’ Fears About Social Media (and how to overcome them)”, based on the Social Media Marketing course he’s been running for the past few months.

It’s available free of charge from www.MarketersFears.com, and it’s already attracting attention (and praise):

• “amazing and awesome”
• “That’s the best looking social media document I’ve ever seen”
• “love the comic art”

Michael has made the ebook available at no charge to our readers. Simply go to http://MarketersFears.com and organise your copy.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that today’s holy marketing grail is to be talked about (a lot) in social media. Unfortunately, social buzz doesn’t necessarily translate into either attention or sales.

That discontinuity has now been clearly illustrated thanks to a just-released U.S. report from Networked Insights Inc called “SocialSenseTV”, which correlates the buzz on popular US television shows with their actual Nielsen ratings.

The report covers the period from the 1st of February 2010 to the 25th of April 2010. Unsurprisingly given that timeframe, the Number 1 most-discussed show across the social networks was “Lost”, counting down to last week’s final episode. However, despite its Number 1 social status, the ever-mysterious saga could only average 10th place in the Nielsen TV ratings (amongst those 18-64) across the period.

American Idol, second most talked-about TV series, was actually the top-rating TV show in the US for that time period according to Nielsen; Glee, third most buzzed, sang and danced its way into fourth in the ratings.

Further down the list, however, the disparity between the two metrics becomes far more evident. The Simpsons, still buzzworthy after all these years, ranks Number 4 on the social-o-meter but rates 44th most-watched series according to Nielsen; the Number 5 social show, Heroes, only manages an asterisk in the report (which means in this instance that the show is ranked lower Nielsen’s 50 most-watched shows).

Other socially-superior shows that fell into the Nielsen realm of the asterisk included Saturday Night Live (9th most social), Cold Case (11th), So You Think You Can Dance (16th), Chuck (17th) and How I Met Your Mother (20th).

What implications can we take from all this?

Firstly, that just because a topic hits water-cooler status doesn’t mean that talk will translate into action. In fact, it may well be that in many cases social newsgatherers can get enough out of the virtual buzz to avoid bothering to engage with the product at all. The next best thing to being there may well be listening hard enough to be able to bluff your way through in future conversations.

Secondly, those who stalk the corridors of the social networks, numerous though they may be, are not yet representative of the population at large — they’re younger (and tend to spend less time engaging with traditional media and more time interacting with each other). And when it comes to disposable income their share of purse still tends to be lower, except for core categories of importance to their demographic.

Thirdly, buzz about any particular event or TV show AFTER the event is just too darned late. Yes, TV operators might gather a few viewers to their Replay TV service, but for most other applications, it’s already over. The time to drive buzz is beforehand.

And finally, especially when it comes to TV shows that have been around a while, many of us carry a symbolic understanding of at least the most popular shows in our heads. Episodic television being what it is, where things don’t change much from week to week, all we need is a few fragments of current information to update our cerebral files and we don’t need to see the show to have the experience.

In summary:  it’s nice when they’re talking about you (especially beforehand) but it’s no substitute for the ka-ching of the cash register.

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

French Algerian author/philospher Albert Camus had a way with words — and coined a phrase that still resonates today, half a century after his death.

Jim Farley, group VP-global marketing at Ford Motor Co., echoed that sentiment last week when he told attendees at Advertising Age’s 2010 Digital Conference that the recession forced companies to find innovative ways to reach out to consumers, giving a big boost to digital and social marketing. “If the economy hadn’t dropped the way it did, we would have been on auto pilot and not experimented the way we did.”

The Ford marketing chief said the new paradigm that media owners and clients have to get used to involves spending a lot more money in post-launch with new partners. “Yes, we still need traditional media partners and integration will become more and more important,” Mr. Farley said. “But then post-launch we can’t just go away. We have to allocate [social and digital] resources because these different resources change the content and the dialogue of the product after the launch. It’s much more manageable, and it impacts how we build the product.”

Turning social may have been an unintended consequence of the recession for Ford and other marketers but it was also a sign of the times for other reasons — most especially, as consumers worldwide look to their peers for information about products and services they’re considering. The old ‘Interruption Marketing’ paradigm isn’t dead — it was never that healthy to begin with, but it was the only hammer in our toolbox — but it’s becoming less and less effective.

Digital and Social Media aren’t the new “one size fits all” solution, but they’re certainly turning out to be a useful new tool for marketers.