In this follow on to last week’s column I look at some of the trends driving social media and the techniques being used by marketers.If you do not have a PR company, you can get away with the minimal, keeping in mind low effort probably means low pay-off, but at least you are in the game. Advisors abound, and everyone is attempting to be the marketing guru who can launch your brand on social media.But there is some good advice available if you keep your goals in focus. HubSpotto.com, quoting an often used saying, says social media marketing “enables others to advocate for your business through compelling content”.Tim Ho, a social media marketer, advises novices to think of Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs, podcasts, pictures, and videos as communication channels: “Think about these channels as languages, they can be mastered easily but content and value of the conversation is all that matters.”These quotes are from various slide presentations on social media marketing that you can use to build your brand. They are available by searching Slideshare.com using terms such as ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’. SlideShare is itself a very good community site which allows users to share their slide presentations on any topic, including one called “Death by PowerPoint”.Slideshare is dominated by marketers and web consultants so social media is a hot topic, judging from their “most popular” section. One of the best presentations is by Stefanos Karagos of Xplain, who looks at ways to measure social media’s return on investment.Big companies need a way to measure this metric to justify the spend, as social media is not cost free. ROI is not measured by user numbers, but by connecting the dots between spend and transactions.He points the way towards how this could be done, for example through the correlation of patterns: for example, General Mills’ launch of Fiber One Bars, sales, and the number of consumer-generated messages online the buzz. There is a remarkable correlation in pattern.I also advise checking out ‘Social Media for Business’ by Jon Thomas of Presentation Advisors. He sketches out a simple strategy for beginners.Another place to glean ideas is Mashable.com’s business and marketing section. The blogging site is mostly devoted to social media.If you are still not convinced social media is a must-have addition to marketing, look at Pepsi, which took the plunge and gave up on Super Bowl ads after a 23-year run. It opted to spend a third of its annual marketing budget into a social marketing campaign called the “Refresh Project”. The company’s Facebook page has 473,000 followers and Twitter about 63,000, still a low number for such a large company, but dedicated.Dell is doing it right, generating millions in sales from Twitter alone (about $6.2m in 2009). Comcast set up a Twitter account in 2008 to help solve users problems. About 150,000 were using it the next year. Starbucks is using social media to generate ideas for coffee products from customers.This week Mashable.com is buzzing about Kraft’s plan to turn tweets about its Macaroni and Cheese into TV ads within a day. Kraft picked five tweets on Monday, then wrote and shot ads based on them. One ran on TBS. The other four are on the Mac & Cheese’s Facebook page.A previous campaign on Twitter this month identified pairs of people who tweeted about the brand at the same time. The two were contacted by tweet and the first to respond got a T-shirt and five boxes of Mac & Cheese. That campaign generated 1.5 million tweets in a day.Marketers are now looking for ways to exploit Facebook’s new feature, which you can use to pose questions and track answers. The feature is a kind of “recommendation engine” in marketing lingo. Businesses see it as a way to conduct market research and crowd source, according to a Mashable blog.Thanks to Elizabeth Tee at Troncossi Public Relations for answering my call for interesting Bermuda-based efforts at social media. She pointed me to her clients on Facebook, the Fairmont Hamilton Princess, Lindo’s and Meyer-Franklin Travel.“We’re now the second largest Fairmont hotel globally on Facebook due to the work we’ve done over the last year and we’re pretty proud of it,” she writes. The Fairmont Facebook site is updated often enough, even with at least one planted comment and responses by a Troncossi staff member (she was promoting happy hour). It is after all a corporate Facebook page meant for marketing the hotel. Of course, you don’t need to do this if your Facebook attracts enough clients anyway. Competing for free drinks and stays is one way to do it, but it must be done in a way to generate enough buzz to pay off.l Send comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed[AT]gmail.com