If everyone was going to jump off a bridge, would you? No? Really? Then why do you have a blog?

Many DMers are leaping on the social marketing bandwagon simply because everyone else seems to be there. That's a mistake if you don't have a strategy, says Denise Shiffman, founder and principal of consultancy Venture Essentials.

Direct recently talked to Shiffman — author of the new book “The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture” (Hunt Street Press) — about trends in social media.

DIRECT: What mistakes are marketers making in social media?

SHIFFMAN: The most common one is that marketers are jumping in without a strategy, [and so they] won't get what they want out of it. If marketers [plan] to start a blog or enter the social networking world, they need to set goals about what they want to achieve. Is it branding? Is it outreach? Is it more interactions and engagement with their audiences? Is it simply to get more product purchases? You have to know what you want to accomplish before you get going.

DIRECT: Are a lot of companies lagging behind consumers in how they use social media?

SHIFFMAN: With the exception of some key players like Amazon and IBM, in general Fortune 500 firms are dragging their feet. Smaller companies have been more aggressive about getting into blogging and using wikis, because a lot of the technology is free and it doesn't hurt to get started. Larger companies are being a lot more careful, rather than jumping in and becoming more interactive, open and authentic, which is what customers demand. We have a very powerful consumer audience that we didn't have just five years ago. People can voice their opinions. What large companies need to do is open up their Web sites and allow social commentary and ratings. [There's also] social spaces like Facebook, where customers can put up information about themselves and interact with other customers.

DIRECT: Once clients know what they want, how do you suggest they begin? Do you say ‘start small’?

SHIFFMAN: It depends on the company's personality. I like to see firms start with a blog. It sets the stage for how to interact and shows your personality as CEO or as a group of employees. A blog helps companies find their comfort zone [when it comes to] being more open about where they source materials, what's happening with their products, and issues that arise with customers or the reseller channel. It's a great way to get the ball rolling, listening to customers as they comment. Another area is wikis [Web sites that allow users to add and edit content], because they can be done internally. Wikis can change the behavior of people in a corporation.

DIRECT: How so?

SHIFFMAN: You're more open with a wiki, because you invite people in. It doesn't have to be public. You can do an internal wiki to, say, set up a marketing program or even define a new product strategy and get input from across a company in real time. And that's unusual. Generally products are defined by a very narrow set of individuals who work up the same hierarchical ladder. Everybody else in sales, customer service, what have you, gets the information long after it's been defined. So wikis really change the way people think. In the end, being more open to outsider input, working in real time and listening to other people's input sets you up to do more engaging marketing. You're more comfortable working with customers to define an ad or a contest, making them more a part of the decision process and allowing a fairly wild conversation to happen.

DIRECT: How are companies judging the return on investment for things like blogs or social networking?

SHIFFMAN: It depends on the company. Most analyze their blogs to see what sites customers are coming from and what sites they're leaving for; simple blog or Google analytics offer this type of information. Once again, it goes back to strategy. Is the strategy branding or being better known? Then you're looking at those pure numbers, how many pages are being read, how many visitors you have, how many comments you have. If the blog is supposed to change marketplace opinion, or maybe affect your resellers and get them to think differently about how they're selling your products, then you have to do far more analysis of comments, feedback and ratings. And that takes a bit more work.

DIRECT: What's the next big thing?

SHIFFMAN: One is mobile, which has been the ‘next big thing’ for three years. But this year we're finally going to see some amazing things happen, [thanks to] open access conditions. Competitive platforms will be open and marketers will be able to set up mobile programs quickly and easily. This will be important, especially to database marketers, who are going after people who already buy the product and will opt in [to receive] location-specific real-time coupons, discounts, announcements and alerts. The other technology that got a lot of visibility last year was widgets. Widgets are such a simple idea — a little chunk of code that allows you to distribute things customers want to receive right on their desktop on an ongoing basis, like coupons, discounts and branding information. Consumers might post [these things] on a blog or their Facebook page if they're excited about showing other people what they're receiving. This is a marketer's dream.