I’m just off the phone with Alex Kotler, founder of Football Partnerships – a great network and resource for companies in the business of football. From interviews, articles, to job openings – it’s all on the Football Partnerships website.

I’ve done one podcast before. Back in 2008, when I was working at the Chicago Red Stars, Peter Wilt invited me to crash one of his… but I was new to the scene so he led the charge. So this was the first time I’ve actually been responsible for the answers. Since I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, I asked Alex to send me a list of questions last night. Then, I put my thoughts together in a word document – that’s what’s posted below.

We got to most of these points on the call (certainly in a different order as you’ll eventually hear), but I thought it might be interesting to post this too. Note that many these questions aren’t exactly the ones Alex sent over, but it’s pretty close.

General discussion of Social Media. What is it?

Social media is a way for people to communicate and interact with one another online.

What’s hot in Social Media right now?

Twitter, of course. But to take that a step further, the localization of information is certainly a trending topic. For example, Yelp, FourSquare and GoWalla are all sites that offer specific geo-tagging, so that when you post to their networks, your feed is tagged with a location.

Why should we care where you are and what you’re doing?

By letting the world know your location, you can enable a new kind of search. These sites all allow you to take the online communication, well, offline, and connect it to real life. You can find your friends when they’re nearby. Yelp can show you restaurants near where you’ve checked in. Foursquare can show tips near you. You can show your friends all the places you checked in on your vacation, for example. Also, a rolodex of your friends organized by location can be super helpful.

Here are some other hot trends I identified that we didn’t talk about:

Ecommerce has gone social. For example, Lululemon, Gap, Dell… All these companies are using Twitter as their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. Honda and Smart Water both establish Facebook as their main URL now.

Org charts are starting to catch on – Social Media jobs are no longer for the interns. Companies are hiring managers and director-level positions in the field. Soon, I think it will be standard operating procedure to have a Director of Social Media.

We’re seeing the emergence of Social Media Managements Systems – ping.fm, CoTweet, etc. So it is easier to manage all your social sites from one URL. Of note, I’m seeing much less engagement in the content that gets published via these channels than if I just post to individual networks.

Who are the key influencers in social media?

Tough question, since the beautiful thing about social media is that the influencers are actually the users themselves. The more people the subscribe and engage through Twitter, the more powerful the tool becomes. So I guess you could say that key influencers are the technologies that people find useful – among the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and more.

Google has demonstrated that social media is clearly causing a riff in the world of organic ranking, by indexing Twitter posts and public Facebook status updates. This is generally referred to as social search. Importantly, Google recently announced that their #1 goal in search quality is to deliver the best locally relevant results, served globally. If Google, the biggest player in the Internet, is scrambling to integrate organic search into their results it must be of value.

If you want a good recommendation on social media people, check out Dan Zarella, The Social Media Scientist http://danzarrella.com. He studies social media behavior from a data-backed position and teach marketers scientifically grounded best practices. Personally, I think the guy’s genius and offers valuable insight into data and trends with which we can make decisions moving forward.

A couple others l like:

- Jeremiah Owyang, http://www.web-strategist.com/blog
- Robert Scoble – http://scobleizer.com
- Charlene Li – http://www.altimetergroup.com/blog

Do you have recommendations for designing a social media strategy for a small to medium size business?

Start by asking yourself these key questions:

- What are your business objectives?
- What are your goals with social media?
- How will you measure those goals?

Then, listen. You’ll really should listen to the social conversation in each community before marketing to the folks in there. Sign up for a Twitter account and learn how and why people are Tweeting. Sign up for Facebook Fan Page to see what people have to say about your brand.

What are some tactical things small business owners can do to get started?

#1 – Set clear goals for your social media marketing efforts, and determine out how you’ll measure success.
#2 – Purchase/secure your domain name across the Internet. This is extremely important for brand management! For example, Women’s Professional Soccer owns:

- http://womensprosoccer.com
- http://facebook.com/womensprosoccer
- http://twitter.com/womensprosoccer
- http://myspace.com/womensprosoccer
- http://delicious.com/womensprosoccer
- http://youtube.com/womensprosoccer

#3 – Listen – It’s important to learn how and why people communicate within different communities. Plus, social communities are savvy and will reject your efforts if you just try to push marketing messages on them.

Get your hands dirty. Pick a site, find a spare hour, sign up. Experience it as a user, and observe how others are using it and engaging with one another through it. Only in doing that can you come to understand not only how it works, but how it might relate to your company.

#4 – Develop a plan. For example: When I started at the Chicago Red Stars, Elly Deutch (who at the time was my intern but is now the Marketing / New Media manager – note the hiring trend) posted a huge dry erase board in our office. We made a chart – along the left hand side, we listed all the social sites we had. Twitter, FB, Yelp, YouTube… Then along the top we posted every event. Every event, we went through the checklist to make sure we had all the outlets covered. We also created a schedule for checking sites and answering questions. Like, Monday = Facebook, Tuesday = MySpace, Wednesday = YouTube, so forth and so on.

What do you think about the saturation effect. Is there too much out there and not enough differentiation?

Let’s take this one back to the birth of the World Wide Web. When you first heard of a “website” you probably thought you’d never have any use for it. Now of course some of the tiniest shops in the world have online presence. Then, you probably had the same reaction when you first discovered blogs, text messaging, or perhaps even email. Many of today’s social networking sites will certainly fail, but the medium is here to stay.

To tie this in – Back then, an Internet search would return search results that took you pages and pages to tab through to find the result you want. But as the internet evolved, and companies like Google figured out how to sort information more effectively, these troubles became less substantial. The same thing is happening with social media. As this medium evolves, we’re seeing more and more organization of content. Who know what this will look like in the future…

That’s pretty much it for my Part 1 notes – Hopefully the conversation it more colorful and insightful than my notes here. All the details for Parts 2 and 3 can be heard on the actual podcast. Apparently that’s due out sometime next week… I’ll let you know!