These days, companies of all sizes are diving into the world of social media, and Misty Lackie, CEO of Go Smart Solutions, LLC, is making it easier and more affordable than ever for small businesses and individuals to create and customize their social media “brand”. Misty started Twitbacks.com, a tool that helps create free and affordable custom Twitter backgrounds. Twitbacks.com is a huge success and has been featured in BusinessWeek, CNET and PCWorld.

Misty has been involved with social media for years, and learned early on how valuable social media can be. Currently she sees how powerful and valuable Facebook is for businesses and has created FaceItPages, a do-it-yourself system that allows businesses to create a professional Facebook business page without the designer price.

Here’s what Misty had to say about social media:

What is your job/company/profession/title?

I am the CEO of Go Smart Solutions, LLC. We develop self-serve online marketing solutions for businesses.

What was the first social media technology you used?

Back in the day, I would use discussion forums. I lived and learned in forums. I know there are some who may not consider this as a type of social media, but my belief is that forums were – and still are – an aspect of social media. The technology has been around for a while; it just wasn’t always in the form we’re familiar with today. Forums, social bookmarking, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all forms of social media technology, in my opinion.

What is your favorite social media tool?

I use a lot of them, and some more than others, but my favorite social media tool at this time is Facebook. I feel like with Facebook I can engage on a deeper level with not only our members, but my family and my friends as well.

How have you used social media for your business/company and how has it benefited?

We mainly use social media to connect with our customers. We actually end up doing a fair amount of support through social media. In fact, our customers will sometimes contact us directly through Twitter or Facebook rather than by email or phone. We see these platforms as another way to be able to provide quality support to our customers in a setting they are comfortable with. We also use many social media platforms to monitor our brands and what’s being said about them. We have received some new business through social media, but it has mostly benefited us by keeping us visible with our existing customer base.

How much time would you say you spend a day engaging social media?

I normally spend about an hour per day unless we are releasing something new or dropping a press release. In these cases, I will spend more time managing the messaging for the new release.

How do you incorporate it into your day so it’s not a time waster?

Great question! It is easy to get caught up and spend hours in the different social media platforms, which can cause you to become less productive in other business operations. I have been guilty of this. I set my schedule to check the major platforms in the morning and in late afternoon. I also have alerts set up that I monitor at least once per day. I don’t allow myself to spend more than 1/2 hour in the morning and 1/2 hour in the afternoon on these platforms (collectively). I have also trained myself not to get distracted throughout the day while working on other things. This same type of discipline can also apply to things like email or phone calls. As a small business owner, it is important to manage your time; if you are spending all of it in the social media platforms, on the phone or answering emails, you may be loosing valuable time growing your business. I have set times throughout the day where I will answer emails, take or return calls, monitor social media, and do anything else that may need my attention.

Is there a social media tool/technique that you think is underutilized that you would like people to know about?

I think Facebook business pages are underutilized. Our company uses various Facebook business pages and each send a decent amount of traffic to our sites. I also think many companies are not using social media as a support channel. Being able to support our customers through these channels has been invaluable to us.

How did you come up with TwitBacks?

TwitBacks started out as an office conversation. We were discussing how there was a new business trend with Twitter backgrounds and how designers were charging hundreds of dollars for these. I mentioned that I could create an app that would allow people to create their own Twitter backgrounds using templates and have the output save as an image. It was statement that I wasn’t really even serious about but Candis, our marketing communications rep, thought it was a great idea and hounded me for weeks about it. So I registered the domain and decided to make it a weekend side project. The very first release was very minimal, but it went totally viral. CNET and some other big sources picked us up. From there we built onto it and have just been adding more features over time.

Do you have any new services coming out?

Our latest service is FaceItPages. It is a DIY system that allows businesses to create a professional Facebook business page with your branding, links, etc.  Following are a few pages that have been created through the service.

FaceItPages.com

Estudiar Hoteleria

Shoes Online

Lauren Mcmullen – Your Social Media Marketing

Culinary Arts Academy Switzerland

We are also working on a video advertising platform, VidShout, which will allow business to create video ads (commercials) with landing pages and have those video ads published online to video portals, shopping comparison sites, directories, etc.

Where can people find you online and via social media?

http://www.gosmart4u.com

http://twitter.com/gosmart4u

http://www.facebook.com/gosmart

http://www.linkedin.com/in/gosmartsolutions

Facebook recently introduced a new feature that automatically suggests pages for new users to “Like.” This feature is placed second in the Facebook signup process, just behind the finding friends page. They’ve also added a section on the top right of your Home page where they sometimes recommend pages for you to “Like.” So how can you take advantage of these new features to help promote your page?

Facebook says the pages chosen to suggest will be based on the pages that people in the same demographic commonly “Like”, and how much the pages are updated and engage with friends.

So, if you’ve been waiting for yet another reason to frequently update your page with good content and reach out to your friends, here it is!

Before you start updating, here are few rules to keep in mind:

1. Update 1 to 3 times per day, even on weekends and holidays!

2. Update at different times of the day, and then monitor which times are most successful.

3. Ask friends to click “Like” when posting. It’s much easier to click “Like” than to actually comment.

4. Make updates conversational and casual.

5. Add in photos and videos when appropriate.

6. Respond quickly to questions and comments, within 24 hours if possible.

Now go start updating and build up your friend base! Have any more tips? Share with us here!

The example was sports stories; stats are e-mailed to Narrative Science where a computer pops out an article in just a few minutes. The Big Ten Network is using the service as is Fox Cable for its baseball and softball coverage on its website.

As if journalists weren’t concerned enough about their jobs, now they have to worry they will be replaced by computers. “There’s no human author and no human editing,” Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel is quoted as saying.

And if you don’t have human authors and editors, you don’t have paychecks to hand out every two weeks. Sure, it’s a significant financial savings, but at what cost? Articles won’t have the context and perspective a human can bring. They won’t have the historical information and analytical eye that trained and experienced journalists provide. It’s a good bet the writing won’t be as polished and will probably be filled with clichés and unimaginative writing.

To bring this a little closer to home, from a public relations perspective, it’s a little tough to suggest a story idea or source to a computer.

Using a computer to generate short online stats-driven stories for the website and saving the meatier pieces for the journalists would certainly be a slightly better option, yet it still takes away jobs from interns and young reporters who often cut their teeth on these sorts of assignments.

Granted, widespread use of technology like Narrative Science may be many years in the future, but whether it’s five or 50, it’s unfortunate something like this would even be considered. It’s clear more and more people assume the skills of reporting, writing and interviewing are something anyone – even a computer – can do.

But if you somehow missed every one of those reports, let me fill you in. Chatroulette is a site developed by a Russian teenager still living at home with Mom and Dad that randomly pairs you for a video chat with people across the world. If the person who comes up isn’t of interest, you click “next,” which has created the term “nexting.” Fun, right?

Well, it pretty quickly went downhill, turning into a site that is “71% male, 15% female and 14% pervert.” Um, with the demographic being highly male, just use your imagination as to what you might see a lot of . Southpark also did a great episode (warning: adult content) making fun of Chatroulette.

But on to its marketing potential: is there any? Eh…

Pretty much not, unless you’re marketing to perverts, but I thought I’d show you a few pretty creative ways some different folks are using it anyway.

1) Improv Piano Guy

This is so funny! A guy did a video of himself on Chatroulette playing the piano and improvisationally singing a song about however who ended up with on the video chat. Even better, the musician Ben Folds did something similar live during a concert. Pretty fun!

2) The Travelocity Gnome

If you’re Chatrouletting, you just might come across the Travelocity gnome! He sits there, doing nothing obscene, with a little sign encouraging you to stop video chatting and start vacationing!

Courtesy of ChatrouletteVideos.com

3) What’s Your Reaction?

Lots of people get on Chatroulette dressed up in a costume or doing a silly dance, etc. just to get people’s reactions. Might make for a funny marketing video if you can cut through all the unsavoriness.

4) Come Find Me!

We also heard tell of a comedian putting out the word on social media that he was headed over to Chatroulette and to come find him. We think that’s a pretty fun idea too, as it creates a bit of  a “hunt” to see if you can find him.

In Closing

Overall, I think that Chatroulette is best left to the 14% mentioned above, but if you feel compelled to do something really creative, I’d stick to coming up with a silly idea, hopping onto Chatroulette and getting people’s reactions. Get it on video and use a clean version of it later on your own site or YouTube channel.

Here are a few more good posts and websites on Chatroulette:

Chatroulette Being Used for Marketing? Say It Ain’t So!

4 Fun and Crazy Chatroulette Videos

ChatrouletteVideos.com

Got any ideas for marketing with Chatroulette? Share them!