Among the common mistakes brands and companies make when first launching themselves into social media is to focus on the tools (“which apps and sites should I be on”) rather than first figuring out what it is that they want to achieve in terms of business objectives, says Andrea Elliott, National Instruments (News - Alert) corporate content manager. Elliott was part of the "best practices for leveraging customer conversations for brand equity" panel at ITExpo West. You need to start with objectives first, then move to strategy, and only finally choose the technologies and tools to achieve those goals, she says.

But even once that is done, tools operate in different ways. “Twitter (News - Alert) is radio while Facebook is snail mail,” says Ricardo Guerro, Social Media Dynamo owner. Or, to put it another way, Twitter is a cocktail party while Facebook (News - Alert) is a pub, he says. Twitter is used to send messages to people an organization might not know, while Facebook is primarily for users who have, want to have, or will have, some tangible connection to a firm. Also, as obsessed as marketers are with measuring success, which often means quantitative measures such as traffic, followers, fans and so forth, raw numbers should not necessarily be the objective, but rather the ability to reach influential users who have an impact on others in any marketplace.

Nor are social media tools only for marketing, says Mark Myers, Vivisimo senior director. Vivisimo, in fact, often opens a trouble ticket when the firm receives a tweet about some customer service issue, illustrating the way social media actually can be used not just for branding and research, but for customer service operations, in both consumer-focused and business-to-business settings.

Vivisimo and Radish Systems both have developed software useful for operations, in fact. Vivisimo collects and integrates social media feeds into enterprise customer relationship management systems, for example. Radish Systems puts visual, graphic and text information onto a mobile device that also then integrates voice communications.

Watch the Radish video here.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place NOW, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.