Suppose you met an experienced marketing consultant who promised to give you one-hour assignments five days a week for three months to teach you a brand-new marketing channel.

And the result was a detailed marketing plan for that channel.

Suppose the marketing channel was social media? And suppose he only charged you $30?

Would you accept his offer? I thought you might.

The consultant is Dave Evans, a communications expert who now focuses on using social media to market goods and services. His 400-page book is Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day. Here’s a comprehensive review of some of the main tips from this excellent book.

This book could be used as the textbook for a college course on social media marketing. If you think of it and use it that way, you should be an expert social media marketer by the time you “graduate.”

If you have a traditional advertising or marketing background, you will love this book. You don’t have to abandon your other marketing channels!

“The social web is not an advertising platform per se, but is rather an adjunct to what you’re doing elsewhere,” Evans says. “Use TV, radio, direct mail, sports, and event marketing to seed the conversations, to set the expectations and to create the beginnings of a demand. Then tap social media and the conversations generated by direct experience with your brand, product or service to reinforce your messages based on the genuine interest and comments of others.”

Part 1: The Foundation of Social Media

The book is divided into four parts. In the first part of the book, Evans talks about traditional “interruptive” advertising. The advertiser “pushes” product information out to a mass audience and hopes people notice it. Ads have to interrupt you in order to get your attention.

But on the social web, spam filters and popup blockers show that consumers are getting tired of interruptive ads. They still want product information, but only when they need it.

Evans talks about the “purchase funnel,” where consumers first become aware of a product/service, then they consider buying it and then they buy it. For the first time in advertising history, people who bought a product/service can give their opinion of it to a total stranger on the other side of the planet who is considering buying it!

In other words, that post-purchase opinion feeds back on the consideration phase that other consumers are in. So before I even buy a product, I can see what people all over the world think about it.

Part 2: Prepare for Social Marketing

Evans then introduces marketers who know nothing about social media to all of the basic tools such as blogs, wikis, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Delicious, RSS, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. You must use each tool and answer several questions about it. Evans even gives you worksheets in an appendix for each assignment.

He gives more detail about the effect of social feedback on the purchase funnel. He introduces BlogSearch, BlogPulse, Planet Feedback and other metrics you can use to measure the online conversations about your product/service. He talks about creating touchpoint maps. He tells you to find customers who can be evangelists for your product or service.

And you start rethinking how you can use social media to promote your product/service. You cannot control your message and reputation in social media, but you can influence it. That’s your primary job.

“Your customers are already talking about you,” says Evans. “Marketers, ignore your invitation to participate in the conversation at your own peril. This is your chance to be part of it and to influence the outcome through your participation.”

Part 3: Social Media Channels

This is the “meatiest” part of the book. Evans describes in detail:

• Social platforms such as wikis, Facebook, MySpace and other online communities
• Social content such as blogs, microblogs, photos, podcasts and videos
• Social interactions such as email, SMS/texting, status updates and event notices

And he encourages you to experiment with all of these tools, as he has throughout the book. He even encourages you to subscribe to his FriendFeed stream, which might not be a bad idea if you want to stay in touch with your social media marketing mentor.

Part 4: Complete Your Plan

Evans talks more about metrics in this part. He describes Blogsearch, BlogPulse, Cymfony, Techrigy, DIYDashboard and Google Alerts. You can even track your competitors and suppliers.

He talks about audience, influence, engagement, loyalty, action, content metrics, relevance metrics, impact metrics and ROI. It may be difficult to link a conversation about your company in the blogosphere with a visit to your website, but you can make an educated guess.

The final chapter encourages you to define your opportunity, select your channels, select your metrics and write and present your plan to corporate executives.

Yes, this book was written for Fortune 500 companies who have a sales and marketing department, an IT department and maybe even a chief marketing officer (CMO).

But a sole proprietor may still benefit from this book, if he or she can find the time to spend three months in the process! Here’s what Evans says about that: “The social web is all about relationships, and relationships take time—and information—to build.”

He scatters social media resources throughout the book. Fortunately, he includes a list of all the social media sites he mentions in the book in an appendix. And he summarizes the main points at the end of each chapter.

“The Internet and the communities that ride on it [have] become the ‘first place’ for a whole lot of people,” he says. “As a marketer, you really need to be there. The social web, used correctly, is all about what your community of supporters can do to help you build your business.”

Social Media Examiner gives this book a 5-star rating.

Related article on Social Media Examiner: 3 New Social Media Studies Worth Reading

Have you read this book? Do employ some of these tactics? I welcome your comments below!

But many brand and marketing managers responsible for social media don’t quite understand what social media monitoring is and why it’s important. Here’s a quick primer:

Social Media Monitoring Is Listening

Listening to online conversations is technically done without ears. Using search engine technology, social media monitoring tools scan the Internet looking for documents that contain keywords you select. They return those results in some sort of order that allows you to see where people have mentioned your brand, company, product or whatever you specified.

Seeing these results reveal which websites or blogs you should visit to either see what people are saying about you or actually participate in those conversations. Without monitoring, the conversations are happening without your knowledge.

Social Media Monitoring Can Be Free

The easiest way to start monitoring social media is to sign up for some free tools and services. Google Alerts allows you to search for a word or phrase just as you would in a regular search, and then notifies you when something new pops up on the web with that search term. You can subscribe to email updates of the new search results or add them to your RSS subscriptions. (If you don’t know what RSS is, watch “RSS in Plain English,” a video from CommonCraft.)

You can also search for your company or product name on Twitter to see real-time conversations that include mentions or discussions of your brand. Add Technorati to the list and your monitoring will cover the majority of blogs as well.

Paid Social Media Monitoring Solutions Are Often Worth the Investment

The one drawback to the free monitoring solutions is that manual work will be required to quantify the results for your executives or report your findings. Paid social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Techrigy pull all those conversations together into an organized, web-based dashboard and allow you to pull charts and graphs that explain the information with very little work on your part.

One big benefit to many (but not all) of the paid solutions is their ability to analyze sentiment and tone of the conversations through fancy computer algorithms using natural language processing. What this means is that you can log in to your service, see that there were 250 conversations mentioning your brand this week, and of those, 83 percent were positive, 10 percent were negative and the other 7 percent were neutral.

Paid monitoring solutions offer dashboard experiences like this one from Radian6 which makes monitoring your brand easier

Monitoring Is Only the First Step

Finding and cataloging the online conversations about your company is just the tip of the iceberg in social media monitoring. Once you know where conversations are taking place and what is being said about your company, you can then participate in the conversation. This is critically important for companies because today’s web-savvy consumer requires direct access to the people behind the products and services they buy or shop for.

Let’s say you find a customer upset about the service she received at your place of business earlier today. Letting the individual mouth off to her friends who have a natural predisposition to either agree or jump on the bandwagon of hate only guarantees your company will be thought of negatively by those involved in the conversation. However, social media case studies show time and time again that entering into similar conversations with a simple, “I’m sorry you had a bad experience. What can I do to help?” shows the disgruntled fan—and her bandwagon-jumping friends—that you’re truly interested in improving the situation. The customer response is almost always something like, “Wow. I didn’t know you were listening. Thanks for offering.”

Smart Monitoring Can Build Your Business

Please don’t think that social media monitoring is limited to mitigating online detractors. By analyzing the conversations around not just your company, but also your industry or even competitors, you can gain a significant market advantage and actually drive business.

Let’s say you’re monitoring mentions of your nearest competitor and uncover a trend that people are complaining that their product (say, a coffeepot) is great but not durable. You then change your advertising campaign to trumpet the fact your coffeepot lasts three times longer than the competitor’s.

For another example, suppose you have a national product that has inconsistent sales patterns from region to region. Your social media monitoring shows you what people in the Pacific Northwest say are the best and worst qualities of your product, but the answers are different in the South. This consumer intelligence helps you better market your product based on geographic and cultural specifics which can be the difference in customers choosing you or your competition.

Last but not least, sophisticated monitoring can even reveal individual customers who are at the point of making a purchase decision, enabling you to reach out and help them make a connection to your product at the absolute perfect time.

What Are You Waiting For?

Now that you have an idea of what social media monitoring is and what it can do for you, dive in. Start a Google Alert for your company or product. Add one for some general industry terms your customers might use when discussing your category. Add one for each of your competitors. As you feel comfortable, add Twitter and Technorati searches, then branch out and start exploring other social media monitoring tools. At the very least, you’ll have a better idea of what people are saying about you.

What social media monitoring tools are you using? What are your thoughts?  Please leave a comment below.