Kudos to Anna for getting her act together and finally checking out the 2010 Social Media Summit. It had been on my to-do list too. But with the series finale of Lost, the Boston Celtics charging through the playoffs and my countless charitable endeavors, I just couldn’t find the time.

Until last night, that is. I sat myself down and watched “5 Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Success,” by Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer. (Gotta love a guy who’s landed both Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark as clients.)

Without further ado, here are five things I learned.

Lesson One: What can social media marketing do for your company? Jason broke it down into five categories:

1. Aids in branding and awareness
2. Builds a “community of passionate people who love [your] brand”
3. Provides a customer service opportunity (e.g. identifying aggrieved customers via Twitter tweets)
4. Allows you to gather input from consumers and even collaborate with them in product development
5. Offers the opportunity to sell your product or service directly to consumers

Lesson Two: Before you try to engage in social media marketing, make sure you understand the above capabilities. The same goes for goal-setting — if you don’t understand what social media marketing can do for you, it’s impossible to set meaningful goals.

Lesson Three: Speaking of goals, be sure to keep them “clear and singular.”

• Good goal statement: “We’re going to use social media marketing to increase website traffic.”
• Bad goal statement: “We’re going to use social media marketing to increase website traffic and drive website sales.” (These are two separate goals, and you should treat them as such.)

Lesson Four: Jason sees “objectives” as what supports your overarching goals. And your objectives for social media marketing should be measurable, which means identifying a target audience, level of attainment and timeframe.

An example of a measurable objective for a company looking to build a community of advocates: “We want to achieve 100,000 Facebook fans [i.e. hand-raisers] by December 1st.”

Lesson Five: The next step is to devise a strategy that will allow you to accomplish each objective. Going back to the Facebook example, your strategy might involve:

• Offering an incentive (e.g. T-shirt) for Facebook users to “like you”
• Advertising on Facebook and elsewhere to get the word out about your promotion
• Let your existing network know about the promotion and your objective (e.g. via email lists)
• Consistently engage users on Facebook (e.g. through comments, “questions of the week”)

Finally, developing and fulfilling a list of to-do items allows you to “achieve the strategies that ultimately meet the objectives that ultimately accomplish the goal.”

You got all that? If not, maybe you should sign up for the Social Media Summit and dig into the archived presentations. It’s money well-spent.

Social media is supposed to be red-hot, right? Not so fast. According to a pair of recent articles, two of the giants of social media may have trouble ahead.

Although Anna tweets (as do dozens of other people I like or admire), I’ve never been a big fan of Twitter. In certain cases, it can be quite effective. The post-election Iranian protests are perhaps the most potent example, and some businesses have also put it to good use.

But personally, I just can’t get into Twitter. There are enough distractions in my life – I don’t need a constant stream of tweets to make things even worse.

Over on Slate.com’s The Big Money, I have an ally in Mark Gimein. He posits that Twitter is “in danger of collapsing under its own weight.” Why?

“The volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users’ time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging.”

Gimein goes on to cite his personal experience. Each of his followers on Twitter typically follows 200 feeds; one ambitious soul follows over 3,000. How can marketers expect to break through all that noise, a situation that will only worsen in the years ahead? You got me.

Meanwhile, Virginia Heffernan on nytimes.com notes that “while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing – some of them ostentatiously.”

Heffernan identifies a number of reasons for the departures. Some users are disgusted with Facebook’s growing commercialization. Others are unnerved by the privacy concerns. Still others have decided to stop wasting so much time posting and checking status updates.

Is Facebook about to face a mass exodus? I’d hate to think so. However, Heffernan’s article is enough to make you wonder whether Facebook is late 1990s-era Whitney Houston – on top, but about to enter a long, slow decline into irrelevance.

Do you think Twitter and Facebook have become a bore? Have other forms of social media sparked your interest? Let us know.

These days we’re all about SoMe here at The Hired Pens. No, not as in “Girlfriend, you have got to let me borrow your fuchsia goulashes — they are SO ME!” SoMe as in “the new, in-the-know way to abbreviate ‘Social Media.’”

And as I learned at the recent New Marketing Summit, if you’re not doing it, you will be soon. I also learned that soon we’ll be able to buy cell phones that double as lie detectors. But that’s for another blog entry.

So are we just jumping on the blogwagon here? Yes and no. We’ve actually wanted to start a blog for a long time but haven’t because we were afraid that …

Fear #1: This fast-paced medium will allow typos to slip through and dissscredit us.
We just need to get over this one. There will be typos (however rare) because unlike the work we do for our clients, blog entries will not be professionally proofread. But if you catch one, let us know and we’ll give you a prize or proofreading job — your call.

Fear #2: We’ll have nothing to say.
Okay, maybe some days we’ll want to tell you about how psyched we are that the Diesel Café finally updated its menu (try the new house salad). But most of the time, you’ll find timely, interesting content about copywriting, marketing and what it’s like to own your own business.

Fear #3: We’ll have too much to say and never get any work done.
Well, there are worse ways to waste time than writing relevant, entertaining blog entries.

So, I guess what we’re trying to say is, we’re over it, baby. Welcome to our blog!