In my last post, I introduced the concept of the 80/20 rule in the context of a typical business's customer base where 80% of a company's revenue comes from 20% of that customer base. In this post, I want to shift the context of the 80/20 rule to the general business universe - in terms of the number of businesses actually leveraging the power of social media to its fullest extent. By fullest extent I mean it's producing a meaningful, measurable impact on the business.

We've all heard about the 80/20 rule at some point in our lives. Officially, it's known as the Pareto principle, named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who observed in the early 1900's that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

I’ve had the good fortune of primarily working with larger clients with the budget and support staff that allow them to experiment with their marketing in a way that elevates long-term success. Recently, I ‘ve been spending a fair amount of time with smaller businesses and a picture is quickly emerging - and it’s one that causes me no small level of angst. The picture is of a sizable digital divide between the haves and have-nots, the enlightened and the uninformed, the successful practitioners and the frustrated masses.

In a previous post, I wrote about consistently giving away valuable information - good content - as part of your inbound marketing strategy. One of the primary benefits of providing this information is getting a little something in return - that something is typically a full name and email address of the person downloading your content. A key component in obtaining this information is a landing page.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the seven key benefits of social media. My intent in writing that post was to provide an overview of the benefits a business can derive from engaging in social media. I attended a local business networking meeting yesterday and as I listened to the various pitches from business owners about what they offer, it dawned on me that there was a critical gap in their pitches – a gap that I know extends to their social media engagement (for those who use social media – and not surprisingly, quite a few don't).  What’s the gap? It’s engagement without intent.

Information has value. Anyone with a website or a blog understands this, and if you pay copywriters or videographers or editors to create content for you, then you understand it in a very tangible way that words or videos have a specific value. Yet, bloggers give away a lot of “free” information – hard-earned knowledge - and they don't ask for anything in return (other than subscribers and some comment love!).

In this post on social media engagement (which, appropriately, engaged many readers who shared their own ideas on engagement) we discussed “conversation-starters” to begin to get your network talking. Using polls, asking questions on Facebook or posting requests for feedback at the end of blog posts, which all may generate a good volume of responses, may seem counter-intuitive to forging relationships, but it's actually just the start.