I often get asked how "successful" my use of social media is, or how my business's marketing department can justify using social media for marketing.

To me, this seems a little like asking how successful our use of email is, or the telephone. I'd be surprised if we could directly attribute any revenue generation from our use of social media, our presence on twitter, a facebook page, blogs, LinkedIn, or some other network, as it doesn't work like that. What I do know is that I find social media incredibly useful. It's changed my life, in some respects. I've made friends, discovered useful resources, attended social and business events, promoted myself, my business, and my work, I've become involved in a huge conversation that I would otherwise have been excluded from.

"People buy from people." - especially true when it comes to anything with real value. Consumers can now use social media to research products and services, ask for recommendations, and support when something goes wrong. A business using social media can expose themselves to these searches, more easily get recommended by people, and much more easily provide support if something goes wrong. It can make people feel closer to your business, and (if it's done right) put a personality upon what used to be a faceless entity.

For example, I recently signed up for hosting with 34sp, from a recommendation on twitter, and chose them largely because they use twitter for support, and that's important to me. BT and Virgin Media also both use twitter to provide support to customers, to great effect, or at least it makes up for some of what they lack in the call centre realm. With social media, big businesses can appear smaller, while small businesses can appear larger. To some degree, it's easier to engineer your own online personality.

It's also far easier to deal with bad publicity if you're involved in social media. There are myriad examples of this, and I won't go into it right now, but if someone complains about you online, I think it's best to deal with it publicly and professionally - and the only way to to that is on the same platform as the complainant. It doesn't always solve the problem, but too many businesses don't realise how big social media is, and how one complaint can turn into a PR nightmare.

If you want to join twitter to post every two days about your new product line, tweet your website's url, and never use your real name, maybe social media isn't for you, yet.

If you're already a good communicator, enjoy networking, and want to improve your service rather than just make more sales, social media will be your thing.