One of the many reasons things have been quiet around here lately is that my longtime friend and sometime collaborator Robin Fray Carey have been sorting out exactly how we might add value (and perhaps make a couple of bucks) in the social media consulting marketplace.

There is no shortage of talent out there but I like to think Robin and I come to the task with some unique qualifications. Over the past 20 years, separately and together, we have sold somewhere between $50 million and $100 million in advertising and produced and written what is now fashionably called “paid content” around dozens of topics for–at different times–Fortune, Forbes and Business Week. We have worked directly with at least a quarter of the Fortune 500 companies, helping them tell their stories and achieve their marketing goals. I also had a long career in corporate communications.

I started blogging three or four years and one of my early projects was building a very active and influential (according to Technorati) community called Sequenza21 around composers and musicians involved in contemporary classical music. This was before the words “online social community” were commonly heard and the site won an ASCAP award as best internet music site in 2005. I started writing about social media here a couple of years ago and, together, Robin and I launched Social Media Today at the beginning of this year. Her SMT webinars have been very successful. We have in the pipeline communities involving clean tech, SMEs, and CMOs.

In short, we understand the needs of companies and know how they traditionally communicate. We understand what makes online communities succeed or fail and have decided to offer our services as a new business called SMTodaymedia.

we have developed some guidelines that will give you a flavor of our approach:

The Five Principles of Successful BtoB Social Communities

• Design and build your community to achieve a specific business purpose. Want to increase sales in a specific category or market? Generate leads? Build reputation with influential constituencies? What we call “purpose-built.” If you’re doing it just because everyone else is and hoping for the best, that’s not a good reason.
• Make it exclusive. Decide in advance who you want to become community members, design the content of the community around their interests, and invite them to participate. Other people may be able to read material on your community web site but only registered members should be able to interact with other members.
• Make your community only as large as necessary to achieve your business goals. Research indicates that smaller, tightly focused communities produce more active, engaged and loyal participants. Why try to become a Facebook when there are only a few hundred or thousand people that you really need to reach?
• Leverage existing resources. Identify and incentivize internal “evangelists” to interact honestly and openly in community discussions. Re-purpose appropriate internal content. Build a customized network of external bloggers. You don’t have to start from scratch.
• Keep it real. Online social communities depend for success on trust and transparency. No overt selling. No obvious agenda. No talking when you should be listening. No promises you can’t keep. Nothing kills an social community faster than members who feel they’re being hustled.

As I mentioned, our new business is called SMTodaymedia. Drop by our modest web site. If you’re interested in talking to us or getting more information, contact Robin.