Social media is a concept that bubbled up through the masses starting, roughly speaking, around 2005. While social media sites like MySpace and Facebook began as ways for primarily young people to find each other and keep in touch, corporations soon saw how these sites could be used to improve customer relations. By 2009 social media begun to revolutionize the way corporations managed customer relations.

According to IT research and advisory company Gartner, by 2010 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using social media in some form as a way to improve customer relations. That’s the good news. Gartner also posits that over half of the companies using social media for this function will do it wrong and actually harm customer relations. Gartner suggests that companies focus their analysis on customer online buying in order to offer a direct calculation of return on investment in terms of sales and customer loyalty coming through social media sites.

Gartner says that there are four steps businesses need to pursue to successfully use social media to manage customer relations. The first step is clearly defining the purpose of the social media initiative. Second, they must be willing to give up some degree of control over the medium, because the public wants some degree of ownership of the relationship as a reward for participating.

Companies then have to reward those customers that participate socially. This may mean allowing them to vote on, or otherwise rate contributions and information on the site. Finally, companies must appoint someone in-house who has the skills to head up a social media customer relations initiative. Using social media for customer relations should never be an afterthought. In fact, it should probably have someone specifically devoted to it full time, with their own staff if necessary.

There is no question that social networking has changed the behavior of a critical mass of individuals as customers and prospects. According to Gartner, they can no longer be described adequately based on demographic information, which is the usual target for corporate customer relations efforts.

When it comes to your company, you’re not going to want to invest a lot of time or effort in such an undertaking without knowing if it will pay off in terms of driving quality traffic to your company’s website.

Non-linear Creations did a one-year study of the effects of five social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Stumbleupon) on their own home page. After a year, it was determined that social media sites drove about 18% of their site’s visitors from the referring sites in aggregate.

In the Case of Non-linear Creations, Linkedin and Facebook outperformed the other social media sites. That’s important, but it isn’t the whole story. What about conversion rates? Non-linear Creations measured conversion rates by whether visitors downloaded one of their white papers, subscribed to their blog or newsletter, or contacted them by phone or email. In this case – driving real prospects – Linkedin outperformed the other sites. Traffic from Linkedin was much more likely to convert than the average site visitor. Other social media sites actually underperformed the average.

There’s no guarantee that Linkedin will give your company the tangible results that Non-linear Creations got. It probably depends on what type of business you have. It is not quite understood what the less tangible benefits are of reaching customers online in a way that makes them feel as if the brand is listening and cares enough to interact in the way they desire. One of the things people dislike about customer support call centers is their anonymous feel. It keeps them from feeling a sense of relationship to the brand. So far no obvious downsides of using social media for customer service, so it would seem to be in any company’s best interests to use this form of outreach.

It certainly isn’t hard to create accounts on social media sites. The hard part is in actually interacting with customers on them, listening to them, and analyzing your online visitor numbers to see which social media sites give you the most return on investment in terms of online sales or some other metric. At that point you’ll have to determine how much effort to put into making under-performing social media referrers more effective.

Press releases have been a great way to bring traffic to a business, and of course advertise. It doesn’t matter whether they want to tell the public about a new product or just talk about the company-press releases have always been the way to do it. Over the years though, press releases have changed quite a bit, and the way they’re used has changed too.

In the past, a press release was used solely as a way to promote a product, company, service or event through the media. Perhaps you released a brand new product with some fantastic features that customers have been looking for. Your company writes up a press release, sends it out to all of the major news providers in your area and hopes that it sparks their interest.

One of the ways that a press release could get out, is when a journalist catches wind of it and believes it is good story material. They will write an article on it or feature it in their news program. Your company will suddenly get free advertisement, and the media got a new story. This was a win win situation for everyone involved.

The entire game has changed now. Press releases still exist, and they are still being used in the mainstream media, but now there is a new type of press release out there, which is an internet press release. Online press releases are sent to online press release sites instead of real life media outlets. Do these help bring traffic to your business? Yes of course they do.

The online press release is beneficial to all parties involved. Your goal is to create back links that will take customers directly to you. Press release sites are usually sitting high on the search engine lists, and you’ll find that posting with them will get you all the traffic you need.

If you want yet another benefit to an online press release, then just look to Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You can actually put back links into your website AND include keywords that are highly searched for in different search engines. Once you know how to take advantage of it, you’ll get all the hits you’ve wanted, and you’ll get a steady string of income, as well as reputation.

Basically when an individual chooses to search, and then see your press release, they are probably going to click on it. Through this you will get tons of traffic. If you remember to use your SEO, then the amount of traffic definitely will not be small.

It doesn’t matter what your product is. It could be a women’s clothing line, and when people search, they’ll use certain search terms. If your press release contains those terms, then they will be directed to your press release. If they find it to be interesting, then they will probably head over to your website to see what you have.

Keep in mind that when you use an online press release, there’s still a chance that you will get regular media attention. Even though you are going for SEO, you may still get noticed, after all, it’s very important for the media to find stories. Basically if you have a good SEO’d press release online, you might still receive the benefits of regular media coverage. You never know!

As with every other area of marketing, advertising and promotion, the realm of press releases has changed and evolved over the last decade. While traditional press releases are still powerful, online press releases are quickly growing in importance. You can increase your presence, improve your ranking in the search engines and send high quality traffic to your website.

Kevin Thomas is a 21 year entrepreneur network marketing coach and SuperGuide who is teaching people how to use low cost social media marketing for online business success learn more at The Carbon Copy Pro Times