It seems like social media is everywhere these days. But the2010 Business Monitor United States report — commissioned by UPS — shows that when it comes to small- and medium-sized businesses, social media is still a missed opportunity. A mere 24% of respondents said they’ve received sales leads from social media, with just 1% citing it as a factor for business growth.

The data would appear to indicate that in spite of all the positive press that social media gets, and all the use cases we’ve seen emerge over the past few years, small business owners are taking social media for granted. When done right, social media can be a valuable source for customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction. Here a few reasons to help drive the value home.

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Information is There for the Taking

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Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to the web. Ignoring, avoiding or just not looking at what people are sharing online about your small business or your competitors is just plain lazy.

Now more than ever people turn to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Yelp and a slew of other sites to share information and make it publicly available. As such, there’s a wealth of information that existing customers, future fans and online detractors are putting into the public domain, and there’s a plethora of tools to make it easy for you to follow along.

The customer that tweets about a poor experience, the guy that leaves a tip about a venue on Foursquare, or the woman that tweets about being overwhelmed by an event she’s planning, are all real humans sharing real bits of information that if ignored could translate into missed opportunities.

In the case of the person with the poor experience, if it’s your business being discussed, offer to step in and fix the problem. If it’s a competitor, offer to let the person try a comparable product free of charge. When it comes to Foursquare, acknowledge great Foursquare tips, even if they’re not for your own business. If you can help the woman who’s overwhelmed, do it, even if it is just by responding, “is there any way I can help?”

As a small businesses owner, it’s your responsibility to use these bits of public information to build relationships, improve customer service and enhance your products.

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Simple Works

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Finding the right way to use social media can be daunting, especially when there are so many examples of big brands pushing the limits of creativity and possibility when it comes to their Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare initiatives. Often times the big guys forget that it’s the simplest of gestures that can have the greatest impact. But simple works.

On the simple side things, just take the time to acknowledge customers that mention you. Did someone tweet about dining at your restaurant? Did they checkin at your venue? Did they share a story about your small business on Facebook? These actions that take place in the public domain are all opportunities to connect with a current or potential customer and make them feel special.

Responding is easy — a simple “thanks for stopping by,” or “how can we make your next visit better?” tweet can go a long way and even make someone’s day. Yet, it’s something most companies take for granted. People like to be recognized, but often times they’re never presented with an opportunity to associate restaurants, stores and other venues with the people behind him. You can create that opportunity by recognizing their patronage, which in turn should help ensure that they return for a future visit.

Another simple thing you can do is post signage — on your website and in your store — to indicate that you’re social media-friendly. The Express retail chain has their chief marketing officer’s Twitter handle printed on all their bags, which works to reinforce that the company cares about person-to-person connections. Take that idea and apply it to your own business. For that extra touch, make stickers, punch cards or window decals that showcase your small business’s online personality and reinforce that you’re interested in conversations with your customers.

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Your Size Works in Your Favor

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Starbucks is the perfect example of an early adopter brand that gets social media right, and yet their size prohibits them from engaging with every customer that walks in the door.

As a small business, your size is your friend in social media channels. Use your small size as an advantage and respond to each and every person that mentions you. Since you’re working with a smaller customer base, you can also build customer Twitter Lists to separate different categories of customers into groups, which should help you offer more personalized customer service — something the big businesses don’t have the time or resources to support.

Here’s an easy example: Who are your most frequent customers? Make a Twitter List called “Regulars,” and add your regulars on Twitter to it.

In doing so, you’re associating patronage with prestige. Your efforts could even inspire semi-regular customers to frequent your business more often just so they too can get added to the list. This tactic might also serve as a catalyst for one regular to connect with another, though you could also facilitate customer-to-customer connections with introductory tweets. So if a customer tweets for a recommendation, you could respond with something simple as, “@customer1 good question, I like the cheesecake but @customer2 really loves the custard.”

These types of personal exchanges highlight the advantages afforded to small businesses using social media.

Lauren Vargas is a Community Manager at Radian6, the social media monitoring and engagement platform. She blogs at Communicators Anonymous and is @VargasL on Twitter.

The debate over who owns the customer still looms in the shadows of company hallways and conference rooms. There is no one right answer because every department, team and employee owns the customer and takes part in shaping a positive customer experience.

Customer service is no longer an area to triage customer complaints. It’s about anticipating customer needs at the right time and place. Organizations must relearn how to interact with their community, shed some of the heavily automated barriers, and get back to the basics of customer service.

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1. Apply Your Current Service Strategy to Social Media

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To get where you’re going, sometimes it’s helpful to learn more about out where you’ve been.

Most likely, your company has a customer service and response strategy in place to handle issues through e-mail, chat and phone. Avoid reinventing the wheel by creating new response strategies and processes. Take time to review how customer inquiries and outreach are currently being handled. What are the customer service goals? Do any current processes need to be updated? Can current strategies be adopted for social media implementation?

Answer these questions, and you are not only improving your company’s customer service, but making it possible for any person in your organization to take on this task.

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2. Put Human Relationships Back Into Your Service

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The human element has been taken out of the customer service experience in many companies and replaced with automated messages and prompts. By the time a human operator is reached, their responses are often scripted and they do not have the authority or knowledge to solve complex issues. As elementary as it may sound, organizations need to empower their workforce to go beyond canned responses and develop a more relationship-building approach to customer service, as opposed to one-off interactions.

Adding social back into the customer service mix does not involve throwing out processes already in place, but improving upon them. Begin by establishing customer engagement policies. Social media policies and guidelines can provide the education and structure for how to engage online, and empower your workforce to operate within accepted and encouraged boundaries with the freedom to be themselves.

Next, coordinate a system of gathering information, categorizing, segmenting and analyzing customer engagement that is transparent within your company. Finally, establish workflows to distribute customer engagement responsibilities throughout the organization to ensure the right person is interacting with the right customer at the right time.

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3. Establish a Knowledge Base

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The customer service department is often separated from the rest of the company, training and operating in a “silo.” Bring customer service agents out from the shadows and provide them with the training they need to engage customers on their turf within the social web.

Establish a company wiki where all departments can contribute social media knowledge and lessons learned. Train agents beyond their role. Develop subject matter experts who can handle taking conversations to the next level and solve issues in real-time on the channel of the customer’s choice.

In turn, allow your customer service agents to be the teachers and share best practices from the trenches of phone, e-mail and chat support. What are the frequently asked questions? How do agents currently deal with sticky customer issues? What actionable insights can be gleaned from the types of issues and responses from inbound calls, e-mail and chat? Your customer service agents can illuminate new paths and caution you in areas they have already explored.

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4. Set Expectations

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One of the goals and challenges of providing customer service through social media channels is to mine data for actionable insights that will enable highly personal and proactive service. Determine the channels where thebulk of your customer conversation is occurring. Avoid the trap of participating in all channels to serve all customers, which may only overextend your team. Pinpoint the channels your organization can afford to place resources and invest in community participation. Then, analyze these areas for broader trends. Online channel behavior is not indicative of your total customer base, but tying this data back to traditional CRM analysis can yield valuable insights for your response strategy.

Further, just like your customer service department has set hours of business, so should your service in social channels. Conversations are 24/7, and issues may arise in off hours, but it is essential to set expectations of service up front. Your workforce may choose to handle issues off the clock within the framework of your organization’s social media guidelines, but you should clearly outline this capacity in your profile or bio.

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5. Perform Quality Assurance

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Online interaction offers a glimpse into what your customers think about your company, workforce, products and/or services. Embrace this culture of feedback even though the majority of conversations may not occur in your own managed communities.

Improve your online engagement by asking the community about your performance. Similar to a typical call center experience, after an agent or employee has an exchange on Twitter or another social channel, send the person a survey about their recent online customer service exchange. Use this feedback to assist in overall response strategies and evaluation of participation in social channels.

Maintain patience and consistency by first establishing measurable goals and objectives of how your organization will engage in the social space. Align these metrics with overall business goals. Talk to the marketing, communication and sales departments to establish metrics that will measure your collective efforts and give a holistic view of the customer’s online behavior.

Benchmark your progress. Take time to reevaluate processes, take action on feedback and don’t give up because of some rocky roads. There were rough times when e-mail and chat were implemented. Social media interaction will have growing pains just like any other business channel, but you have to make the investment.

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Conclusion

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Each company must forge its own path to integrating social into the customer service mix. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. That is how we got to this heavily automated customer service triage position in the first place.

The companies that are embracing social media as a service solution are succeeding because they realize their employees are the best company evangelists and operators of front-line engagement. Those organizations that treat their employees as humans are also those who are treating their customers as humans, and not a faceless CRM number.