This week begins bringing new changes to Business Computing Weekly. First I am introducing a new format in addition to a shorter podcast to around 20 to 30 minutes per week. New episodes will be uploaded Monday mornings. The other big change is we will be doing the show strictly as an podcast.

We will focus primarily on sales, marketing and productivity technologies and hardware that can help your business grow. We will be recruiting guests to share their best practices on growing their businesses with technology as well.

5: Reasons A Small Business Might Want to avoid Social Media Marketing

A story in CNN today is my inspiration for the top today. The title is E-mail is crushing Facebook and Twitter for selling stuff online. The link is below.

# 5 Social Media is more about Thought Leadership. It’s about community, it’s about branding, it’s about content curation. It’s not another form of yellow pages it’s not advertising, and not always a good fit for all businesses. Is it good for a restaurant maybe a plumber not so much.

# 4 Social Media although might be little to any cost to get started it requires a huge commitment of time, and for many of us time = money. Time better spent with more traditional approaches such as networking and referrals.

# 3 The results even of an effective social Media presence might not bring revenue, or enough revenue to to justify the investment. Social Media is a must for a purely online enterprise, and maybe less so to use my prior example of a plumber. Results might be hard to quantify.

# 2 You have to earn the right to market via Social Media. Even if you are listening to the experts, and you have a business that you can build and participate in community it us going to take time, and effort to earn the right to market occasionally to your community. Do you have the time, staff and the ability to curate content, respond to multiple Social Media accounts, build and cultivate your community?

#1 A recent report from Custora based on a 4 year study following 72 million retail shoppers show that customers who respond to E-mail marketing quadrupled to 7% of sales. These cusotmers are 50% more valuable than average, FaceBook and Twitter sales barely register at all.

The best ways to get customers today is to concentrate on Organic Search,Google Adwords and Email campaigns. This is not to discount the value of social media, but for selling "stuff", social isn't ready for prim e time yet.