Last week, we showed love for the 52nd Grammys’ massive We’re All Fans social media campaign. Quick refresher: In addition to loading up Grammys.com with social content, the Recording Academy’s marketers created wereallfans.com, an elegant promotional site featuring fluid displays of user-generated content.

Now that the ceremony is over and the numbers have come in, it looks like the push paid off in spades, proving that investing in social media marketing brings tangible returns.

On average, 25.8 million viewers tuned into Sunday night’s ceremony, making for the ceremony’s largest audience in six years. That’s a 35% increase over last year’s ceremony, which was promoted only minimally on social sites.

The built-in buzz around Best-Album-winning Taylor Swift and Jacko-tributing Lady Gaga no doubt helped, not to mention everhot Beyoncé Knowles, who won became the biggest-winning female artist ever by taking home six awards. But we think the real buzz was online.

Mashable ran the numbers for the “We’re All Fans” campaign and found staggering results.

125,760 Facebook Fans
48,776 Twitter Followers
1,505,838 combined views on YouTube for the “We’re All Fans” campaign videos.
2,050,699 combined views on Grammy.com for the “We’re All Fans” campaign videos.
The Grammys were a trending topic on Twitter for more than four days.

Numbers = truthy.

Additionally, the awards ceremony itself reflected the ways in which social media has become an integral part of pop culture and everyday life. Nowhere was this seen more strikingly than in Imogen Heap’s mind-boggling Twitter dress. It was a dress. That tweeted. Crazy.

And there was also Stephen Colbert using an iPad to announce the Song of the Year nominees. Though not overtly social-media-related (and no doubt the result of an Apple product placement deal), the fact that Colbert whipped out an Internet-buzzy device on a mainstream-TV awards show — and got laughs — is pretty significant.

And lastly, on an unfortunate note, the Washington Post blog saw fit to point out how Swift’s cringeworthily off-key performance in her duet with Stevie Nicks echoed across the Twittersphere.

If art imitates life, social media reports it.

Imogen image courtesy Moritz Waldermeyer.

Just about every business owner in the universe right now knows that using social media to attract and communicate with customers is essential. For proof, see this and this.

But for businesses that have yet to establish an active presence on social media (and there are still many), coming up with worthwhile content for all those blog plosts, tweets, status updates, videos, podcasts and so forth amounts to a pretty daunting task.

Quality and quantity are key in an effective social media strategy. The messages must be useful and engaging, or people won’t make the jump from following you online to becoming paying customers. The messages must be frequent and consistent, or people won’t keep coming back.

I won’t lie. It’s a lot of work.

So how do you inject value into that stream of content gushing from your keyboard?

The mistake so many businesses make is to hire an intern or appoint an already overworked employee to feed out one-sided sales information. Think of a car dealership that opens a Twitter account and begins tweeting the make, model and price of every car on the lot. Or a restaurant that does nothing but regurgitate its lunch specials day after day.

Worst of all are the businesses that do nothing but repeat the same old, tired call for you to come in and buy stuff. The only thing those businesses are likely to get their customers to do is unfriend them.

It’s social media — not commercial media. People do not want to be told what to do.

So how on earth does a company owner turn the content grind into gold?

The process of creating worthwhile content has two main parts.

1. Listen. Before you can get people talking about your brand, you’ve got to tune into the larger conversation. Plug keywords related to your vertical market into Twitter search and see what’s being said in real-time. Place an ear to the blogosphere through Technorati and Google’s blog search. See if anyone’s built a social network related to your field on Ning. Find experts in your industry on LinkedIn. Just plain Google the hell out of everything.

Whether you deal in semiconductors or hairbrushes, people are talking about your area of expertise online. But before you begin even thinking of talking up your brand, figure out how you can add to the conversation without coming on like that guy — i.e., the one who has nothing of value to add other than “hey, look at me!”

And that brings us to…

2. Create Value. Now, the fun part! Once you’ve gotten a feel for how discussion of your product or vertical is carried out online by experts and amateurs alike, it’s time for you to start throwing in your two cents.

Realize that the real power of social media is in allowing you to tell your own story to the world however you want through your own channel.

If you’re a business owner, then you’re an expert in something. You have information and insights that people can benefit from.

Say you’re a restaurant owner looking to promote your business through a blog. Rather than using that blog as an extended advertising platform or personal diary, cram it with your thoughts on things like food preparation, culinary trends, running a business, managing a waitstaff, dealing with difficult customers, the art of pairing wines with dishes, your thoughts on decor, how sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon affect business … there’s really no shortage of interesting things to talk about. Share your specialized knowledge.

If you’re not much of a writer but still want to produce the content yourself, set up a cheap video camera and record yourself dispensing wisdom. Gary Vaynerchuk used video blogging to turn his site, Winelibrary.com (which was actually an offshoot of his family’s liquor store) into a lucrative online retailer.

Your homework: Come up with 25 ideas for blog posts related to your field of interest to your audience.

Why do this? Because “brand” is no longer just a logo, a company and a product. The rise of social media has deepened and diversified what it means to be a brand. A brand is a story. It has a voice and personality. And now you can create your own channel for sharing that story, that voice, and interacting with other stories and voices online.

If you create worthwhile content, people will consume it and share it with their friends.

Then the next time they or someone they know needs a semiconductor or a hairbrush, guess whose name comes up in conversation?

It’s a new era. The idea that companies big and small need to integrate social media into their business models is no longer just a theory. It’s a common practice. But the question of how businesses begin incorporating social media strategies is still being defined.

2010 will be the year that social media goes mainstream, argues Brian Solis in a guest post for Mashable titled “The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration“.

According to Solis, businesses tend to adopt social media plans incrementally. You don’t just create a Facebook fan page, go to sleep and wake up with 10,000 engaged fans, whom you then convert into sales. The whole thing happens in stages.

Solis’ essay looks mostly at how large, complex companies begin using social media to drive business and enhance customer relations — not to mention convincing CEOs it’s a good idea to Tweet. But there’s lessons to be learned for all. Let’s take a look at the 10 steps.

1. Observe and Report: Listen to what people are already saying on social sites about your company, products, field, and so forth.
2. Setting the Stage and Dress Rehearsal: Create primary accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. and begin experimenting with posting content and building an audience.
3. Socializing Media: Begin conversing with the crowd and documenting what they’re saying, encouraging the positives and dealing with the negatives.
4. Finding a Voice and Sense of Purpose: “‘Chatter’ or aimless broadcasting is not as effective as strategic communications and engagement. This stage reflects the exploration of goals, objectives, and value implementation. Companies begin to learn that exchange is based on trust and loyalty.”
5. Turning Words Into Actions: Show that you’re invested by taking what you’ve learned from your customers through these conversations and putting them into practice.
6. Humanizing the Brand and Defining the Experience: Develop a “socialized version of a branding style guide” to transform your business’ online presence from a static, website-based model to something with a voice that speaks with people on a human level.
7. Community: Now that you’ve brought people into the discussion around your brand, turn them into ambassadors for you.
8. Social Darwinism: Make the necessary evolutionary changes within your business — personnel shifting, rebudgeting, whatever they may be — to grow and improve your social media performance.
9. The Socialization of Business Processes: This stage deals with Customer Relations Management (CRM), or, more precisely “sCRM” (the “s” is for “social”). Which then becomes SRM, which Solis describes as “the recognition that all people, not just customers, are equal.”
10. Business Performance Metrics: Unlike a billboard or Super Bowl ad, the return on investment (ROI) of social media usage is completely measurable. Track your performance in terms of things like growth (or decline) of fan base and number and quality of interactions. If you already have a Facebook fan page, for example, the built-in Insights feature is an example of this on the small scale.

Whew. That may seem like a lot to digest. But really, it’s a breakdown of a process that, when it happens successfully, amounts to a combination of good planning and solid intuition.

That is, you’ve got to be deliberate and proactive about how you frame and present your message — but you also genuinely have to want to interact with customers and listen to what they say.

Because social media is nothing more than a new, brilliantly effective way of communicating. And if 2010 is going to be a big year for that, then bring it on.

Image courtesy Flickr: Leo Reynolds.

The consumer-trend researchers at TrendSpotting asked 30 social media pros to predict what’s coming around the bend in 2010. The researchers found that the predictions fell under six main categories: Mobile, Location, Transparency, Measurement, ROI and Privacy.

Peruse the report, which is phrased in Twitterlike 140-character statements, in the slideshow below. (Brevity, you see, is already de rigeur.)

A few predictions that stood out:

@PeterKim: Advertising infiltrates public social sites on a widespread level, souring experiences for many.
Now that would be a shame. It’s the challenge of all advertisers to find a way to raise awareness of their brand(s) without intruding. The answer: Build community. Bring people into your world; don’t barge into theirs.

@DanZarella: Small Business Social Media – small business will discover the bang-for-buck accountability of social media marketing.
Yes! YES! Even mom-and-pop businesses need to be engaging their customers online.

@JasonFalls: Conversational marketing will be the prevailing success tactic for brands.
Perhaps this is how you infiltrate.

@CharleneLi: Social media in 2010 will cease being the shiny new object and instead become part of the everyday lexicon of business.
And, other experts in the report say, larger companies will attempt to regulate their employees’ use of it.

@GauravMishra: Brand marketers will create compelling micro-content to seed these communities, then run contests to invite customers to interpret their brand, create their own content.
The content remix!

@DMScott: The term “social media” wanes as people realize we’re just talking about communicating.
Now that’s what we’re talking about!

@AdamBroitman: Consumers will un-friend all brands that don’t add value.
Don’t just shout your message at people — give ‘em stuff they can use.

@MikeArauz: We’re moving into an age of transparency.
You can’t have conversation without it.

Attention to anyone who wants to put together a cool video about how investing in social media brings returns: You make it, we’ll post it. We’ll show it to clients and give you credit. And if it has a snappy, hi-NRG soundtrack, hell, we’ll even dance to it.

This one is by Socialnomics author Erik Qualman. The examples and stats are a bit more specific than the last such video we posted, but the message is the same: use social media right, and your business will grow skyrocket.

Spend more face time with the social media ROI examples in the video at Qualman’s blog.