As giant retailers such as Gamestop, JC Penney, and Nordstrom opened--and quickly shuttered--Facebook storefronts over the past six months, many analysts declared Facebook’s e-commerce effort to be a failure. People come to Facebook to catch up with family and friends, they reasoned, not to shop for goods and services.

But recently published statistics from e-commerce software developer Ecwid indicate that either those analysts’ conclusions were premature, or Facebook commerce is merely better suited to smaller businesses right now. Among its more than 35,000 clients that run both stand-alone online stores and Facebook storefronts, Ecwid reports that nearly 18 percent of those clients’ Q1 2012 revenues were generated by their Facebook stores. Meanwhile, Wishpond, another company focused on helping retailers build Facebook storefronts, recently reported an uptick in interest in its products following the debut of the Facebook Timeline profile earlier this year. If Gamestop, JC Penney, and Nordstrom had held on for just a few more months, would they also have seen an increase in their Facebook store sales?

Marketing gurus pushed email newsletters hard back in the days before social networking. If you believe everything you read online these days, you'd think that Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other Web 2.0 services have left such vehicles in the virtual dust. Not so. Nor has the scourge of spam destroyed newsletters' effectiveness. Email marketing still achieves huge results--and pairing an effective email newsletter with a social media campaign can snag many more customers for your business than relying on social media alone.

This survey conducted by Crowd Science reveals the effectiveness of email newsletters.Perhaps the best time to evaluate consumer behavior is during the holiday shopping season, when everyone is looking for the best bargains. In an opinion survey following the most recent season, conducted by the market-research firm Crowd Science, print and email newsletters smacked down Facebook and Twitter when it came to wooing online shoppers.

As one of the web’s “big three” social networks, along with Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has grabbed its slice of the limelight as the space where professionals strategize their next career move. But that’s an unnecessarily limiting way to view this powerhouse network. Over the last few years, LinkedIn has introduced myriad tools – some free, some paid – to help small businesses drive word of mouth about their brand. Here are just a few ways you can get started.

Increase your visibility with a company page

You and I may be fully participating in popular social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but I’ll bet your company isn’t -- at least as well as it could be. While these networks have exploded over the last few years for personal use (Facebook with 800 million users, Twitter with 175 million, and LinkedIn with 115 million), most businesses are at a loss for effective ways to engage with customers in this brave new world. And social media growth is showing no signs of slowing; newer networks such as Google+, Pinterest and Instagram have seen incredible growth in a matter of weeks.

Social media has transformed the way we connect with each other. We all have a voice, and we make ourselves heard, sharing wisdom and gossip, connecting with new friends, and documenting our lives. This new communication channel has empowered us and changed our expectations of the world, including the companies with which we interact.

Salesforce ChatterWhether your company is a small shop of just a few intensely hard-working pros or a large venture with hundreds or thousands of workers, good communication is critical to your success. And by "good communication," I mean communication that works. With the right collaboration tools and a little operational discipline, you can overcome any communications challenge and get your teams in sync.

When I started my career back in the olden days of the 20th Century, the workplace was largely synchronous. For the most part, everyone showed up at more or less the same time, worked in the same office together, went to the same meetings, ate lunch at 12:30, and gathered around the same water cooler when they felt like taking a break. Communication wasn't always of the highest quality, but there was plenty of it and if you missed something, somebody was always right there to fill you in.

Even as social media presents unprecedented business opportunities for marketing, customer service, brand building and consumer relationships, many organizations are still struggling to embrace it for fear that it negatively effects worker productivity or puts the company at risk. A 2011 survey by Society for Human Resource Management reveals that 43% of businesses block access to social media on company-owned computers or handheld devices.

Rather than policing employees, these organizations would be better served by a social media governance model -- a collection of policies, procedures and educational resources that allow you to manage social media internally. A sound social media governance model empowers your employees while keeping them accountable. It allows you to quickly recover from a blow to your brand, or even sidestep it completely. It helps you keep your social initiatives on track and aligned with your business’ strategic goals.

I've ranted before against the perils of delegated social strategies. You know: Management decides it's time to get into social media, and appoints some whippersnapper to the task. The potential perils with this approach are many and severe, but even under good circumstances, this approach comes with a steep lost-opportunity cost. And that -- even if we ignore all the ways a lone-gunman social strategy can backfire on a good company -- is a very compelling reason to spend less energy thinking about your business's social strategy and more energy thinking about your company's social culture.

In a delightfully insightful opinion post on Fast Company last week, Bulldog Drummond CEO Shawn Parr advanced the observation that "culture eats strategy for lunch." The point, in brief, is that no matter how much strategic thinking you do, the culture of your company will either bolster your success or unravel your elegantly wrought plans. And while Parr didn't talk about social specifically, it occurred to me that this is a great opportunity for some dialog about the overwhelming impact of company culture on the effectiveness of social campaigns.

A report published last week illuminates just how some organizations are using social tools inside and outside their enterprise and what results they’re seeing, and it’s worth a read.

The report “When Social Meets Business Real Work Gets Done” shows tangible gains from the use of social initiatives within organizations of all sizes. Written by MIT professor Andrew McAfee, the paper reveals the results of an AIIM study that looked at the progress of social business technologies in organizations from 10 to over 5,000 employees, with a focus on three use cases: sales and marketing collaboration, open innovation and enterprise Q&A.

There's no shortage of talk about engagement in marketing circles, but really honestly engaging with people (not just customers, but any target audience) is a lot harder than most of us are willing to admit. It takes real work. It takes creativity. It takes a sincere desire to understand the people whose influence can elevate your brand. And, critically, it takes a commitment to create social content that resonates with the personalities you're trying to reach.

At the start of the social gold rush, the prevailing attitude among businesses that "got it" was that we just needed to get in there and join the conversation. Social media strategies focused on figuring out ways to crank up follower counts. Quickly, though, savvy brands realized they needed to do something more, and there are now -- happily -- hundreds of companies out there creating genuine, mutually valuable relationships with their customers on the social web through thoughtfully executed strategies that reward customer interaction.

With Facebook on track to reach one billion users, reports that 75% of marketers will increase their social media spending this year, and predictions that social media will transform TV and influence the presidential election, it’s no wonder 2012 has been touted as the “Year of Social Media.”

Hyperbolic headlines like these might convince you that if you don’t incorporate social media into your business, you’ll soon be out of business. But before you race to register a Twitter account or create a Facebook fan page, you should check a few of your assumptions. Is it really necessary for you to be part of these two social networks? Sure, they’re the most popular platforms and likely your competitors are already using them – both compelling reasons – but that doesn’t mean either of them is the best option for you.