It occurs to me that the social media landscape is littered with the carcasses of failed business efforts.

There are blogs that started, had some posts, then stopped. Twitter accounts that tweeted for a while and then stopped. Facebook accounts that never get updated. The accounts stay there, visible, abandoned, but dead. Like carcasses.

And I apologize for the picture here, which is an ugly image — but that’s what carcasses look like.

What’s my point: social media is a powerful new opportunity for business to engage with customers, improve service, offer content, etc. People think it’s free because the accounts for blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus are free. But it requires time and effort because it’s publishing, and it’s content. And the time and effort has to be spent consistently over a long time before it pays off.

By the way: If you were listening two days ago to this radio program with Howard Lewinter, this blog post came up in that conversation. This is what I was talking about then. This link goes to the archive that has the entire conversation available online.

(Image: bigstockphoto.com)