Tip 1: Build your business using social media while considering the principles of Socialnomics, or social commerce. 78% of people care about what their friends think, and only 14% care what advertisers think. Soon we'll be making the majority of our purchase decisions by considering what our friends say online.

Tip 2: Businesses' number one obstacle is time, so begin using social media tools in baby steps. When arguing the value of reallocating time to social media, emphasize the valuable real-time feedback you'll be receiving from consumers and potential customers.

Tip 3: The three steps to using social media effectively are: listen, interact and react. Many people forget the last step and don't respond when someone says something negative about their products or services. Use both negative and positive comments as feedback to improve your business.

5 Reasons for Dropbox's Word-of-Mouth Marketing Success

1. Have an Amazing Product -- When Dropbox launched, its market was already highly competitive with dozens of cloud storage companies battling for users. The company realized, however, through looking at comments in forums and reading blogs, that users weren't really satisfied with competitor products. These other products didn't work all of the time and would create file errors. In others words, users couldn't rely on these solutions. Dropbox decided to make a simple file storage application that worked. Customers talk about great products, so the first step in word-of-mouth marketing success is to have a product worth talking about.

2. Build Your Community Before You Even Have a Product -- Don't make the mistake that you need to have a fully launched and market-ready product before you can get people to talk about it. Dropbox tested landing pages and a private beta program as an effort to generate interest in the product and begin to build a community while the product was still in the development process. Letting users into the process early helped to provide a sense of ownership while it gave the company valuable feedback needed to make the product better.

3. Question Best Practices -- Dropbox's public launch plan looked like other product launch plans. They had planned to use some pay-per-click advertising, launch at an industry conference and hire a public relations firm. That all sounds pretty smart right? It didn't work for them. The cost of customer acquisition was too high because the keywords they were bidding on were too expensive. Basically, the traditional ways to launch and market a company weren't allowing Dropbox to scale its growth. Still, they realized they were still growing despite the fact that these efforts weren't working. This growth was due to word-of-mouth buzz about their product. Their next logical step was thinking, "How do we get people to talk about our product even more?"

4. Encourage Word-of-Mouth -- People were already talking about Dropbox, but to ramp up the conversation, the company started a referral program that offered customers incentives to recommend the application to others. This one simple change permanently increased new users by 60%. Additionally, Dropbox made changes to their product that made it easier for users to share their love for Dropbox with others. For example, they offered the feature of shared folders, which allows one folder of documents to be shared with multiple users, subsequently encouraging users to invite others to share access to folders.

5. Understand What Is Working -- To learn all of these lessons, Dropbox needed clear data to understand what was working and what wasn't. The company prioritized analytics within the company so that it could have the data it needed to make the right marketing and product development investments. To understand how to people are talking about your company, it is important to have the systems in place to see how new users are discovering your business. -- To learn all of these lessons, Dropbox needed clear data to understand what was working and what wasn't. The company prioritized analytics within the company so that it could have the data it needed to make the right marketing and product development investments. To understand how to people are talking about your company, it is important to have the systems in place to see how new users are discovering your business.

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Picture this: You're standing at the front of a ballroom full of customers and potential customers. You have a product you're proud of, and your customers are happy. The more your customers talk about your product, the more your potential customers convert.

You talk for a few minutes about your product, then you open the floor for comments and discussion -- only you add two conditions: nobody gets to introduce themselves and all comments are moderated by you before they're shared with the room.  Then you go sit in the corner and talk with your VP of Sales. You make it clear you're not going to listen or participate.

Sounds crazy. Nobody would do that. It would kill the conversation and suck the life out of the room, not to mention your sales funnel.

Except serious, smart companies do it every day -- on their blogs.

They set up a blog, summon their inner Hemingway for the posts, then suffocate commenting and conversation:

• They insist on moderating comments before publishing them.
• They don't allow commenters to identify themselves with a url.
• They don't respond to comments or participate in discussions taking place in the comments.
• They don't learn from or listen to commenters.

Then they wonder why their blog isn't taking off.

Successful business blogs kind of atmosphere you'd want in that ballroom. They're opportunities for you to talk about your product and your industry, but also to listen and interact.

If you don't engage with commenters in the ballroom, everybody goes to get a cup of coffee. Same with the blog.

Developing popular content once in awhile is one thing, but how do you keep your blog as a whole in demand?

There isn’t a single winning answer – there are many strategies and methods which can be effective.  Regardless of the path you choose, keeping your blog content in demand is vital to keep your community growing itself organically over time.

In demand blogs:

• Creates shares, links and subscribers by virtue of being in demand
• Quickly grow against impossible odds
• Funnel visitors from around the social web, organically

A few ideas to get you started with building an in demand blog:

1.  Publish less

You should be throwing far more ideas away than you actually publish.  Edit your content ideas.  Ruthlessly.  If you’re serious about becoming someone with in-demand content take only the absolute best ideas.  Trash the rest.

2.  When you do publish:  analyze, learn and refine

Even following the art of holding back, not everything you throw at the wall is going to stick.  Far more will fall flat.  That’s okay because if you’re analyzing as you go, you’ll start to see patterns in the noise of your niche and know what will permeate and what will fall flat.

3.  Personality and character…they’re in demand

There was a trend for a while of people seeking more professionally-focused content from blogs.  It is still around to a good degree, but my future prediction is this trend is going to fall the other way.  The fact is now that so many businesses and industries see the benefits of blogging, they’re putting tons of resources and time behind it.  The content produced on their sites is clean, polished and professional.  But what most lack is personality and character.  That is an enduring trait of successful content-based sites and we will see a proper return to form in the coming years.

4.  Take chances, experiment

Bearing you’re creating content in an ultra-competitive category, you need to come up with creative content plays which break the mold.  If you want to grow at scale it’s not about playing it safe and creating cookie-cutter content, you need to take chances.  After enough data you will start to find the formula that works for you.  It’s a commitment and things aren’t going to happen immediately, but if you can persevere and have the freedom to test, the rewards will come.

5.  Fresh thinking

Interpret your subject matter through a different lens, come at it from an unlikely angle and you position yourself to grow.  The strategy here should be to approach from an angle that the current players either haven’t considered or simply cannot take as it counters their thesis.  Overcrowded niches are that way for a reason:  they are popular, and there is always demand for the viewpoints not presented.

6.  Give away secrets

Larger players may not give away secrets anymore because, well, what reason do they have?  Their new content may only be popular by virtue of the fact that their sites now have distribution (popularity breeds popularity).  This is a huge opportunity to move the demand to your content by giving away secrets or less-obvious bits of information the larger players no longer want to share.  This plays into one of the core strategies for creating demand in markets of infinite goods:  providing value unattainable elsewhere.

7.  Lead, don’t follow

We naturally look to leaders for guidance, and while you don’t always need to lead everywhere in your life, your blog should be a place you’re leading readers down a path.

8.  Condition readers that your content will meet an expectation

And once in awhile break it.  This is like a shot of adrenaline for loyal readers.  Always meeting expectation is guaranteed to lull your audience into a trance.  Doing something that breaks the mold once in awhile will shake things up and remind readers your usual material is in demand.  Readers know you’ll return to form, they will stick around if you have delivered value for long enough (this strategy works well for established sites).  Examples of this can be something like posting an image instead of text one day with no explanation, posting a one sentence post when you usually post 1,000 word articles, or simply taking a week off when you usually publish daily.  When you return to form, people will have a renewed appreciate for what you do.  If you execute this effectively, you can concurrently make a lasting statement.

9.  Just be yourself

We form relationships with the people behind the content more than the content itself.  Content is in essence a proxy to create a relationship between writer and reader.  By being yourself, your personality is going to shine through in your writing and keep visitors coming back.  If you’re working with a team, be careful not to create content which has had the personality scraped out of it by being a product of design by committee.

10.  Evolve your thesis

Did your site thesis become irrelevant overnight?  That’s an easy fix – evolve your thesis.  Don’t even say it publicly, just do it and readers will naturally follow along and notice how you’ve kept with the times and stayed relevant.  If what you are doing isn’t cutting edge it probably isn’t in demand.