I frequently get asked by other chambers of commerce how social media has helped our organization, so I thought I'd put together this list to help give some practical ways it could help you, too.
Our shorter messages have more impact.

1. Social Media forces you to be concise. Twitter only gives you 160 characters, so you have to get better at writing headlines to be effective in that medium. It's no coincidence that many social networking sites do the same. We're getting better at using effective headlines to convey our messages of the impact our work has on so many people.
2. People give us permission to communicate with them. At the very core of social connections is this idea of permission. Hundreds of people have "raised their hand" to say, "I'd like to receive your messages, Chamber!" In doing so, they have forced us to be responsible with it. This is different than giving us an email address; they have given us their attention. If you waste it or abuse it, shame on you.
3. We're building trust with our audience, members or not. Jeffrey Gitomer's latest book, The Little Teal Book of Trust, talks about how difficult it is for many to gain and keep the trust of consumers. Social media uses smaller bits of information spread out over time to gain and keep trust. What you do with that trust is up to you. I use it to sell memberships and promote the interests of our members.
4. People are recommending the Chamber to their friends. Another key component of social media is the recommendation. LinkedIn has a tool where you can recommend another's work. Twitter has a quick utility to "Re-Tweet" or forward someone else's post, and Facebook enables recommendations by allowing you, as a user, to become a "Fan" of a business, cause, brand, or product. Or a Chamber. We now have hundreds of fans, some of whom are non-members. You can bet we'll be mining that list for people who should be members.
5. We're increasing our web traffic. All of our posts in social media are leading back to our web site. SalemChamber.org (bragging now) is ranked (today) in the top 200,000 web sites on the Internet. There are 109,000,000 web sites on the Internet. This puts us in the 99.8 percentile of all web sites, among the top 41,000 in the United States. I anticipate this will be really good for our new web site sponsorship packages we're rolling out on our site.

Notice that I didn't say, "We're selling more tickets" or "We've replaced our printed newsletter." But we've used social networking strategies which build our audience so that we have more to leverage later in the process.

We're learning as we go, and any expert who tells you they know everything you'll ever need to know about social media will be wrong tomorrow. The technology isn't changing as rapidly as the audience, and the innovative ways in which you can use it.