Last night we went to the opening of Brick & Bottle in Corte Madera. The restaurant employed various means to let the public know when their doors would open, including old school measures like hanging a banner outside of the premises with a countdown to the opening day, as well as new school tactics like a Facebook fan page, Twitter account from the owner/chef @chefscotthoward and email blasts from lifestyle/fashion mavens such as Thrillist.  The restaurant was completely packed, with a constant stream of locals, VIPs and foodies curious to see, taste and explore the new Marin hot spot.

In addition to social media controlled by the restaurant, they’ve also benefitted by the public voice, courtesy of services such as DeHood, Yelp, Foursquare, and others.

It was also gratifying to see the chef personally meet and greet customers while keeping an eye over the open kitchen.  While technology-enabled social media tools are helping businesses take control of their brand on connected devices, it’s important to deliver on the “last mile” which is extending the care and attention allocated on your online social media to simply being social… in person.

Here are 12 reasons compiled by MyVenturePad to use social media:

Twelve reasons to use social media to help grow your business:

1. Own your brand’s social presence: If you don’t create official channels online, it’s only a matter of time before your fans do it for you and create their own profiles and communities around your brand. It’s important to claim your brand name across all the major social media platforms. Here are two sites that will help you do this:

• KnowEm: KnowEm has the highest number of sites (over 350) available for checking username availability. Simply by entering your desired username, you’ll be able to find out instantly if it’s still available. KnowEm also offers paid plans, from just signing up and registering you at 150 sites, to a full-featured plan which also fills in all profile details, complete with pictures, at 100 to 300 different networking sites.

• namechk: Covering 72 major social networking sites, namechk is simple, fast, and easy to use. If your desired username or vanity URL is still available, you simply click through each one to claim it. If your brand isn’t consistent across the Web, namechk can help you by determining which usernames are still available on a number of the most popular sites.

2. Look like you “get it”: Your target audience is becoming more shrewd about leveraging social media sites as an integral part of their daily lives. If you want to appear relevant and in-step with the latest advances in technology, your potential customers will want to see you on these sites as well. If you don’t have a presence, you appear as if you’re not very savvy.

3. Brand recognition: You need to go where your customers are, and they are increasingly spending a great deal of time on social networking sites. Using social media enables your company to reach a huge number of potential customers. Getting your name out there is incredibly important — studies suggest that people need to hear a company’s name at least seven times before they trust and respect it enough to become a customer.

4. Take your message directly to consumers: Social media tools enable you to directly engage consumers in conversation. Be sure to build trust by adding value to the community consistently over time.

5. Increase your search engine rankings: Social media profiles (especially those on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) frequently rank highly with major search engines. Creating keyword-rich profiles around your brand name can help generate traffic for your both your social-networking sites and your company’s Web site.

6. SEO benefits: Many social media bookmarking sites use NOFOLLOW tags that limit the outbound link value of posts made on their sites, but there are still many leading sites that allow DOFOLLOW tags — including Friendfeed, Digg, and Mixx. You can also benefit from posting to bookmarking sites that use NOFOLLOW tags if people read your posts and link back to your Web site.

7. Social media content is now integrated with search results: Search engines like Google and Bing are increasingly indexing and ranking posts and other information from social networks. Videos from popular sites like YouTube can also be optimized for indexing by the major search engines.

8. Brand monitoring: Having a social media presence gives you a better understanding of what current and potential customers are saying about your products and services. If you actively monitor social conversations, you have the opportunity to correct false or inaccurate information about your brand and address negative comments before they take on a life of their own.

9. Generate site traffic: You can create additional traffic if you regularly post updates on social networks that link back to your Web site. Social media bookmarking tools like Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon can also generate additional traffic to your site if you create frequent articles and blog posts.

10. Find new customers through your friends: You shouldn’t neglect your personal social media accounts as potential avenues to promote the activities of your business. Posting regular updates relating to your business and activities can remind your friends about what your company does and influence them to use your services or make referrals.

11. Find new customers through your company profile: Your company profile is a great opportunity for you to post regular updates on your activities and about important news and trends in your industry. This will attract the attention of new customers interested in your industry and increase your reputation as an expert in your field. It’s important to post regularly if you want to increase your followers or fans and convert them to potential leads.

12. Niche marketing: Social media enables you to reach very specific subsets of people based on their personal preferences and interests. You can create unique social media profiles to target these audiences or create strategies based on addressing individual interests.

Here are a few of the basics I used to get up the campaign, manage it, and measure it.

Benchmarks:  Before your first Tweet, make sure to take note of of how many people are already following you on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn (groups, etc.) so you can compare the before-and-after scenario.

Identifying goals:  While it’s easy to see the hard results – did your numbers go up or down – there’s more to social media metrics than hard numbers.  Sentiment is hard to quantify, but it’s easy to see.  In our campaign, one day we asked people to tell us why they liked what our client was doing.  We received such a great response – comments that were creative, funny, and inspiring.  Of course, you also open yourself up for negative commentary, but in our experience, we have found the community to be collaborative and supportive.  When a snarky comment did appear on another day, the community came to the defense.  A perfect validation of why it’s important to maintain an open dialogue and relationship with the community.

Tone of Voice: For our particular exercise, the voice we used for Tweeting was humorous, approachable and a bit irreverent.  We decided to use this tone as it not only caught the attention of the community but also made people smile, question, and comment.  It was in sync with the client’s brand and messaging.  All elements of the communication – from the press release, to the blog, to the Twitter feed, to the YouTube video, to the Facebook fan page and more reflected upon one another and carried this voice.

Once we had our basics down, then began the work.

We used a variety of free tools to make our job easier, as we provided daily reports on metrics, sentiment, and milestones (by the way, I did try out a couple of paid services, but I found I could gather the same information without paying the subscription fees).  Here are the tools we used:

Tweetdeck:  Tweetdeck’s desktop client was the hub of my Twitter communications.  I set up a few different search columns to make sure I had visibility into all sides of the conversation.  One column was dedicated to the hashtag we used, anothers to particular search terms, and of course others for @ replies and DMs.

Seesmic Web app:  I also used Seemic’s web app as it provided a cleaner and easier way for me to view responses and had a deeper historical view, which was important to me as we were managing this campaign across all time zones (i.e. 24 hours a day).

TwitterCounter:  A great chart that shows how many followers you have today, how many more you just accrued, and how many are predicted to come in a day more more.

Trendrr:  More useful charts and information on the number of mentions on Twitter, blogs, and search engines.

SocialOomph:  When you want to get your message out at 8:00AM in London but you’re based in San Francisco which is 8 hours behind, there’s an alternative to staying awake late or asking your colleagues in London to take on the task for you (assuming you have colleagues in London).  This is where SocialOomph comes in.  You can preschedule a Tweet to go out on a specific date/time.  It’s a great thing to use occassionally, but I don’t advocate you use it often, as the whole point of social media is the conversation, which means you have to have a real-live human on the both ends.

Another analytic tool I did not use during this last campaign but am considering for the future is SocialMention which provides a nice snapshot of all the social media elements you can imagine.

At the end of the campaign, it was gratifying and satisfying to see the upward trend of followers, the collection of great Tweets and comments from the community, and the impact on other social media touchpoints.  We embraced the community to share and ReTweet our news, tips, and were thrilled to see our messages amplified.