Lucky me. The mailman just delivered the Ultimate Social Media Marketing Guidebook. It promises to help me create my own social network and hit the ground running, winning new business in no time! It's great. Very comprehensive. Only cost me $99. One of the very first chapters is: "How to Establish Social Media Marketing Goals". Wonderful.

My Social Media Marketing Goals

• I want "followers" to buy a lot of my products.
• I want those "followers" to tell their friends what great products we sell and strongly recommend they buy my products.
• I want "followers" to replace the products they buy from me with new products I come up with.

That's it.

To sell more of our products/services is why any business spends money on marketing … social or the old fashion kind of marketing.

But looking thru the Ultimate Social Media Marketing Guidebook, I can't find a chapter on selling. There are chapters on selecting the best platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc). There are chapters on developing on-line strategies, a check-list and a rollout timetable. There is a chapter on how to avoid social media missteps. I just can't find one on how to sell more of my stuff with social media.

The closes thing I can find to selling more is a chapter on Measuring Your Success. It begins by asking, "how do you measure success?". Tweets? Likes? Hits? Responses? The chapter promises to help me develop metrics and measuring techniques to determine effectiveness. Great.

My banker measures my business' success by DOLLARS. The deposit window takes checks and cash...They do not take TWEETS, FRIENDS, LIKES. The IRS prefers DOLLARS. My employees are fond of DOLLARS as well. I doubt too many would show up for work tomorrow if I paid them in LIKES. No where in the Ultimate Social Media Marketing Guidebook, or other social media marketing conversations is there a meaningful conversation about monitoring social media efforts.

So here's a question. What company does the best job of accomplishing My Social Media Marketing Goals? Apple. Lots of people love Apple products. They buy products and replace what they bought with more Apple products. These "Apple People" evangelize their friends to buy Apple stuff. I want customers like Apple's customers.

Which leads us to the question, what is Apple's social media strategy? Oh. Apple doesn't have an official Twitter feed or a Facebook page. They have no apparent social media marketing plan.

How does Apple market their stuff? TV ads, magazine ads, billboards, retail stores. Imagine, actually advertising things still works. It is hard work. But it works if you do it well.

PS. There ARE companies making money on Social Media. One of them published my Social Media Marketing Guidebook. Celebrities are doing pretty well also, pay them and they will tweet like crazy for you. Call me if you need to get in touch with Kim Kardashian.