When I saw a cou­ple days ago that the new ver­sion (albeit, still in beta) of Tweet­deck came out the other day, I madly rushed to down­load and install it. And for the past day and a half, my team and I have been shar­ing this new ver­sion with cur­rent and prospec­tive clients as a way for them to bet­ter orga­nize, mon­i­tor and incor­po­rate the use of both Twit­ter and Face­book into their over­all mar­ket­ing and sales strate­gies. And finally, clients are star­ing to get it. There really is a way to use social media to do more than just catch up with your old high school friends.

The chal­lenge for busi­nesses in our con­ser­v­a­tive regional mar­ket is see­ing how such tools as Face­book and Twit­ter (and the like) can drive sales and aware­ness for their busi­nesses. After a tar­geted dis­cus­sion of social media, they typ­i­cally come back with one of three com­ments: 1) “How do you mea­sure it?,” 2) “How much time is this going to take me?,” or “How will this stuff make me money?” All are fair ques­tions. But it has been dif­fi­cult to answer them beyond, “Well, social media is still evolv­ing, so it’s dif­fi­cult to answer those ques­tions. But other com­pa­nies are find­ing ways to make it work.” And then we would share some of those suc­cess sto­ries. The progressive-minded busi­nesses see the light, and begin walk­ing toward it. The oth­ers go back to cold calling.

But now that we’re able to bring up Tweet­deck on our screens and show them how it enables users to seg­ment out their Twit­ter feeds and replies and to mon­i­tor and track their Face­book con­ver­sa­tions, they begin to see the poten­tial. It’s too soon to tell whether the value is truly click­ing for them, or if it’s sim­ply the fact that Tweet­deck appeals to the more lin­ear, left-brained man­ner of think­ing that tends to drive busi­ness deci­sion mak­ing. The impor­tant point in my mind is that tools like Tweet­deck, Hoot­Suite and oth­ers are help­ing to bridge the divide between social media and business,…or, per­haps more directly, the divide between social media and sales/marketing. Because, finally, met­rics have a place in social media. And that speaks vol­umes to busi­nesses try­ing to cre­ate demand in a recession.

This is one more baby step in the right direc­tion for mar­ket­ing and sell­ing in the new econ­omy. Per­son­ally, I can’t wait for the next evolution.