You may have grown your business haphazardly, bit by bit, particularly in a recession. If so, this section is for you. On the other hand, if you have studied business, done a course and see business planning as second nature, I'd skip the next couple of pages.

If you've never had to ask for external finance, you might never have had to put together a business plan. It's basically a road map of where you're going to go, where the money is expecting to come from and how you're going to achieve it. It will include sections on budgets, on people, on market research (of which you'll have done plenty), on the requirements of the business and of course on cash flow.

There are different sorts of business plans depending on who you're addressing. If you're putting together a plan so you know where the business is going and how it's doing, that's a plan for you and your colleagues. If you're trying to impress on the tax authorities that you're highly unlikely to pull into massive profit any time now, that's another kind of plan, and the subject of another book by someone with vastly different expertise! If you're looking for external investment, clearly the plan will be full of growth and profit and should also focus on some sort of exit point for everybody so you can all walk away millionaires.

For our purposes we're focusing only on the first of those sorts of plan. You've read this far, so you're interested in social networking. That's fine. Now we look at how you fit it into the rest of your business.

Many books on social networks – indeed, many websites and online tutorials – make a great deal of how much you can achieve for nothing. Social networking costs zippo, nada, nowt. You'll get a whole load of customers for nothing.

This is hogwash. Let me qualify that. The direct cost associated with putting your profile about on a social network is usually nothing. But the overall effort has to be resourced properly if it's going to do anything at all for your business. You may need new people to keep your social media activities up to date. You need to ask yourself who's going to be responsible for this (and who isn't: more on that later) and where the money's going to come from. Remember, if you have different budgets for different elements of the business:

I can't tell you where the budget needs to come from in your business, but it needs to come from somewhere. Social networking can be expensive and it's labour intensive: is it something you can actually justify? You need to decide that independently, but there are precedents to suggest doing so might not be a bad idea. Almost a decade before writing this book I was editor of something called The E-Commerce Handbook, which aimed to help businesses that were starting to trade electronically. One of the distinctive features about e-commerce was that in its infancy a lot of businesses didn't take it all that seriously, and if a customer or prospect sent an email inquiry they'd be lucky if they had a reply within a week. Companies are no longer naive enough to assume they can get away with this kind of behaviour in e-commerce, but they revert to it when a customer comes in via a blog comment or a Facebook group. Same point, newer medium.

Another element that needs to be in the plan is some sort of projection of what being part of a social network is going to do for your company. In the section above I focused on costs and where the money is going to come from (usually at someone else's expense), which can seem rather negative.

The flipside of this is building the cash that's going to come from social networking into your projection. At this stage it's only fair to say: be conservative, be realistic, temper your expectations. Remember when you started your first business and how the potential market was worth millions so if you could just get one percent of that you'd get rich, but then only a fraction of the potential market turned up and you had to do something active to get further attention? Social media is the same. The hype says that Twitter is great for marketing because it had 7 million (according to Nielsen Online) users by February 09. True though this is, they're not all going to see your Tweets. Ashton Kutcher, who was able to entice people with a snap of Demi Moore in her underwear, barely scraped a million users – you're probably neither a movie star nor married to one, so you won't get that sort of attention.

The projections that you've got to feed into your cash flow projection at first need to be pessimistic. Revenue from social networking is going to be slow, and it's likely to be pennies at first.

There are things you can do about this, of course. Suppose you do what Glasses Direct did a while back with its Twitter account: offer to give a free pair of prescription sunglasses to whoever comes up with the best reason for having them. Within minutes, the MD's tweet had been repeated by tens of people and forwarded to thousands of potential customers by their online friends and acquaintances, not in a sales-like way but in a 'this is fun and you might just get something worthwhile out of it' sort of way.

OK, I'm biased. I won. I'll tell you what, though. I've had nothing but polite service and no pressure at all to buy any more glasses from the company. I have no doubt that the whole thing spreading virally through Twitter will have earned it a load of new viewers to the website and many new customers as a result. And a mention in this book, come to think of it, although the company didn't know I was writing this at the time.

You can do similar things through Facebook and the other media, but be realistic about how many of these efforts will lead to actual sales. Whatever you do don't give up; just remember that in spite of the direct and almost intimate nature of the contact you're making with your prospects, they're still the same cynics who won't want to rise to every ad pitch they're sent. Make what you say fun and infectious and it'll catch on, and you might find you get new people following you to see what you do next.

Overall, a slow build of sales needs to go into your spreadsheet. You need to revisit this depending on how your performance actually balances out. Here's a little experiment for people still wondering whether social networking is worth doing: draw up a spreadsheet based on your competitor having social networking capacity when you don't. Once you've started to posit an exodus of your more technically minded customers, you'll probably agree it's worth doing.

If you've decided which part of your organization is going to pay for your social networking efforts and your sales projections justify continuing, you next want to think about how much work it's going to take for you and your staff. Note I'm talking about how much work it's going to take, not how much it could take.

Let's take a hypothetical example. You're a musical instrument retailer, you're web savvy and if someone wants something obscure you'll be able to find it for them. A woman joins your Facebook group and starts talking about antique harpsichords. During the exchange it becomes apparent that she's very interested in the subject, and she starts sending you private messages instead of public ones. This is fine and in no way an intrusion, it's no worse than sending someone an email.

(That said, private messages might not suit you. One or two of the TV presenters on Twitter decline to do the private message thing because their objective is to get loads of people involved and talking. You don't have to be a TV personality to have that as your aim.)

The messages continue for a fair while. They're no longer drawing attention to your company's expertise in old musical instruments, because nobody can see them apart from you and your correspondent. They're certainly evidence that your other marketing has worked somewhere or that the Facebook group is drawing in enthusiasts. Nevertheless, at some stage it becomes apparent that keen though the correspondent is, she simply isn't going to buy an antique harpsichord from you, restored or otherwise. You're not reaching specifics and you're not approaching closure on the sale. The options are:

Of those options I'd probably plump for the second, but I'd have to say it would be difficult. You need to ask yourself the following questions:

The answer might well be that you're not doing this for a hobby as so many people do, and that you can't justify continuing the conversation. Beware, though; customers will have different expectations of your Facebook site as compared to a company website simply because it's in a different medium.

A well-known movie franchise set in space – there are plenty to choose from – ran a blog for collectors during a specific promotion. When the promotion was finished the company said that was it, thanks for coming, the blog is now closing; and the fans went into uproar. Eventually the original site relented and, in a variation of the second solution above, handed the running of the blog over to the fans. The end result was that everyone was happy. The fans were enjoying themselves and unconsciously getting loads more people to the website. The company therefore had, suddenly, a lot of new workers bringing new customers in without thinking about it; although you can be certain someone from the company was still overseeing that site to check for libels and inaccuracies. It won't always work out like that, but the option's worth considering.

Whatever you decide to do, check the likely workload and balance it against the skill set you need to have within your company, or need to bring in.

Do you have an established webmaster in your organization or do you outsource that to someone else? If the answer is that you do it in-house, you should find that adding social networking isn't that onerous, as the webmaster will want to bring their skills up to date anyway. Social networking is something they're likely to take for granted, as we'll see later in this chapter.

Probably the most important thing to remember if you're recruiting someone, or auditing your existing in-house skills, is that you're looking for someone who can communicate. This isn't a technology job. Clearly, someone who is completely technophobic isn't going to help you at all, but someone whose skills are purely technical is going to do a great deal to hold you back.

It's worth looking at what people are actually advertising for when they're searching for someone to manage an online community and engage in social networking. A scan of a number of recruitment sites and newspapers suggests the elements include:

The person will also need a lot of imagination. Writing a blog entry or stimulating some discussion is easy as a one-off, but will the candidate for the job still be generating ideas by the end of his or her first year?

Quick horror story: someone was talking to me about this sort of position a while ago. They were offering money, so I was interested. It didn't come to anything, partly because they felt – fair cop – that I was a writer rather than a manager, but partly because they felt someone working away from their premises would end up treated like, I quote, a 'second-class citizen'. If I ever write a book on how to demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of social networking, that's going on page 1.

Salary is going to be a sticking point for many. Market forces will inevitably dictate what the job is worth if you're recruiting afresh and the best place to look is the Guardian, which for decades has had one of the best media recruitment pages in the UK, published every Monday as part of the Media supplement. Do benchmark your salary and package by looking in there. Do also call agencies who are recruiting in the area pretending to be a candidate and ask what the job pays, they're used to it and they do the same to their competition.

Some kinds of people shouldn't be running your social networking operation, although all too often they end up doing just that. Many of the following examples of people who shouldn't handle the task are drawn from real life:

These people will damage your business's reputation rather than enhance it. They won't mean to, they just will.

If you're doing this for the first time, and I assume that's why you're reading this book, then you'll clearly need to put some metrics in place to measure how effective your use of social media is. Like other branches of PR and communication, it can be difficult to quantify. Too many people think they've failed in these areas because they have given themselves no way of telling whether they've succeeded.

It's useful to adopt a checklist mentality. You might want to work out a formula based on:

And of course you need to revisit your desired output by checking it against the achieved output. It could be that your market is incredibly suited to a social networking approach to marketing. It may be that your staff or recruited social networking implementor has an incredible flair for putting hilarious videos together, and interest in your services has increased dramatically as a result. This clearly means revising your forecasts upward instead of downward.

Try putting a table together like this, for starters:

You should soon get an idea of whether your plans are bearing fruit.

Once again, be careful. Social networking can have an effect on other areas of your business. Take the phenomenally successful American site willitblend.com. It consists mainly of a set of videos about blenders; as it happens they aren't hosted on YouTube, but there's no reason you shouldn't do something similar and use the YouTube bandwidth. It's a blender company's website. So far, so dull. Except it's aware of how dull the product could be, so the owner, Blendtec, has put together some extremely silly videos to see whether a number of products will survive in a blender. Blendtec hit some sort of high when Apple launched the iPhone and instead of talking about the product the producers put one in a blender and turned it into grey powder. This went round on Twitter and Facebook very quickly indeed, and a load of people used ordinary email to send it to their friends. But did it make me any more inclined to buy a blender?

Suppose it had encouraged me to do just that. Suppose you were also making something like a blender and had a similar idea, and the whole thing took off in the same way and customers were swayed towards your brand more than any other. Suppose you needed extra credit lines to make up the volumes. And you hadn't put this into your business plan, and the bank, uncomfortable with your lack of prescience about the quantities you'd be selling, decided to say 'no'.

Years ago I attended a business start-up course and the adviser from the bank was very clear: if people were overtrading and growing too quickly, this was a cause for concern and there was no guarantee that they would be granted a financial facility if their order book suggested their capacity had reached breaking point.

Increases in orders are good, of course, but only as long as the rest of the business can be managed in such a way that it keeps pace. Social networking is a cheap and efficient way of test marketing and if your tests suggest it's going to go ballistic, then you can go to the bank before you need extra credit rather than after. Don't sacrifice quality control (ever!), don't slack off on continuing to check new customers for creditworthiness if you work on invoice rather than on a cash basis, keep all of those sanity checks in place as you would for any other customer and you should be fine.

The trick is to keep in mind always that this is one aspect of your business, but that it needs to fit in with the rest of it. Too many companies think of social networking as a new thing and therefore ring-fence it completely. If it's integrated into the business plan at the earliest possible stage, it becomes significantly easier to manage than if it's rationalized much later.

Here's the big secret that no business expert ever tells you: in real life, all the planning and everything you do on paper only goes so far. Ask someone who's a small business owner when they last looked at their business plan and you'll get a very mixed response. People don't always plan and it's not always necessary.

In many ways the Brewers are ahead of many businesses in this respect, and their method will undoubtedly become the norm. Once people are used to social networking without thinking about it, they will no more plan specific resources around it than they would for writing letters and answering the phone. It'll just be natural. While there is a learning curve to negotiate, while there is a culture gap that suggests staff won't take a sales lead coming in through Blellow as seriously as someone walking in through the door, it probably needs a little more work. I have no doubt that in future editions of this book – maybe not the very next – this will be the first section outside the listings to be altered dramatically.

At the risk of sounding dull and boring, you'll also need to put some policies in place to control just how much your staff use social networking sites. These are the kinds of things that can happen when people are using social media in a cack-handed or unwise manner:

There was also an airline whose marketing staff set up a Twitter account for a laugh, insulting customers small-minded enough to take blog entries seriously. This was bad news for the airline and the Twitter account was closed down immediately. Even worse was the pizza company that found a couple of employees on YouTube applying various nasal fluids to the pizzas for a laugh...and sharing it with the world.

The airline has been tight-lipped about the fate of its employees who were making so free and easy with their company name on Twitter (and indeed using the company's logo); the pizza company was perfectly up front about dismissing the employees immediately and consulting the police because of food safety issues. Those are really straightforward instances. Less so is the overenthusiastic employee who blogs or tweets future developments, not because he or she wants to ruin the company but out of genuine excitement about what it's doing for customers. What you need is some sort of policy about acceptable use.

This would cover:

Check the policy you do put in place with the company's lawyers, and make sure you explain that there is a sanction for disregarding it. As long as you're not being unreasonable, and as long as you're not dealing with Members of Parliament, there shouldn't be any problem.

The week before that I'd been speaking at an event in London on social media and someone had asked me: what do you do about people who abuse social media and make unwanted mentions of the company for which they work? I told her the answer was quite simple; you invoke the contractual clause in people's employment that says that if they bring their company into disrepute they're dismissed immediately.

Why people assume there are special rules for new media I don't know: normal business rules apply. You might already be thinking of revisiting some of your contracts for your employees, which is good.

Another question came up at the same event and it was more tricky to manage. If a colleague or employee is deliberately bad-mouthing you on a blog, Facebook or Twitter, then fine, you can take action against them. In this instance, a PR manager in a technology company had a more complex issue. Her developers were really, really keen on the gadgets they made: which was great, if you're in PR then the spokesperson meaning what they say about how neat the devices they make are is a brilliant thing. The thing is, they were so excited they couldn't resist blogging about them. On their own personal blogs. They didn't say 'this is the company view', they didn't use the logo, just their own names – but they would pre-announce stuff that wasn't officially out. 'We're developing functions A, B and C into the next version of product D,' they'd say. The person whose job it was to manage the launches and keep new items away from prying eyes had to find some way of calming these people's enthusiasm and towing the company line without appearing like a control freak. She loved their keenness but hated the fact that the buying public wouldn't now buy the current gadgets because they knew about the stuff that was coming in the near future.