You learn a lot from the savvy traveler who has to fly coach. Of course they all carry on; and they’ve learned to stand as close to the miserable airline representative collecting boarding passes as is socially acceptable. This way they are positioned to sail forth with alacrity onto the jetway when their row is called.

This is critical because it guarantees a prized overhead luggage spot - you’re two steps ahead of the vacation travelers bearing overfilled diaper bags and scary-looking back packs with metal paraphernalia hanging off the sides. Fail to position yourself at the gate, and you go straight to on-board luggage check. Which of course means arrival purgatory.

This is a classic example of thinking through your strategy and executing flawlessly. Good practice for business. Execute well and someday you’ll be enjoying that scotch in a real glass in the first-class seats. It’s precisely what you need to do today if you’re thinking about using social media and social networking to market your business. Today you can get onto the “jetway” very quickly through all the new channels but to win the prized spot you have to be there with a powerful message.

The myriad of new media channels for communicating with customers - is the equivalent of marketing on a “coach” budget - it’s cheap and easy to fly. However, you’re not going to secure your spot unless you get your customers’ attention. Setting up a Twitter account is easy; it’s what you say that’s hard. Blogging is a matter of setting up Word Press. The hard part is what to write about.

One of my summer reads has been David Meerman Scott’s best-seller, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, second edition. Meerman’s book sites how savvy organizations are blowing by competitors with smart use of cyber-marketing. No longer tethered to the money-pit of traditional advertising, they are publishing cool stuff and their customers are finding them on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and through direct news releases (which don’t go to the press, but to customers, online publications, etc, avoiding the “middle guy”). With all that viral buzz they’re generating on a small “coach budget” they can probably afford to buy their own corporate jets.

But just like maneuvering onto the plane, execution is everything. The message must be right. It can’t be self-serving. It can’t be about you. It has to be about your customer. If you think like a “publisher” as Meerman suggests, as a “purveyor of information,” you write articles, blogs, white papers, e- books, webinars that are of real value to the people who might buy your product or service. Good social marketing gets your customer thinking about you as a problem solver, not a pusher.

We just completed a project helping one of our clients start a library of customer “stories” - to use in their sales presentations. To be sure, these will be a powerful new tool in getting a real conversation going with customers. What’s great is that if they wish, this client could easily repurpose the stories in a social media strategy. They could turn them into white papers, articles for online publications (third party endorsement), or on their own web site. Taken a step further, their CEO or SVP of sales could record a video and post it on You Tube. Or they could write about it in the company blog.

The point is that stories like the ones we developed have multiple purposes in cyber marketing. On a coach budget, you can get great results. Just remember to tell a story. Give your customers a real-life example of how you can help them. You don’t need a “first class” marketing budget to look “first class” all the way. A good customer story will get people to pay attention, faster than you can say “tweet.”