Is the key to business just being online or having a social media strategy?

I wanted to start a revolution in the way we buy and sell children's clothes and create a boutique like environment where parents could grab a bargain on practically new items and make some money from their child's outgrown clothing.

I knew that there were fabulous kids' clothes in lofts, cupboards, stuffed away at the back of drawers all over the country and that if someone offered to sell these clothes for all the parents who are too busy to do it themselves and give them money, then why wouldn't the business work?

All I needed was a super dooper looking website with a shopping cart and I'd be on my way to being the next online retailing sensation.

Build it and they will come!

Not so.

Built it. Freaked out. Convinced myself I needed a shop.

Why? Because a shop is easier. Isn't it? People come in, chat, buy things, leave with a bag, put the clothes in their wardrobes and you put the money in the bank. Except when they don't come, and they shop online instead, which is what everybody had been trying to tell me for the past two years.

Do. Not. Build. A shop. Do not! Make your business work online!

I thought it would be simple. Or at least, simpler. I thought that if I built a great looking site, sent press releases out to all the right places to announce that 'Ta-dah - what the world is waiting for has finally arrived', then I would be one of those people apologising to customers for the site falling over momentarily due to sheer volume of traffic.

What I didn't embrace quite as wholeheartedly as the idea of success, was the idea of social media and social commerce. At the time of launch, I still kind of thought it was something that other people did…and then the penny dropped.

One of the downsides of running a business on your own is that you don't have a room full of sparks, or at least, one other spark to help turn light bulb flashes in your head into actual live projects, or even to gently move an idea into the trash can because quite frankly, it has no legs or a brain and could cost you thousands. There is nobody to say "How about this?" or "Have you tried that?" or "If you do that, this will happen" or, "Ask Techy Mike - he'll know".

So if you're not that experienced in running an online business i.e. zero experience, it takes a while to learn to ride the digital bike. It's taken me two years with a lot of falling off and a long period where I wanted to throw the digital bike into a wall and run away and buy a four wheeled wooden one that travels at a maximum speed of five miles per hour.

Then I realised what I needed to do. Turn the copy on the website into 'optimised' copy so that it will help to boost the ranking of my website via search engines, start creating a meaningful social media presence and find ways to drive sales using a range of social media platforms.

Be online present, not just 'be online'! Being there is not enough.

How could I even think that I could run a successful online business by just having a website and doing a little bit of PR!

I stopped banging my head against a wall trying to sell things on a website, stepped back and approached my business with an entirely new philosophy.

It's not about selling goods, products or services, it's about increasing social currency.

Ta-dah. Lightbulb. Social media really is everything. Social currency is even more.

Social currency is the extent to which people share a brand or information about a brand as part of their everyday lives. When you start building your social currency, you start to cash in with higher conversion rates and better customer engagement and retention.

Anyone in the digital world will tell you that you need a social media strategy and that's true. The thing is, the very phrase 'social media strategy' is enough to make most people (the ones not whizzing through cyberspace on their digital bikes) feel like the untrendy geek at the uber-cool party.

So how do you build your social currency?

Building social currency is all about connecting with customers on an emotional level. Building emotional bonds means that your brand becomes front of mind for customers so not only will you become familiar to them, they will become loyal to you and become your advocates, champions and No 1 fans.

Think about your personal relationships. People who we have more of an emotional connection with are more important to us than people we just "know". It's exactly the same with brands. Equally, we may be engaged with someone but not emotionally connected. We hear them, but they're talking about themselves all the time and exhausting themselves trying to get their key messages across about their life, their car, their family, their holiday, their blah blah blah, but they haven't connected with us, asked us about ourselves, or shared something of genuine interest or usefulness with us.

This is generally where brands (and most definitely people) fall down.

Of course, engagement can happen in many places - parties, the school gate, the workplace, the bar, over coffee, on a bus and it's no different online. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram - they all become your places to engage.

Real and meaningful engagement is key to building your social currency but hey, don't take my word for it. I'm just the geek in the corner trying desperately to fit in at the party.

If you really want to run with the cool gang rather than hang out with me in geeks corner listening to Kool and The Gang, then check out the study into the impact of social currency which was published by global consulting firm Vivaldi Partners earlier this year.

I know I need a social media strategy for my business but for now, I've just done the social media equivalent of looking at all the fashion magazines to see what the trendy people wear and enter the party with my new outfit. It's a start. It's progress. I may be the untrendy geek beneath the fabulous outfit but who's to know!