This guest post is by Zephrin Lasker, co-founder and CEO of Pontiflex, an e-mail and social acquisition technology startup based in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

The digital marketing industry is a cornucopia of buzz. It’s impossible to throw a stone without hitting a meaningless acronym or piece of jargon (and I’m not a very good stone thrower). And there’s no area where the buzz is as widespread as social media marketing. Don’t get me wrong – I am a major believer in the power of social media marketing to increase brand awareness and enable a stronger bond between the consumer and the marketer. It’s just that, too often, the buzz tends to drown out the real value.

The good news is that despite the clutter of extraneous buzz in the industry, social media marketing is here to stay. A 2010 eMarketer report projects that ad spend on social networks is projected to reach $6.7 billion in 2010. This represents a 20 percent growth compared to last year, and accounts for as much as 6.7 percent of the total ad spend for 2010. A survey of CMOs conducted by the American Marketing Association predicted that this share will rise to as much as a fifth of the total ad spend in the next few years.

And yet, for all this growth, many marketers have still yet to fully leverage the benefits of social media marketing, and some remain hesitant to even begin to engage such a program, simply because they don’t know where to start. The question I often hear from marketers is, “Just what is the first thing I should do to start a social marketing program?”

Let’s try and arrive at the answer to this question by answering another question: “What is the kind of marketing program that works best on social networks?”

As an example, let’s take a closer look at campaigns on Facebook – a sample that is truly representative of the entire social networking universe. After all, the social networking giant accounts for more than half the total Internet audience in America and 50 percent of the total time spent by American consumers on the Internet.

Earlier this year, Sarah Smith, Ad Operations Manager for Facebook, said that the average click-through rate for campaigns on Facebook was in the 0.04-0.05 percent range. This figure, to say the least, is not overwhelming. On the other hand, social media agency virtue estimates that the click-through rates on Facebook wall posts were as high as 6.5 percent. To state these findings clearly, only 0.04-0.05 percent of people would click on a banner advertisement for a brand on a social network. However, that number increases exponentially when the brand endorsement is user-generated.

This clearly tells us that the first step that a marketer should take to run a successful social marketing program is to acquire the right users for their social networking group. These are the people who will interact with the brand – interactions that are posted on their news feeds for all of their friends to see and click on.

But how can marketers connect with the consumers most interested in their products and services? How can they acquire the user data – the names, emails and social networking handles – of people they can engage on social networking sites?

A truly comprehensive approach will encompass capturing the user data of two sets of people:

People visiting your site or landing page – These are the consumers who are already interested in your product or product category and who are more likely to give you their contact information.

There are a number of ways you can capture the user data of your site visitors, and it is recommended that you give people choice in how they want to share their user data with you.

For starters, you can provide a site registration form. People fill out their contact information and their information is sent to you when they hit the “submit” button. You can also use plug-ins provided by third-party services like Facebook or Open ID. By using these plug-ins, users can submit their contact information directly from their Facebook, Gmail or Yahoo! accounts.

A good landing page will incorporate more than one of these elements and enable consumer choice.

People who are not on your site or landing page – Even if you are one of the most frequently visited sites on the Internet, there’s a good chance that your ideal prospects and customers are not on your site. They are on other websites – including those belonging to the competition. You can capture the user data of people who are not on your site by running search ads or sign-up ads.

We all know about search advertising. Search ads, which are typically priced on a cost-per-click pricing model, allow you to reach users who are searching for your product or industry category.

But what about the people who are not searching for your products or services? To reach them, you can run sign-up ads. Sign-up ads allow consumers to submit their information to the advertisers inside the ad itself. There’s no click-through. User information is sent from the publisher to the advertiser in real-time. The advertiser pays only for qualified sign-ups. Sign-up ads are the most direct way to acquire and pay for user data.

Once you acquire the user data of people interested in your brand, you can engage them in a number of ways via email, Facebook and Twitter. You can read more about acquiring user data and engaging users on social communities in the Pontiflex social marketing guide for brands. It draws on real-world examples to illustrate how some of our industry’s best social marketers are building and engaging vibrant social communities. I hope you’ll find it useful – and buzz-free.