Monday, April 27, 2009

Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, LinkedIn? What a busy social life

An important part of New Media Marketing is the integration of the various Social Media vehicles. For many Social Media is a new type of building friends and relationships. This is also true for businesses where we are concerned with customer relationships and sales. In this case we refer to it as Social Media Marketing.

One of the first couple of blogs in this New Media Marketing series dealt with the arrival of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 users took for personalization and collaboration. This is also one of the major discriminators of Social Media. Social Media differs from traditional media of newspapers, broadcast, books, etc. in that with Social Media the audience can participate in social media by adding comments and stories themselves.

Social media has the following characteristics:
  • It is involved with a number of different social media channels.
  • Social Media changes over time. Actually the more participants the faster the amount of change
  • You cannot have social media without assuming and encouraging the audience to be part of your sales or creative process.
A question often asked: “Is social media accurate?” Yes and no. Statements may be made about your products/services that may not be true. However, if your customers reject them, you better fix them ASAP if you want to be successful. Guidelines when it comes to this:
  • Social Media uses the collective, the wisdom of the crowd – they cannot be entirely wrong
  • Social Media is effective when used for participation and influence not command and control.
Marketing classically deals with awareness -> consideration -> purchase. Social media feedback is user generated: use -. form opinion -> talk. This talk must be captured and made part of the marketing consideration. Social media is word-of-mouth. It is based on actual post-purchase experience. This is critical to help maintain the perceived quality aspect of your brand.

In terms of psychobabble, Social media follows Reed’s Law. David Reed’s work at MIT developed the Law of the Pack. This holds that the value of a network grows more powerful as the network grows. Thus a network of 100 customers is much more powerful than a network of 10 customers.

The simplest and effective way to jump into the Social Media Marketing is to use the New Media Marketing vehicle of the blog.

But to at least starting looking at all the various vehicles out there, here are just a few:

Microblog Services:
Twitter (http://twitter.com)
Tumblr (http://tumblr.com)
Plurk (http://plurk.com)
Seesmic (http://seesmic.com)

Multimedia Sites
Flickr (http://www.flickr.com)
Photobucket (http://www.photobucket.com)
YouTube (http://www.youtube.com)
Seesmic (http://seesmic.com)
Metacafe (http://www.metacafe.com)

Taggin Services:
Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us)
Stumble Upon (http://www.stumbleupon.com)

Social Sites
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com)
MySpace (http://www.myspace.com)

Business sites
AdGabber (http://www.adgabber.com)
LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com)
Plaxo Pulse (http://www.plaxo.com)

Please share with us any others that you may be using.

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