Social Media Marketing - the first step
“Communities can build amazing things but you have to be part of that community and you can’t abuse them”. Jimmy Wales (Co-founder of Wikipedia), Keynote Speech South by Southwest Interactive 2006.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) or more appropriately named (in my view) Social Media Marketing (SMM), is becoming mainstream.
The term social media is a broad concept that describes the many applications that allow individuals to communicate with one another and to track events across the web in real-time such as Digg, MySpace, YouTube etc., and social networking refers to the exchange of interpersonal information through these websites.
Using social media as a marketing tool is rapidly becoming more popular as companies realize that they need to get in front of their prospective customers wherever they may congregate online.
The most important thing to remember is the quote from Jimmy Wales above in that you must become part of the community before you can effectively use the community.
If you haven’t already you should begin to become familiar with the SMM space and prepare for the future. To that end I suggest you spend time on the sites below to see which may be most suitable for marketing your company products or services.
When you have a short list designate someone in your company (or do it yourself) and build a reputation within the chosen communities. Then (and only then) will your future SMM efforts be consistently rewarded.
One tip to start with, choose a username that is associated with your company and if you are active in more than one community use the same username in all of them.
Just click on the logo to visit the site, there are 55 of them.
Social Shopping
ThisNext is a communal consumer site for users to talk about the lastest must have items. Gadgets, fashion, products for the home etc., all chosen by the ThisNext community.
Crowdstorm users recommend products and write comments about them, and the best items bubble up to the top.
When users see an item on the web they are interested in they hit a bookmarklet and Kaboodle will automatically grab the image and relevant information from the page. Users can also explore what others are bookmarking and comment on their choices.
The Stylehive is a collaborative shopping community where contributors can work together to share and discover the hottest stores, designers, trends, and must have products.
StyleFeeder is a way to find, share and keep track of shopping stuff online using visual bookmarks.