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February 5, 2007 |
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By: Louise Rijk - Bio - Blog |
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Interactive Marketing:
The New World of Internet Marketing - WOMM, SMM and SMO
New forms of Internet marketing using social media and social networking web sites are spreading fast and are striking fear in the hearts of online merchants, corporate CMO’s and executives at traditional media outfits because they are changing the way marketing and advertising have been conducted over the last five decades.
Who is in Control of the Marketing Message?
Social media marketing (SMM), social media optimization (SMO) and word of mouth marketing (WOMM) are new forms of online marketing that are increasingly taking control over brands, the marketing message and advertising away from the business owner and online marketer and putting it in the hands of the consumer. They have created a new marketing and advertising order where the goal is to partner with the consumers or customers so that they may interact with, or call attention to, products or services.
New Technologies That Drive Change
This new trend in marketing and advertising is a result of the Internet infrastructure and new social media technologies, such as blogs, online forums, online user review sites, podcasting and RSS feeds, which have allowed consumers with similar interest to find each other online and communicate better. Other technologies have helped consumers to determine how they want content to be delivered to their desktop or portable device. Consumers can now skip ads (Tivo), use software to block ads and pop-ups, filter email messages and delete cookies. On top of this, marketers have to deal with the fact that consumers have become more skeptical about traditional advertising and rely more and more on friends, colleagues and peers for product and service recommendations.
Adapting to the New Reality
To deal with this new reality online marketers and business owners must adapt to this new social media environment and find creative ways to promote their brands, products and services. However, before we can start working with social media marketing we need to know and understand social media and the subtle differences between social media marketing, social media optimization and word of mouth marketing.
Social Media Tools and Platforms
Social media are online tools and platforms such as blogs, wiki’s, online forums, online user review sites, podcasts, RSS feeds and social networking web sites such MySpace, FaceBook and Digg, that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other. Increasingly, social media tools are used by marketers to place and spread their marketing message and to generate large amounts of web site traffic. The better marketers and business owners understand the inner-workings of those platforms and their communities the better they can leverage them.
Social media tools also create content in the form of text, images, audio and video as a result of online consumer/user dialogues. Some of the characteristics of consumer-generated media (CGM) are:
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CGM is relevant to the product and services experiences of consumers/users. |
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CGM is frequently archived online and indexed in search engines for access by other consumers or others looking for information. |
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CGM can be influenced, but not controlled by marketers. |
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CGM can be monitored and measured. |
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WOMM
Word of Mouth Marketing is based on intense user engagement and primarily relies on finding and empowering “influencers” and “evangelists” to spread the word about a product or service. Influencers are opinion leaders who have extensive knowledge in a specific area, while evangelists are individuals who are empowered to take a leadership role in extending a brand to others. Influencers and evangelists are different and must be approached in a different way. WOMM requires an excellent product or service “influencers” and “evangelists” can use, be excited, and talk about. An estimated 80 percent of all WOMM is still happening offline through face-to-face conversations but there is a growing trend towards online WOMM driven by online consumer activities using Internet technologies. WOMM is more effective for building brand-awareness then for generating large amounts of direct web site traffic.
Social Media Marketing
SMM is primarily driven by off-site activities that are initiated on social media web sites, such as Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, Reddit and others, to spread a message or content (video, text, audio, widgets) by itself if it is compelling enough to be passed around from friend-to-friend.
Whether the objective is increasing inbound links to get more traffic to achieve top web site rankings in the organic search engines or improving brand-awareness and consumer associations, a social media marketing campaign is more effective when you have a prominent profile in the social media. The latter can be established by connecting with the communities at the social media sites your are targeting, by engaging with them, generating content and building trust and visibility to gain the power of authority. Once the power of authority and respect has been achieved and the community has seen you, like you, trust you and they most likely listen to you and buy from you.
Social Media Marketing campaigns can vary from creating compelling text-based content that gets bookmarked at Del.icio.us or Furl or makes the home page at Digg to the creation of a video that spreads virally by placing it on YouTube and other video sharing and social networking web sites.
Social Media Marketing happens primarily online and still requires a lot of experimentation and testing. Therefore the risk of failure is higher then for “traditional” online marketing and advertising, but the rewards can be high for relatively low cost.
Social Media Optimization
Social media optimization is a more narrowly defined activity then social media marketing. Social media optimization is often limited to making a web site or blog more adaptable to social media.
The idea behind social media optimization is that by adding compelling, dynamic and fresh content on a regular basis, e.g. through Tip Sheets, How To listings, white papers, a podcast or blog, a web site gets more easily and frequently linked to and achieves top ranking and visibility in the general and specialty search engine such as Technorati, Blogpulse and podcast directories. Other examples of SMO are the implementation of links to social media web sites to make tagging, sharing book marks (Del.icio.us), and voting for content (Digg, Reddit, Netscape) by visitors easier. For more information on SMO check the 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization.
In the next issues of this newsletter we are going to cover each individual social media marketing technique in more depth and also explore how businesses can benefit from these new methods of online marketing.
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Copyright © 1996-2007. Advanced Media Productions, Inc.
Advanced Media Productions, Inc.
251 West Central St., Suite 28, Natick, Massachusetts 01760, USA
Tel: 508-647-5151 Fax: 508-647-5150
E-mail: info@advmediaproductions.com
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