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March 26, 2007 |
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By: Louise Rijk - Bio - Blog |
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Interactive Marketing:
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
In our previous issue we covered the characteristics, benefits and execution of a Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) campaign. In this issue we are digging deeper into Social Media Marketing and discuss how you can use a social media marketing campaign to your benefit. In our next issue we focus Social Media Optimization (SMO), another form of social interactive marketing.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is initiated on social media web sites such as Digg, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Reddit and relies on the premise that exceptionally good, outrageous or unique content, in the form of video, text, audio, widgets, can be distributed throughout the social web to invite people to interact and to share it with other people.
Unlike WOMM, where the primary goal is to target influencers to spread the message online and offline, social media marketing is a marketing strategy that is based on connecting directly with the target communities, engaging them and generating content or discussion online. This can range from submitting a how-to article or tip sheet to content voting web sites like Digg and Reddit or bookmarking it at Del.icio.us and Magnolia, putting images up on Flickr, uploading videos to YouTube and establishing a business profile at social media web sites like MySpace and Facebook or just passing a web page on to a friend via email. Once a message has been released it should be appealing enough to travel through social web by itself.
A social media marketing campaign also has potential to extend into the mainstream media such as radio, newspapers and TV. When it gets enough attention in the social media, there is a chance it will be picked up by the traditional media and the reach goes even further.
Social media marketing is not about technology, but more about ideas. The better the idea the more reach and visibility you get and that almost always translates into more brand-awareness and back links. The latter increases web site rankings on the organic search results pages at the major search engines, which in turn translates into more web site traffic. Interacting directly with the target communities through message board participation, blog comments and podcasts, builds respect, trust and reputation for you, your product or service. Messages almost always travel better and faster through the social web when they are generated by people that have built a reputation as a trusted expert.
There are more than 300 social media web sites and each has a specific focus, community culture and “social glue”. The best social media web sites for a social media marketing campaign are those that are supported by large public communities. Here is a selection of prominent social media web sites:
| Blog Search Engines |
Social News Web Sites
(Content voting)
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Shared Bookmark Sites |
- Technorati
- Blog Pulse
- Bloglines
- Google Blog Search |
- Digg
- Reddit
- NewsVine
- Netscape
- Popurl’s
- ShoutWire
- Hi5
- Fark
- Stumbleupon |
- Del.icio.us
- Furl
- AddThis
- Shadow
- Slashdot
- Yahoo MyWeb
- Squidoo
- Ma.gnolia
- Binklist |
| Collaborative Text Content Aggregators |
Photo Sharing |
Video sharing |
- Wikipedia
- Wikihow
- Prefound
- Zimbio
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- Flickr
- Google Images
- Picasa
- Fotolog
- Ringo
- WebShots
- Imageshack
- Photobucket
- Pbase
- Fotki
- Buzznet |
- YouTube
- Revver
- Metacafe
- Google Video
- Yahoo Video
- SearchforVideo
- MySpace Video
- iFilm
- Grouper
- Break.com
- Bittorent.com
- Eefoof
- Flixya |
| Podcasting Directories |
Social Forums |
Social Network Sites |
- PodcastAlley
- iPodder
- Yahoo Podcast
- Podzinger
- iTunes |
- Ezboard |
- MySpace
- FaceBook
- Bebo
- Piczo
- Xanga
- Tagworld
- Tagged (Teens)
- Eons (over 50) |
| Social Q&A Web Sites |
Mash Up Web Sites
(remixing of content) |
Social Shopping Sites |
- Yahoo Answers
- Answerbag
- Wondir
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- Ning
- Snapse |
- Kaboodle.com
- Wists.com
- ThisNext.com |
Benefits of a SMM Campaign
Social media marketing campaigns provide businesses with new ways of online marketing that no longer rely primarily on traditional online advertising with large budgets, such as banner ad campaigns and paid search advertising. The main benefits of a social media marketing campaign are:
Back links - Social media marketing campaigns generate incoming links to a web site and as a result higher web site rankings in the organic search results at the major search engines.
Web site traffic - Social media marketing campaigns generate more web site traffic from profile pages, links embedded in messages that travel virally throughout the social web and high ranking web pages in the organic search results.
Increased brand-awareness - A social media marketing campaign, when executed correctly, builds more brand-awareness through visibility, online reputation and authority in the social media.
Planning a SMM Campaign
Social Media Marketing is attractive to many marketers because it can create a lot of free web site traffic, but it is not something that just any online marketer can pull off easily because it is highly dependent on message originality or outrageousness. A recent poll among online marketers by Dynamic Logic has indicated that 50 percent of more than 1,000 respondents felt that viral or social media marketing is not something every marketer can do.
A social media marketing campaign will be more than a link building campaign when it is well planned with content that is prepared for a target audience and with a message that engages them. To be successful a social media marketing campaign must be about the products, services and brand of a business and not about something that is “cool”. The best way to promote content through a social media marketing campaign is to make it easy for the user to pass it along and have the community decide in which direction it should go from here. If the content is good enough, it will spread by itself. There are many things a marketer can do to facilitate the viral distribution of content through the social web, e.g. adding links or icons within the content to encourage bookmarking of content at Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Furl or content voting at Digg, Newsvine or Stumbleupon.
Setting campaign goals and objectives upfront is one of the most important exercises you need to engage in before a social media marketing campaign can start. Here are some guidelines you can use to put your campaign on the right track:
Goals and objectives - Set your campaign goals and objectives before you execute the campaign so that you can track and measure the campaigns’ performance. What is the goal? What are the key performance indicators? What makes the campaign a success?
Target audience - First, research the social media sites you plan to target for your campaign. That way you get an understanding of what kind of content is popular on those sites. Knowing your audience and how to reach them via social media is one of the most important aspects of social media marketing. This way you avoid submitting an article about quilting on Digg where the audience tends to be more interested in technology related content. You will find that sites like MySpace and YouTube are more appropriate for a subject like quilting since they have groups on many general topics. If your goal is link building MySpace or Wikipedia are not good sites for seeding your content because they do not produce outgoing links. Social networking web site are notorious for generating large numbers of untargeted traffic with low conversion rates, so make sure you target the most relevant social media web sites.
In the next issue of this newsletter series we cover Social Media Optimization (SMO).
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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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