Social media marketing (SMM), social media optimization (SMO) and word of mouth marketing (WOMM) are new forms of social interactive 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.

Social Media Tools and Platforms
This new trend in marketing and advertising is a result of the now dominant use of the Internet infrastructure and increasing adoption of social media tools and platforms, such as blogs, online forums, podcasts, wiki’s, online user review sites, RSS feeds and social networking web sites such MySpace, FaceBook and Digg, which have allowed consumers with similar interest to find each other online, communicate better and share information.

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.

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. This has already begun as social media tools are used by many marketers to place and spread their marketing message and to generate large amounts of web site traffic using social media tools.

Word of Mouth Marketing (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. WOMM requires an excellent product or service “influencers” and “evangelists” can use, be excited, and talk about.

Learn more about Word of Mouth Marketing.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)
SMM is primarily driven by off-site activities that are initiated on social media web sites, such as Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and others, to spread a message or content (video, text article, audio) by itself from-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 compelling message or unique content and prominent profile in the social media.

Social Media Marketing campaigns can vary from creating compelling text-based content that gets bookmarked at Del.icio.us or Furl or by making 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 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.

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Social Media Optimization (SMO)
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 bookmarks (Del.icio.us), and voting for content (Digg, Netscape, Stumbleupon) by visitors easier.

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Business Blog Marketing
Business blogs allow online marketers, business owners and online merchants to engage and communicate directly with their customers and with consumers to build loyalty, online buzz and brand visibility. Through our Business Blog Marketing program we offer an end-to-end service that includes business blog strategy consulting, blog design, installation and training, ongoing blog management and analytics.

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Online Reputation Management
What consumers, customers and industry analysts are saying about your company, brand and even company employees in blogs, newsgroups, forums or social networking web sites is quickly indexed by the search engines and retrieved by the public that is doing research online. By actively monitoring the buzz that is generated about your company, Advanced Media Productions can capture, understand and report on product issues and opinions that consumers and customers share and proactively participate in the conversations to defy bad publicity or repair a damaged company image.

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Podcasting
Podcasts are not longer used primarily for entertainment purposes and are well underway to becoming a low cost, mainstream syndicated audio channel that is increasingly used by businesses to innovate, educate and spread the marketing message.

Learn more about Podcasting.

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