Posts Tagged ‘LinkedIn’
The One Effective Use of Facebook for B2B Marketing
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010You’ve seen the eye-popping statistics: Facebook now has more than 350 million active users. If it were a country, it would be the third most-populous on earth, behind only China and India. TechCrunch predicts that “by this summer (2010) well over half of all Internet users will likely visit Facebook each month.” It’s now the second most-visited site on the web, behind only Google.
Given that level of popularity and traffic, it’s no wonder that marketers have embraced Facebook in a big way. What’s curious, however, is that of the top 50 brands on Facebook according to Slate magazine, not one is a b2b vendor. Not even close. And as Mark Schaefer has noted, b2b Facebook success stories are notoriously hard to come by (he found one).
With a mammoth audience and the acceptance, even embrace, of brands there, why is Facebook success so elusive for b2b marketers? It isn’t demographics. Granted, the potential pool of customers for most b2b companies is minute compared to that for major consumer brands, but given the sheer size and ubiquity of Facebook, there are still a lot of b2b buyers using it.
The challenge rather lies in the way Facebook fan pages are used. I’ve heard countless people, within the b2b community, express the sentiment that “LinkedIn is for business, Facebook is for friends and family.” As such, it’s not surprisingly that many of the entries on Slate’s top Facebook list are lifestyle brands. If you buy a new Audi, you might use Facebook to show it off to your friends, but if you’re part if a buying team that just acquired a new enterprise software system—eh, not so much so. And as one more bit of anecdotal evidence, I have my Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook badges all displayed in the left column of this blog. I pick up a lot of new Twitter followers here, and a fair number of LinkedIn connection requests, but rarely a Facebook invitation.
Still, this doesn’t mean that Facebook can’t serve any purpose for b2b marketing. It can serve one helpful role: humanizing a company. As a very wise b2b sales executive said to me several years ago, “people don’t buy from companies. They buy from people.” With the emergence of social media as a marketing tool, that sentiment is arguably even more true today.
Because of the intimate, informal nature of Facebook, it is the ideal venue to showcase personal content related to your company that may not be appropriate on a corporate website or even a LinkedIn profile. Many employees within b2b companies have email communication with customers and prospects, but never actually talk to them. Or they have phone conversations but never meet face to face. Facebook provides an excellent means for sharing photos and even (limited) personal information, to help put a human face on an organization, and “put a face with the name” or voice of an employee for customers and prospects.
Just a few examples of content that work better on Facebook than in more formal settings are:
- • Photos of employees in casual office settings;
- • Photos of employees and customers interacting, or casual shots of a customer using a product (with permission, of course);
- • Trade show photos;
- • Pictures of employees working on community service projects;
- • Company executives speaking, accepting awards, meeting with VIPs, etc.;
- • Photos of production facilities (for manufactured products);
- • Photos taken with resellers or channel partners;
- • Informal or even humorous videos, such as HubSpot’s spoof of The Office or Resco’s “border battle” video shot before last season’s first Vikings-Packers game;
- • And of course, interaction! Most customers and prospects probably won’t want to interact with your brand on Facebook, but for those who do, it’s important to engage them through this channel.
In short, Facebook provides a place to show the human side of your company, to cut loose just a bit and have some fun. While it may produce a lead now and then, it isn’t a very effective lead generation vehicle. Instead, by humanizing your company and giving a glimpse inside, it’s business value lies primarily in lead nurturing—helping move leads through the buying process. It’s more about making current sales cycles more productive than about generating new potential business.
Because the ROI is likely to be difficult to measure with precision, it’s best to keep the “I” fairly modest. Still, with realistic expectations, using Facebook as a means to put a human face (or faces) on a B2B brand can be one effective component of an overall social media marketing strategy.
Don’t They Know Who You Are? Why Reputation Management is Crucial
Sunday, February 14th, 2010In the old days—like, six or seven years ago—if someone had a bad experience with a company, he or she generally vented about it to a few friends and that was the end of it. The emergence of social media changed all that of course, so now that person can vent online to, essentially, the entire world. And search engines love social media, which helps expose that rant to anyone searching for the company’s name.
Lee Odden recently framed this topic effectively in a post about digital reputation management, noting “There are plenty of CEOs, executives, brand and business managers that are facing the dilemma of what to do about their company and brand reputation online…Companies like Kryptonite Locks, Comcast, Dell, Walmart and Sony have all experienced what it’s like to ignore the influence of the social web and the subsequent effect on how their brands are reflected, both in the search results and within social media channels.”
This Time, It’s Personal
What these CEOs and other executives also need to appreciate is the importance of their personal brand. These individuals are often the “face” of their organizations; as they get quoted in press releases and news articles, pen bylined articles, speak at conferences, and talk to industry influencers and prospective customers, their names can become almost as well known as their brands. That makes it crucial for business leaders even at smaller companies who may not in the past have considered themselves “public figures” to manage not only their firms’ online reputations, but also their own.
A few examples. One executive I know, the president of a software company, shares the first page of Google with a biomedical researcher, a diplomat, a (not exactly best-selling) author, and the Facebook page of a college student from North Dakota. While that isn’t a terrible group to potentially be confused with, this executive has a sufficiently unique name that he should be able to own more of the real estate on this page, including the top spot (he’s currently #5), thereby making himself—and his company—easier to find.
Another executive acquaintance has things a bit worse. He shows up on the first page alright, but several of the links are to dot-com-meltdown era news articles about a company he worked with that had some of the typical problems of tech companies at the time (collapsing stock price, low on cash, disgruntled shareholders etc.). The full story is that he wasn’t the cause of these problems at all; he was hired to fix them, which he did, successfully taking the company prviate and turning it around. But a casual Googler wouldn’t get that story from the page one results without really digging.
On the other side of the ledger are individuals such as Jon Rognerud and Guy Kawasaki. Jon has a somewhat unusual name obviously (and the “Jon” spelling helps), but he isn’t the only person on the planet with that moniker. Yet he owns the first five pages of Google for his identity. Guy owns at least the first ten pages of Google (being a best-selling author
How To Be Seen
Granted, it may not be realistic for executives with more common surnames and less fame to achieve quite those levels, but most could nevertheless dramatically improve their personal online reputation management using the following techniques.
- Buy yourname.com if it is available. Use the domain to build a professional website (e.g., GuyKawasaki.com) or redirect it to a suitable page, such as the Management Team page on your corporate site.
- While you’re at it, spend the $95 to own your personal LookupPage.
- Make sure the Management Team page on your company website is optimized for your name.
- If you can make the time commitment, start your own blog. At the very least, look for opportunities to write guest-posts and/or get interviewed for blogs related to your industry.
- Write an article (or articles) for Google Knol on topics pertaining to your product or service. As an example, here’s one I wrote about records management. You can link to other blog posts, published articles, white papers or other informational content your company has produced about the topic.
- Record a short video introducing yourself and your company to potential customers and anyone else who may be interested. For examples, see the Pitches section on TechCrunch. Use your name in the title of the video (e.g. firstname-lastname-of-companyname.mp4). Upload the video to YouTube and Vimeo so it’s easy to share on blogs and other sites.
- Upload company-related photos—you, other executives on your team, your building, your products, screenshots (if there is any software component to your product), your logo, etc.—to photo-sharing sites like Flickr.
- Start Twittering. Use your real name in your profile.
- Create accounts on social bookmarking sites like Wikio, Mixx, Digg and/or StumbleUpon. Any time there is an online news story or blog post published about your company or product, submit it. Also submit other items that may be of interest to your customers and prospects.
- Hire a social media-savvy PR person to help you get interviewed by prominent bloggers and writers in your industry.
- Consider writing a Wikipedia page about yourself. Keep in mind, however, that you have to be considered a public figure (or at least be able to make the argument that you should be) or the Wikipedia cabal will reject the article and take it down. That means you’ll need to have links to third-party sources who have written about you, and the, er, idiosyncratic folks at Wikipedia will have to agree. For example, Tim Young the relief pitcher for the Expos and Red Sox has a Wikipedia page, but Tim Young, CEO of on-demand social networking platform Socialcast doesn’t.
- Create and maintain profile pages on social networking and directory sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Naymz, Jigsaw, Plaxo, ZoomInfo, CrunchBase (for technology executives), and VisualCV.
Professional corporate “evangelists” like Scott Monty and Christopher Barger, not surprisingly, tend to show up pretty well on search. But shouldn’t the CEO—particularly at smaller firms—be one of a company’s biggest evangelists? Stakeholders may very well think so. As a top executive, you are a public figure, and people will search for your name on the web. Online reputation management gives you at least some control over what they’ll find.
Note: this post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in January 2009.
How Social Media Changed the Sales Cycle into the Buying Cycle
Friday, January 15th, 2010Back in prehistoric times (before the Internet, that is), b2b buyers learned about products and services by reading (print) magazines and (printed) analyst reports. Once they developed a short list of vendors for consideration, they contacted the companies (using phones, which were connected via wires) and the companies sent them (printed) sales collateral by mail (postal, that is). Then sales people would contact the prospects and use a “consultative” sales process. Buyers would tell each sales rep all about their company, industry and problems, and each sales rep in turn would then explain why his or her product/service was absolutely the best fit to meet the buyer’s needs. Marketers spent a lot of time creating attractive sales collateral materials–brochures, specification sheets and the like–and getting these printed on nice, glossy paper. Store rooms and offices were full of these glorious materials.
Then the Internet came along, and despite pronouncements that it would “change everything,” it really didn’t for the first several years. Sure, it was a leap forward in distribution technology: websites replaced printed magazines and reports, email replaced postal mail and faxes, phones lost their wires, and online conferencing reduced, somewhat, the need for travel. But processes didn’t really change much; marketers still spent a lot of time producing brochures and spec sheets, only now there were more often delivered in PDF form than printed. The sales process benefited from electronic communications, but remained largely the same. Detailed information about vendors and their offerings was still limited, enabling marketing and sales to act as gatekeepers of information. Even in the late 1990′s, sales people were still trained on how to control and manage the sales process.
Things began to change when blogging became popular about seven years ago. Established voices (journalists and analysts) had a new channel for expression. Customers, competitors, and other people with expertise in a given area even if they “had no dog in the fight” became new information sources for prospective buyers. Blogs were different from other forms of communication: less formal, more matter-of-fact, (sometimes) unbiased, and most importantly, they provided the opportunity for feedback. Readers could respond to and extend the conversation through comments. Marketing and sales were still largely in control, but buyers were entering sales cycles with more and better information.
But it’s been the explosion of social media and user-generated content over the past three years that has really changed the sales process. Prospects can ask questions, within or beyond their social networks. Anyone can answer; not just the traditional “experts,” but anyone inside or outside of a vendor organization, including customers. Journalists, analysts and other industry influencers have new channels for communication. Employees who in the past were far removed from customers, or at least certainly from prospects, can join online conversations. Customers can say pretty much the same things they’ve always said, only now instead of talking to only a few close colleagues and peers, their words can reach thousands or tens of thousands of social media readers and participants.
The result is that prospects can learn far more about an offering before ever contacting the vendor. Marketing has more involvement before the sale; marketers can’t control the conversations, but they need to monitor them and participate. By the time a prospective buyer contacts a vendor, they are closer to a decision and their information needs reduced to a small number of very specific questions (almost always including price). And they no longer have time for that “consultative sale;’ just as they are coming to the sales conversation armed with a tremendous amount of information about the vendor and it’s offerings, they expect the sales person to know about their company, needs and industry trends as well. No wonder sales groups are among the heaviest corporate users of social media. Tools like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs not only enable sales pros to learn more about their prospects before the sale, they also raise the expectation that sales people will do so.
This is not necessarily bad news for sales. Social media has the potential to lengthen marketing cycles but shorten sales cycles, and by enabling both sides to begin the process knowing more about each other, to allow for higher-value conversations.
All of this is one reason webbiquity, or web presence optimization (WPO) is so important. Prospects are going to be checking you out online, well beyond your website, long before they have “raised their hands” and made themselves known to you. What will they find?
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Best of 2009: Social Media Marketing, Part 1
Sunday, January 10th, 2010With the rapidly increasing use of social media tools for marketing and PR comes growing pressure to demonstrate results. But what metrics are really most appropriate for social media measurement? How can you monitor everything that’s being said about your company, competitors and key industry topics across the social media landscape without spending a fortune on monitoring software? Is your social media strategy built on a solid foundation, or is it more like a Hollywood movie set—a pretty facade with nothing behind it? Which tools are most important for social media participation, analyzing what’s being said, and separating important substance from the noise?
Discover the answers to these questions and others here in more of the best posts on social media from this year.
ROI Is Dead by StraightUpSearch
This post suggests that marketers should focus on a different ROI when calculating the value of social media efforts: “return on insight.” Traditional ROI measures fail to take into account the search value of social media engagement, as well as the value of the customer service and product enhancements that social listening and interaction can provide.
Facebook Lets Users Open Up Profiles by MediaPost Online Media Daily
Mark Walsh helpfully outlines the recent changes Facebook has made to its privacy settings, though noting that “profiles opened to everyone, however, will still not turn up in searches on Google or other outside search engines.”
How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard by aimClear
Marty Weintraub provides a remarkable and highly detailed guide to setting up a social media reputation monitoring dashboard using free tools such as Google Alerts, iGoogle, Google Analytics, and keyword tools along with Excel. The set up takes some time, but the end result is a powerful monitoring tool without the cost of a paid social media monitoring application. This tutorial is clear and generously illustrated with screenshots.
Is Your Online Marketing Strategy All Tweet and No Meat? by HubSpot
Rick Burnes notes that without a strong content strategy to back up social media efforts, marketers risk the “all hat, no cattle” syndrome: lots of attention on Twitter and Facebook, but no compelling content to back it up and turn the curious into the converted. Compelling thought-leadership content, blog posts, white papers, video and SEO efforts support and create long-term value for social media tactics.
A free DIY approach to social media by iMedia Connection
Rebecca Weeks provides a “cheat sheet” with five key tactics to increase website traffic through social media, including interaction on the most popular social networking sites, using free Twitter tools to maximize the value of that platform, and getting exposure on social news sites. Another noteworthy post from this publication is Facebook is a Personal CRM for Baby Boomers, in which Daniel Flamberg reports on an Accenture study showing that in early 2009, “boomers posted a 59 percent increase in use of social networks; a rate of adoption 30 times faster than any other age group.” Facebook’s InsideFacebook blog reports that in February and March of this year, the number of Facebook users age 35 and over doubled. Boomers use Facebook somewhat differently than younger age groups as well; Flamberg notes that “they are more reticent to share information, less likely to leave comments and a bit slower to join groups.”
8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams by Social Media Today
Noting that with the collective millions of tweets produced every day, there is “an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information,” Yung-Hui Lim reviews Twitter analytics tools that can help with the task, including Twitalyzer, Trendistic (formerly Twist), Twitt(url)y and TweetStats.
What’s In Your Social Media Toolkit? by Dave Fleet
In this short but useful post, Dave Fleet outlines the set of social media tools he finds most useful on a daily basis, such as Google Reader for keeping up with blogs, Twitter for real-time communications, Radian6 for social media monitoring, and LinkedIn for social networking.
Video search 101: Marketing and optimization by iMedia Connection
Noting some statistics on the explosive growth of online video, David L. Smith explains how marketers can use video search engine optimization (VSEO) and video search engine marketing (VSEM) to maximize both the organic and paid search value of video assets.
Forrester: B2B Marketers Need To Keep Up With Business Technology Buyers On Social Media by Forrester Research
It’s pretty rare to include a press release in a best of list here—actually, this is probably the first time ever—but this one includes key statistics on how b2b buyers use social media on the job. As the release notes, “Despite the fact that 77 percent of business technology decision-makers engage with social media on the job, most B2B marketers are not effectively using social technologies to influence the purchasing decisions of their customers.” For those marketers, reading this announcement is a starting point.
6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan by Social Media Today
Lorna Li provides an outstanding roadmap for b2b social media marketing, starting with an understanding of what social media is and what it can and can’t do. She explains how to use tactics like blogger outreach, social networking and social news marketing to create engagement with prospects and move them toward your solutions. Another noteworthy post from SMT is Social Media ROI – a financially sound method. After noting that no “even ‘somewhat’ acceptable method for calculating marketing ROI” exists, Axel Schultze goes on to propose a formula for measuring the ROI of social media interactions. But measuring the return from social media investments is problematic for several reasons, and the notion of being able to do so with any accuracy remains controversial, as indicated in the large number of comments generated by Axel’s post.
Top 25 Social Networks by Navel Marketing
Brian Critchfield reports on the top social networks ranked by traffic. The list also shows previous rank—indicating which networks are growing and which faltering. While most of the sites on the list are hardly surprising (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), there are a few unexpected results, like Tagged at #6 and Yuku at #16.
Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation by Mashable
Noting that “Depending on how popular and well-known your brand is, there may be few or many people talking about it,” Dan Schawbel recommends setting up an RSS feed reader and Delicious account, then using free monitoring tools such as Google Alerts, Technorati, Twitter and Social Mention to keep tabs on discussions of your company and products across social media platforms. For those marketers more serious about social media engagement, and a budget to back it top, Dan wrote a follow-up post detailing the Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For, including Buzzlogic, Radian 6 and Cision.
5 forces that are strangling conversational marketing by iMedia Connection
Tom Hespos warns marketers against five practices that can damage a brand in the social media sphere, like failing to think about conversational marketing strategically, or flooding Twitter with brand messages rather than engaging in true dialogue.
11 Reasons You Can’t Ignore Social Media in 2009 by Digital Labz
Social media now has wide adoption as a marketing and PR tool, but for those still reluctant to use tools like blogs, video, LinkedIn and Twitter for marketing, Eric Brantner offers almost a dozen reasons to get started, such as “social media is gaining trust,” it’s fast, it’s passionate, and it’s free (at least the tools are for the most part).
Study: Company Blogs Lead Social Media Options by MediaPost
Mark Walsh reports that “blogging (is) the most important lead-generation source among social media options, followed by StumbleUpon, YouTube, Facebook, De.lic.ious and Digg” (not a surprising result, considering that those other sites tend to support a corporate blog, not replace it). He also quotes a HubSpot study finding that three-quarters of bloggers in small to midsize companies say that “their company blogs were ‘useful,’ ‘important,’ or ‘critical’ to their business.”
Another MediaPost article worth checking out is Scout Labs Offers Cheaper Way To Monitor Consumers. Gavin O’Malley writes that Scout Labs offers “a more economical consumer sentiment-tracking service for agencies and marketers” than Nielsen BuzzMetrics or TNS Cymfony. The company has an impressive list of clients using its tool to monitor and analyze brand conversations across the social media landscape.
Top 5 SlideShare Groups – A Rich Learning Environment for Social Media by uber.la
John McElhenney praises SlideShare as an innovative social media tool and links to his favorite groups for learning about and sharing knowledge of social media.
How to be a LinkedIn superstar by iMedia Connection
Larry Weintraub explains how to get the most out of LinkedIn, from creating the right kind of profile, building connections and soliciting recommendations to working with LinkedIn groups.
Social Media Marketing 101, Part 1 by Search Engine Watch
For those either still new to social media, or just struggling to explain its value to a manager or client, Ron Jones provides an excellent explanation of social media, the different types of sites on the social media landscape, and the marketing and PR benefits of using social media.
50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business by Social for Business
As the title promises, here are more than four dozen ideas on how to use Twitter for business, categorized into five groups including “Ideas about WHAT to Tweet” (e.g., ask questions, retweet interesting information from others, and when retweeting your own stuff, make sure it has value to the reader and isn’t just self-promotion) and “Some Positives to Throw Back” when people argue that Twitter is a waste of time, such as Twitter’s value in breaking real-time news and quickly collecting market feedback.
The Periodic Table of the Social Media Elements by eyecube
This very clever and ambitious post compares social media to chemistry, and lays out a “periodic table” for social media encompassing different behaviors (e.g., sharing and listening), key influencers (David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis, Joe Pulizzi, etc.), tools (delicious, Feedburner, LinkedIn et al.), practices, blogs and more.
7 Social Media Predictions for 2009 by Search Engine Watch
Erik Qualman produced this list of predictions in January. Granted, perhaps none were particularly daring, but his clairvoyance has proven remarkably accurate to this point. “Social media continues its rapid growth”—check. “Marketing budgets will continue shrinking”—yup. “Many free services will become defunct”—hmm, not yet, but there are still three months of 2009 to to.
Social Media and the Enterprise Customer – Wired PR by uber.la
John McElhenney lays out a process for mapping your social media communities, then capitalizing on their structures by letting your customers and partners tell your story for you.
What The F**K is Social Media?
Marta Kagan has put together possibly the best single presentation on social media ever. Not sure how to explain the potential and elements of social media marketing to your boss or client? Borrow some wisdom from Marta’s slide deck:
20 Totally Free Buzz Pocket Mining Tools by aimClear
Want to know what’s being said in social media circles about your company, competitors and industry but don’t have the budget for a tool like Techrigy SM2 or Radian 6? The inscrutable Marty Weintraub reviews 20 free tools for monitoring social media buzz, including StumbleUpon Recently & All Time Most Popular Hot Tags, Facebook Lexicon. Twitter search engines, Google Advanced Blog Search and a few you’ve probably never heard of.
7 Reasons Your Social Media Marketing Failed (and how to fix it!) by Stuntdubl
Todd Malicoat advises marketers on how to avoid social media marketing failure by outlining seven reasons results may fall short of expectations, including “you chose the wrong channels” and “your content sucked.”
5 Social Media Mistakes To Avoid by ZoopMedia
In another post on the theme of social media mistakes to avoid, Justin Wright offers up five surefire ways to fail, such as spamming the networks with only your own content and not taking full advantage of the messaging and SEO potential of social media profiles.
The Six Fears of Facebook and Other Social Media Channels by Internet Marketing Strategies and Secrets
Bob Cargill analyzes the fears that keep some people out of the social media realm. These are individual fears (e.g., fear of rejection, loss of privacy, time commitment) rather than the social media ostrich type fears that prevent businesses from taking advantage of it.
How to Make Money Off Social Media (originally titled: Selling Social Media to Your Clients) by Webdesigner Depot
Despite the spammy title, this is a very worthwhile piece for corporate b2b marketers or those who work with them. Most helpfully, for those just getting started with social media (or not sure if they’ve started correctly), this post provides a “Suggested Social Media Package” with a list of must-haves (e.g., a WordPress blog, Twitter account, Facebook page) and nice-to-haves (e.g., a YouTube channel and Live Help component on your website). One caveat to the advice given in this post: for businesses, a Facebook page is generally a better option than a Facebook group.
The Four C’s of Social Media Marketing
Monday, December 28th, 2009Social media is a bit like art—most of us are pretty sure we know what it is, but articulating a common definition can be challenging. There are many definitions of social media floating about of course, they just aren’t consistent.
Social media “are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information” according to Wikipedia. It is “the use of technology combined with social interaction to create or co-create value” according to John Jantsch, a “shift in how people discover, read, and share news and information and content…a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) per Brian Solis, “online communications in which individuals shift fluidly and flexibly between the role of audience and author” in the view of Joseph Thornley, and “a category of practices, technology, tools, and online sites that are based in social relationships, participation, and user-generated content” in the words of Liz Strauss.
My own definition incorporates the 4 C’s of social media, or the “4 Cons” if you will: “online tools that permit users to create content, within a given context, to help establish connections and engage in conversations.” Okay, that’s a bit awkward in words, but makes more sense as a picture:
The starting point is typically content—a blog post, video, podcast, article, photo, a resource such as an industry-specific glossary or calendar of events, or other means of expression. The context in this case is the particular tool, website or other online venue where the content will be shared: in a blog, a social networking or bookmarking site, a media sharing site (e.g. Flickr or YouTube), a wiki, a forum, a Squidoo lens, wherever. Sharing content enables one to make connections; to find people with similar interests. For example, someone with an interest in enterprise data warehouse technology will probably read data warehouse blogs, watch data warehouse videos, listen to data warehouse podcasts, and follow people who write about enterprise data warehouse technology on Twitter.
Finally, sharing content with those interested in the topic leads to conversations. These can take the form of interaction on a social sharing site like Searchles, blog comments, Twitter replies, LinkedIn messages, writing on a Facebook wall, or other means of online dialog.
The online conversations themselves are content (closing the loop), and can also lead to the creation of new content: for example, a conversation with Cece Salomon-Lee that began with blog comments and Facebook led to her writing several guest posts on this blog, and a conversation on Twitter led to me writing a guest post on SEOmoz.
However defined, it’s clear that social media embodies a set of tools that enable anyone to be a media producer as well as a consumer, and that force traditional media outlets to now participate rather than just broadcast. As the recent example of Skittles first turning its website entirely over to social media and then pulling back, companies and brands are still struggling with exactly how to best utilize these tools. But with the continuing explosion of new tools and venues for online social interaction, the worst mistake marketing and PR practitioners can make is to have no social media strategy at all.
Note: This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in March 2009.
