Recently in Social Marketing Category

Last week I caught a blog post at FutureNow which cited Ted McConnell, General Manager-Interactive Marketing and Innovation at Procter & Gamble Co from a recent interview in AdAge. To quickly paraphrase both FutureNow and McConnell, social media is mislabeled - it's not a form of media in any traditional sense of the word where people come to engage with information but rather a communication tool in which the user is an active participant and you [the advertiser] are competing to take them away from their intended goal. Acknowledging that social sites really are about a user to user relationship and not about showcasing advertising brings up an interesting question - should you even bother engaging in social spaces? My answer is unequivocally yes but with a different approach than you've ever used before. Click in and I'll explain...

I've devoted a lot of time to writing about ways to engage users on social networking sites without being "noise" and in a longer piece I'm working on right now I mention the idea of using polls as a means of getting attention. That said, getting the right response isn't just about using a tactic, you have to think it out. In the example I'll talk about from an interactive Mazda campaign on LinkedIn I'm not so sure that happened...

It's no secret, user generated content [that would be reviews, forum postings, blog contents, and so forth] drives business to those with a good name and drives it away from those with a bad one. The effects are even more impressive for smaller businesses like those in the travel industry; after all, picking a condo in Hawaii for a week is basically a crap shoot unless there's a comment to direct otherwise. So how do you go about getting your customers to talk about you without building a complex website or spending the time to create your own social campaign? Simple, you ask your customers to do it.

Click in for more information and sample create you can start using tomorrow.

I'm sitting in the airport right now on my way to Las Vegas for DEMA, the annual Scuba Diving industry convention. My involvement in the dive industry started in the very late 90s when I, along with 2 partners, launched ScubaBoard.Com, a forum community, as a part of a large dive network. At that time communities were a new concept for most people and certainly something the dive industry, like many others, was struggling to understand. Still, we were late starters compared to other sites and faced fairly strong competition with both "basement startups" and major publishing companies already running successful forums. Just a few years later ScubaBoard was the largest diving community online and has since gone on to become the most visited site in the industry. So how did we do it? Features.

Everyone knows about social networking these days and if you trust the media or have been to a marketing conference in the last couple years, you probably think you have to be represented in it. But if you own a small business resources are always tight and expanding to new territories isn't something you can just jump into because everyone says to. In this post I'll explore some of the benefits and realities of social media as well as explain who should be involved and who should stay away. Let's begin.