Social Media Marketing: What It Is, What It’s Not.

Social Marketing:
What It Is

Online social media websites, often referred to “social marketing” or “Web 2.0“, are the various online platforms that encourage user sharing of information and opinion and help individuals to create and post their own content.

Blogs, Wikis, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr are all examples of social websites. The user could be anyone - a customer, prospect, child, CEO, your Mom - anyone willing to go online and use the websites.

Social media websites thrive on user-generated content. In fact, they depend on user-generated content: Users create accounts, create profiles and then post content, whether that content is a blog post, picture, video, music, a link to another website or something else entirely.

This content is largely unfiltered except for certain website’s prohibitions against spam and adult-content. The unfiltered nature of social media content is both the peril and opportunity for businesses engaging the social marketing world. Why? Anyone with access to the internet can go online and post information about you or your company - good or bad. And anyone can pick up that information and redistribute it.

Social Marketing: What It’s Not

Social Media is not traditional “command and control” marketing. In other words, you are never in control of your message like you would be if you purchased an advertisement on television, radio, or a newspaper. You are not purchasing someone’s attention. You are hoping to get their attention by being interesting, thought-provoking or even controversial. And you are not “paying per click” as you could with Google’s PPC program.

However, you can attempt to use social marketing to “seed” conversations about your company. That is, you can put your ideas on the social media websites or on your company blog. But if people don’t like what you put up or worse - find it boring or irrelevant, you are doomed. Online, people can’t be forced to go to a website or watch a video or read a blog post they don’t like. They will simply click away.

If you DO manage to create provocative content, if you put content online that users WANT to share, and send to their colleagues, and link to from their own websites…then you are in the game. You have gone “viral” and you may have the beginnings of a successful social marketing campaign.