Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad.  Moreover, it’s a terrific extension of your content marketing strategy.

What’s clear from current research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.

Social media marketing is here to stay.  If you are not already active in venues such as a business blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Slideshare, and YouTube, you should be asking yourself whether it’s way past time to jump in with both virtual feet.

The answer to the question is yes with an important caveat…

…Before making the commitment to one or many possible social media outlets, it is vital to determine whether:

• you understand the target audience that you intend to reach
• you have something valuable to communicate to that target audience
• you have someone with the time, skill, and enthusiasm to execute a consistent social media program–either inside or outside your organization
• you will make the time to listen and respond to your social media audience.

There is nothing sadder than a business blog whose most recent post was a year ago. And, there is nothing less impressive than a Facebook fan page with only a few fans and hardly any messages to or from those fans.

Yes, social media can be an extremely effective marketing tool. But, you will need to make a serious company commitment to ensure that it is effective for your organization.

Social Media is the First Cousin to Content Marketing

Social media is really all about content marketing. We have often written about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers.  And, that sounds an awful lot like social media as Wikipedia defines it:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Because social media is in a constant state of flux with new technologies and tools coming and going you might feel intimidated at ever trying to understand the essence of social media. But as Paul Gillen explains in his excellent book Secrets of Social Media Marketing, “there is nothing mysterious about social media. The practices that we all use to maintain meaningful relationships in our personal lives apply just as well online. It’s just that the media is different.”

In a sense, social media goes back to the earliest times, when people gathered together in the marketplace and shared information about crops, food, neighbors, the evil King, and rumors of a scary dragon lurking in the forest.

In the 21st century, we talk about the same sort of stuff, but much of it has moved online and become highly mobile thanks to the Internet, iPhones, iPads, and a host of other leading-edge devices.

Just a few years ago, social media was a relatively marginal phenomenon. Today,  just like the Internet, it is absolutely mainstream and therefore belongs as a core part of your marketing mix.

Five Reasons Why You Should Begin Your Social Media Marketing Efforts Now:

1. Your customers are using it to make buying decisions. Millions of web users, both in the business to consumer and business-to-business markets, are reading blogs visiting Facebook, and tweeting daily. They are relying increasingly on social media for buying information in both the b2b and b2c worlds.

2. Smart news organizations are with the social media program. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and your local newspaper have made social media fundamental to how they learn and how they report.  If it’s good enough for their information gathering and sharing where it really counts, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us.
3. Your competitors are using it. You’re almost certainly paying attention to your smartest competition.  I’d be surprised if most of them haven’t already dived headfirst into social media waters.  Organizations as diverse as law firms, interior designers, real estate agents, and roofing companies are using blogs, podcasts, videos, and user communities such as Facebook to demonstrate their expertise and thought leadership. Don’t let those tough competitors outmarket you via social media.
4. It can be your most cost effective marketing strategy.  The required financial investment in creating a blog, for example, can be close to zero.  The real investment will be in time and thought required to craft a content marketing strategy which provides valuable information to your customers and prospects.  You may need to hire specific content creation resources either internally or externally.
5. Your old-style marketing is less and less effective. Because buyer behavior has changed, you cannot expect traditional advertising and public relations alone to drive buyers to your business as it did a decade ago.  You may certainly want to use those traditional tools to drive them to your online home. That’s where you can prove to prospective customers that you are a reliable supplier who can be trusted, based on your knowledge and understanding of your their problems.  A regular blog, a Facebook fan page, an uploaded Slideshare presentation or a series of informative YouTube videos may be just the ticket to prove that you are the best choice to provide essential solutions.

Summing Up the Social Media Marketing Imperative

You can use core social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, both effectively and inexpensively to compete against competitors large and small. But, as with every content marketing effort, it’s vital to make a consistent long-term commitment and to build your social media strategy on a solid understanding of your target customers. By understanding those customers, you will be able to communicate and to interact with those customers in a meaningful way.

We’ll be writing more extensively about the how and why of social media marketing tools in the weeks ahead.

A Great Video Points the Way to Effective Use of RSS

Written by Paul Mosensen

An overview on Google Reader, and how to manage RSS feeds, folders, share buttons, and integrate with LinkedIn, Google Alerts, Google+, and Twitter……

Via www.youtube.com

Awareness, Inc.shares their new annual report on the State of Social Media Marketing – Top Areas For Social Marketing Investment in 2012…

You will notice some underlying themes in this report:

• Executives and senior managers are looking for traction in three key areas – ROI, integration of social with lead generation and sales, and expansion of social presence and reach.
• While social marketers feel they do not have the necessary resources to execute initiatives successfully, they must meet the expectations of senior management who demand to see tangible business value.Companies experienced in social marketing are moving beyond growing social presence and reach. Their focus will shift to active social media management for increased lead generation and sales.
• You will see less-experienced marketers following their visionary peers, adopting established practices as they move along the maturity continuum.

Get a copy of the report: State of Social Media Marketing

Via www.socialnomics.net

Content Marketing Beats Social Media

A report from BlogHer suggests that tech businesses targeting American women can be most effective with blog content marketing.

Content marketing campaigns including blogs can be especially useful for consumer electronics companies targeting women. A report from BlogHer found that 69 percent of adult females in the U.S. rely on blogs when they research smartphones, computers, tablets and other consumer electronics.

Social media marketing is also effective, but to a lesser degree, with 53 percent saying they turn to Facebook, Twitter or another social network for information about potential purchases. Additionally, they are sure to check manufacturer websites, but blogs weigh more heavily into their eventual purchase decisions.

Click  for highlights of the BlogHer Study.
Via www.brafton.com

Via Marketing Clout

You wouldn’t ask a violinist to conduct an orchestra. He may be an extraordinary musician, but what does he know about conducting or about how each section comes across to the audience? Will the audience come back? Chances are, probably not.

Similarly, your typical copywriter, while highly skilled in his area, won’t necessarily have an understanding of writing content for integrated digital marketing campaigns.

Old school copywriters are still in demand for offline campaigns. The new breed of digital writers, however, understands how to write for the web. For example, they know how to:

• Make your content searchable and high ranking for search engine optimisation (SEO) using key words and links without compromising on content quality
• Make copy digestible, using short, punchy sentences, subheadings and segmentation
• How to write for social media with the right tone, timing and level of interaction

Via www.marketingclout.co.uk

Just two years after the launch of Social Media Examiner, founder Michael Stelzner has plenty to be proud of. He runs one of the world’s top business blogs, with an email list of more than 124,000 and growing, plus over 450,000 visitors per day.
He also recently published his latest book, Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition, that details his strategy for developing new business initiatives. This got us curious. We wanted to learn more about his approach, and share ways that you can apply it, so we spoke with Stelzner about his book, the success of his site and the importance of email in an effective content marketing strategy.
Via www.aweber.com

Written by Melanie Brooks

Dave and Carrie Kerpen started their marketing company,   Likeable Media, after they created a buzz selling sponsorships to their New York wedding. They raised $100,000 for their wedding and $20,000 for a charity

The couple, who both had marketing backgrounds, were asked by so many people “what’s next” after their wedding promotional stunt that they started their own company, which today has offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Mexico City.

Dave appears in this video on Inc.com talking about how he got started as well as sharing some tips on what makes someone good at social media marketing. While I wish there was less “wedding” and more “tips for 2012”—as the title suggests—I did like what he had to say about the kind of person who excels at social media marketing.

The most successful person in social media is the same person who is the most successful person at a cocktail party. —Dave Kerpen

Dave has a few fantastic tips that are worth considering in your freelance business…
Via freelanceswitch.com

Classic wisdom from David Meerman Scott. Don’t buy, beg or bug!

It still boils down to content marketing.  According to David, you can choose from three old, traditonal methods:

• You can buy attention (advertising)
• You can beg for attention from the media (PR)
• You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales)

Or…

…you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an ebook, a Facebook page.

More content marketing and social media wisdom from David: Via www.webinknow.com

The Top 5 Things Marketers Should Never Say About Social MediaBusiness InsiderHere are some things I resolve to never hear from a brand manager or product marketer or any marketer about social media in 2012…
Via www.businessinsider.com

Time to Take Out the Social Media TrashMarketing PilgrimHere’s the full layout from Altimeter’s new report: “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation.” Companies create multiple accounts to split out brands or for a specific marketing…
Via www.marketingpilgrim.com