Adventures in Mobile Marketing

Breaking Into Social Marketing

I’ve had a few meetings lately, mostly with friends, on this whole “social marketing” thing. How do they get into it? Why do it? Which application should they pick? I thought I’d write up a quick list of things I’ve been repeating:

1) Find the popular kids.
It’s high school, I know, but there are mavens out there and they can make your job a lot easier. For a friend who works in a software platform company, I told him to find his highly networked colleagues, and where they’re posting. Twitter? OK, then join twitter and plurk for a while, find out if it’s worthwhile.

2) Mix work & play
I setup two Twitter accounts- “advent_in_email”, and “banane”, and tried to separate them between work and play. Well, my personal one had a lot more followers, and I couldn’t keep my twitter accounts straight, so now I follow a policy of mostly work but some play in my twitter comments. I have to admit I enjoy the personal posts of those I follow as well. So it’s a brave new world of mixing work & leisure.

3) You’re not a stalker!
There’s this fear that people are stalkers- and you’re not- though each platform has a different way of following, and for some it’s far more personal than others.

4) Does it really work?
I refer people to Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog, the “social networking” category, quite a lot, when they start asking questions about business justifications for social marketing. He has a ton of posts and he actually meets with these companies and asks the hard questions. Zappos is a poster child for social marketing, and there are various case studies I’m posting all the time on companies doing it right.

5) It’s such a time investment!
You can be strategic in the use of your time. It’s getting easier and easier each week as more applications are developed to centralize this stuff, too. Lately, an account on Digg, Flickr, and Twitter, with FriendFeed as a reading location for you, will pretty much accomplish a bare bones but effective social marketing campaign. Set aside an hour, keep it frequent (3-4 times a week) and you’re good. I also suggest not doing everything at once- join one platform, get used to it, join another, get used to it, etc.

6) Blogging is so time-consuming
Yes. I’m a writer so it’s not that stressful for me, but as a writer friend told me the other day, “for some people writing is like doing taxes.” LOL. So if you’re not a writer, I’d create a blog that was just a set of links, every day, basically your “digg’d” articles, and blogs you read. Or just use your blog as a living resume. No need to write your deep thoughts each day. Blogs seem to be getting phased out, so it’s not an end-all solution for many companies.

Me on Twitter
Me on FriendFeed
Me on Digg
Me on Flickr

More Reading:
Social Media ROI
Web Social Architecture
I Want to Believe (that Twitter is useful…)
The Online Participation Factor, by Justin Korn, and more interesting perhaps is his quantification of participation during a 24 hour process: FriendFeed Followers: Lurking or Participating?

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • StumbleUpon
Written on Wednesday, 30. July 2008 at 11:33 In the category images off, metrics, social networks, strategy. Follow the comments via RSS here: RSS-Feed. Read the Comments. Trackbacks- Trackback on this post. Share on FriendFeed

«  –  »

2 Comments »

  1. Anna –

    Nice recap. Speaking of “the cool kids” – Kelly Rusk fits into this category nicely. She is actually quoted in the new book by Forester (Jupiter?), called Groundswell. I am a few chapters from finishing. Great great book.

    http://web2dotwhat.com/2008/07/17/the-groundswell-are-you-listening/

    Cheers.

    dj at bronto

    Comment: DJ Waldow – 01. August 2008 @ 10:36 am

  2. Social networking etc. seems to be the thing all the young kids do now. Us older folk find it a lot harder to get into. As a businessman online I try to balance using it for promotion and personal use, but usually err on the former.
    It’s a bit frightening what some kids get up to on these sites though…especially my daughter!

    Comment: Eddie Wolfe – 03. August 2008 @ 11:34 am

Leave a comment

Recent Posts

Pages

Recent Comments

Topics

Recent Trackbacks

Meta

Follow Me

  • Add to Google
 

WP-Design: Vlad -- Powered by WordPress -- XHTML 1.0
© 1998 All Rights Reserved banane.com