If you were wondering where does Social Media Marketing fit into the classic "4 Ps of Marketing" model, check this out. Traditional 4 Ps of Marketing encompass Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Social Media as well as social networking sites enable the Promotion aspect, especially the Word of Mouth part of it. (Related question I posed on LinkedIn Answers – 44 answers). Subsequently, the Word-of-Mouth component enables the 5th P of Marketing - Participation.


So, if you're a company wondering whether you should engage with your users through social media or social networking, here are the first four steps one should follow (marketers, listen up), all of which culminates in the 5th P of Marketing - Participation. Thoughts?
Here are the first four steps in social media adoption for marketers and businesses or as I call it, the Social Media LAMP theory:

1. L - Listen
* Where are your customers online/offline?:
Blogs, Social media tools (e.g. LinkedIn Answers), Discussion Forums, Twitter, etc–/Events
* Monitor these conversations:
Use a central tool to track the different conversations happening around your company. Most online conversations are RSS enabled, barring a few Yahoo! groups that don't support RSS. Use a RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader) to gather all these conversations into a central repository and create a folder that you check on a daily basis.
2. A - Awareness
* Calculate Brand perception within these conversations
- News & Blogs (Google search, Google Blog search, technorati search)
- Keyword mentions & incoming links
- Corporate Blog (Unique users, hits, trackbacks, comments)
- Brand Scoring system (similar to brand attitude survey)
(Source: Clickz article)
3. M - Measure
Any social media presence of your brand can be calculated by simple methods (example below):
* ROI of corporate blogging (Resource: Charlene Li's new ROI of corporate blogging study)
4. P - Participate
* Create a strategy around how you wish to participate
* You have the following options:
- Be where the users are
- Facilitate easier means of communication with them
- Create brand evangelists
- Be a source of information on the company
- Respond swiftly and honestly
- Start publishing content
- Stir internal company conversations
- Improve product and user experience
(Brief excerpts from my keynote presentation at the Online Marketing Summit)