Social Media Marketing Resources

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Social marketing techniques such as blogging, wikis, podcasts, twitter, and virtual worlds have given marketers an extraordinary range of opportunities to reach out to audiences. But do these techniques really pay off—or are they just trendy alternatives that offer no measurable return on marketing investment?

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Companies have been scrambling to figure out how to leverage Web. 2.0 applications, but are they doing so for all the wrong reasons? With all the buzz about blogs, wikis, widgets, and other forms of user-driven Web interactions, the question your business needs to answer is, "Is this what our customers want?"

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Kodak has invested people, energy, and two years of dedicated effort into building its social media program, and has met with great success. Here, Amber Naslund talks to the people behind Kodak's efforts to find out why their social media program is so valuable to their business, and how they've defined success.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

There's a new kid on the social media block that's starting to garner a lot of attention from companies. Microblogging sites, such as Twitter, are increasingly becoming a companion to an existing blog—or a standalone strategy for businesses that are using social media to connect with their customers. But many companies aren't sure what the microblogging "rules of the road" are. This is where Connie Reece comes in.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Rohit Bhargava is a well-respected marketer and blogger and frequent speaker at conferences, including the upcoming MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer. Here, he shares advice on how to get the most from the conference experience and discusses where social media is headed, as well as how businesses can make the most of it.

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The top 10 challenges facing the interactive marketing community are very much the same as those facing the entire marketing community... in that almost every marketing professional must address the interactive/online marketing medium. When they are asked about top challenges, many marketers say things like "social media" or "search engine optimization" or "integrating online and offline." But I think the challenges are much more fundamental to the individual and the organization. Here's my list of the top challenges, and my recommendations for dealing with them.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

There's probably no better case study on how a business leverages social media to connect with customers and grow itself than Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Library. Here, Gary shares the reasons your company should pay attention to social media, and what impact these tools will have in the years to come.

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Email is not dying in the midst of the social-media revolution. In fact, the question we should be asking is: How can email marketers best leverage the new social-marketing applications?

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Michael Antman's recent article, "Six Reasons Word-of-Mouth Doesn't Work," struck a chord. He raises reasonable points about the limitations of WOM; after all, it can't completely replace other forms of marketing communications. However, we can't ignore the impact of WOM. What's more, here's what companies should be doing to leverage it.

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Is there any form of marketing communications more compelling than word-of-mouth, the enthusiastic and genuine recommendation of a person you like and trust? It's no wonder that virtually every business-to-business marketer prizes this organic, spontaneous, and—perhaps best of all—practically cost-free method of bringing in business. But some businesses, especially on the B2B side, rely far too heavily on organic word-of-mouth strategies and, specifically, on acquiring new customers primarily through referrals.

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There are countless ways to get into the game with Social Media. Check out these few sample Social Media tools and see how they can be used effectively and efficiently.

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By looking at your company's readiness in conjunction with your market, your competitors, and your buyers, you'll be able to determine what the potential is (or isn't) for social media. What's more, you'll be able to assess where you should be diving in, or what's a realistic starting place.

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Should your company should start a blog, open a Facebook account, or be on YouTube? Start by taking a giant step backward and assessing the social media landscape as it relates to your market, your buyers, and your competitors. Here are three key factors to consider.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Considering the stakes, it's no surprise that the online sales channel is becoming increasingly important to the bottom line of top-shelf brands as consumers of luxury products and services continue to demonstrate their willingness to spend as much through commerce-enabled Web sites as they do in stores. Despite this trend, many luxury brands continue to separate their online and mainline marketing efforts, confusing customers with disconnected messaging and missing golden opportunities to cross-support expensive marketing initiatives. What few realize is that the best experience—the experience that the customer wants—results when all channels work together and complement each other. Here are some guiding principles to help brands achieve this goal.

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Viral marketing has been all the rage in recent years: Companies are intoxicated with the idea of creating the next video that spreads across the Internet and becomes a viral sensation. But for every successful viral effort there are countless attempts that totally miss the mark. Here's where David Meerman Scott comes in. Scott understands why ideas spread in a Web 2.0 world, and he educates his clients on why the "old school" rules of PR and marketing are totally irrelevant in a time of content-sharing on YouTube and Twitter.

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As a result of its online customer community, a company can get much more than basic product feedback. It gains deep insight into the needs of customers, and creates ever-greater customer loyalty by embracing customers as co-designers. Most importantly, the company goes directly to the source for product enhancements, pulling new innovations and ideas directly from the minds of the customers who use, buy, and recommend its products. This is the holy grail of customer-centered product design. Online customer communities can enable the connections, host the conversations, and facilitate the processes that make routine innovation possible.

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Today's technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors, and the press—any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received. By some estimates, 85% of the information companies collect is not in a form that they can access or analyze—it is unstructured. The Gartner Group reports unstructured data doubles every three months while seven million web pages are published every day. This cacophony presents the one of the biggest challenges companies face today.

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When Bob Lutz of GM or Jonathan Schwartz of Sun set up their blogs, they probably didn't worry too much about the review with Legal. But how does, say, a midlevel corporate marketer or product manager set out to create an "official" blog with the sanction of Legal?

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Today we discuss some SEO tactics that may or may not be Black Hat, and how to deliver a dope smack to commenters who don't add to the conversation. All that and more in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics and what's new on the technology front.

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Here's the story of how Best Buy built an internal social-networking forum for its 140,000 employees, and how its original goal to get more information about customer likes and dislikes through the sales associates on the floor morphed into something else entirely.