In a meeting yesterday, I had an ah-ha moment. As we’ve tried to help our clients make the leap to social media, too many times social media brainstorming is limited to banner ads on Myspace or Facebook. As marketers, we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg, so I say: take social media out of the list of marketing tactics… it doesn’t belong there. Really, it’s a paradigm shift in that the social nature of messaging is infused in everything we do online.
Virtually every type of digital marketing has or could have a social component changing each medium from a one-way form of communication to two-way communication stream. For example, we must understand online user behavior to be able to join the conversation. Going in blind simply doesn’t work. This act of online listening can be defined as participating in social media. Cross-linking is social media. Reading and writing blogs, ratings and reviews is social media. Digital PR is social media. I’ve even known certain e-mail campaigns to generate dialogue. And of course, we can build web applications that have social nature and application.
Don’t place Social Media as a line item within your marketing plan – that’s too limiting. Think big. It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s simply the online world in which we live and play. Dive in.
Steadily socializing,
Robin
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I completely agree with this and chuckle when people suggest “we need to include social media, let’s advertise on Facebook and MySpace.” I believe that Facebook and MySpace are often suggested since they are top-of-mind. However, social media is very broad. It includes blogs, podcasts, email, wall-postings, music-sharing, picture-sharing, message boards, wikis, etc. MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Digg and YouTube are simply popular applications for social media to take place on.