Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Social Media Topics - Part 1

We didn't cover much on social media in seminar 3, but it is an emerging area of much interest to marketers.

According to Wikipedia, Social Media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Another way of defining this is describing it as media which are formed mainly by the public as a group, in a social way, rather than media produced by journalists or other traditional media producers.

According to PC Magazine, Social Media is the "online forms of communicating to the masses, which include blogs, microblogs, social networking sites and podcasts. Contrast with 'industrial media,' which refer to radio, TV and film."

So what are the tools you need to get started? This post by Chris Brogan outlines the essentials. (Chris is the author of an interesting book entitled "Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust").

Christina Kerley has published an informative presentation on the benefits of social media for B2B marketing. Also, social media is very different from traditional media.

There is a lot of new concepts to understand to capitalize on social media. I think Blogs and Video are the best tools to start with for a young technology company.

The purpose of blogging is well outlined by this Inc magazine article.

There are many great examples of how to use video to great advantage, and here is a case study published by DH Communications on one example. Of course, there are risks as well, and this blog post discusses some of the issues for this particular case study.

(in part 2, I will discuss developing a social media strategy, and in part 3, I will cover twitter and social media analytics).

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