Is Your Market Ready To Meet The Social Media Crowd?
Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 27 of May , 2008 at 10:57 am
Business owners new to the social media scene often confuse social media with traditional media such as newspapers, television, and radio; or worse yet, they think that social media optimization is simply creating a Myspace page.
Matt Goddard at R2i blogs wrote a nice piece about the difference between social networking and social media. It’s definitely worth taking a look at.
1. Social networks and social media are distinct but connected
2. Social networks are patterns of advice seeking and advice giving used to reduce the risk of decisions.
3. Social media is a popular platform for delivering the social message.
4. You need to establish whether the social networking exists in your target market and whether social media is viable channel of influence.
Further thinking about the guidelines that Matt is discussing, there are some questions that you need to ask when considering a social media marketing strategy:
1. Should your business host a blog?
2. Social Networking: Are there social networking sites or groups that target your industry? If there are, what kind of strategies can you employ to enter them?
3. Podcasts: Are there any podcasts in your target industry already? What can you offer as an alternative podcast?
4. User Generated Content : Are there videos or other forms of user generated content already being made public in your industry? How can you make a different, more noticeable impact?
One of the key points of the article is that businesses don’t want to approach social media optimization just because they’ve heard the term and it sounds nifty. They should make a concerted effort to look into the social networks of their target audience and see if there is a social market to go after with SMO practices.
Category: Social Media
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