An intro to marketing through social media

Editor’s Note: Last time Louise Rijk penned a piece for the blog, she wrote on word-of-mouth marketing, or WOMM. Today she goes into social media marketing, or SMM, and explains how you can help drive readership, links and clicks using social media.

Social media marketing (SMM), social media optimization (SMO) and word of mouth marketing (WOMM) are new forms of online marketing that are increasingly taking control of brands, the marketing message and advertising away from the business owner and online marketer and putting it into the hands of the user and the consumer. They’ve created a “new world order” in marketing and advertising. In this new world the goal is to partner with consumers and customers so that they interact with, and call attention to, your products and services.

Online marketers, publishers and business owners need to adapt and find creative and subtle ways to promote their content, products and services. But before we can start doing social media marketing we need to know more about social media and understand the differences between social media marketing, social media optimization and word of mouth marketing.

Social Media Tools
Social media are “Web 2.0” tools and services such as blogs, wikis, online forums, online user review sites, podcasts, RSS feeds and social networking web sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, MyBlogLog, de.licio.us, Digg and even the virtual world of Second Life, that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other. Increasingly, social media tools are used by marketers to place and spread their marketing messages, and to generate beaucoup traffic. The better you understand the inner workings of these services and communities, the better you can take advantage of them.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing
We’ve talked about word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) before. To reiterate, WOMM is based on intense user engagement and relies on finding and empowering “influencers” and “evangelists” to spread the word about a product or service. (Read more about WOMM here .)

Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is primarily initiated on social media and social networking web sites, such as Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Groups, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Reddit, topic-specific message boards and so forth. These services can be used to spread a message or content (via text, video, audio, widgets, etc.). The objective can be to increase page views and inbound links, help improve your ranking in organic search, improve your brand awareness, or all of the above. 

Your social media marketing campaign is most effective when you have a prominent profile in the social media community. To help establish a prominent profile, begin by carefully targeting your community, engage with it and generate compelling content that speaks to the other users’ needs and desires.

For example, let’s say you’re a scooter enthusiast and have a site that offers articles and advice on scootering, sells scooter accessories through an online store or affiliate program, and serves up contextual ads for scooters and scooter parts. You’ll want to target the groups within the scooter community most likely to be interested in your content, merchandise and advertisements. You can build trust in that community through offering authoritative content—factual data, advice, opinions, photos, video and so forth. Once you’ve gained their respect, your community is most likely listen to you, buy from you and click on your ads.

Social media marketing campaigns can vary from creating compelling text-based content that gets bookmarked at del.icio.us or Furl or makes the home page at Digg to the creation of a video that spreads virally by placing it on video sharing sites. (Go to Flickr or Yahoo! Video and type “scooter” or “Vespa” into the search box and you’ll get an idea of what I mean by a “social media community.”)

Social Media Optimization
Social media optimization refers to making a web site or blog more adaptable to social media. It involves adding compelling, dynamic and fresh content on a regular basis—stuff like tip sheets, how-to’s, white papers, podcasts or videos can be especially sticky, can get more links to and help drive better ranking among search engines and specialty sites such as Technorati or Blogpulse. Other examples of SMO include the implementation of links to social media web sites to make tagging, sharing book marks (del.icio.us, Add to MyYahoo!), and voting for content (Digg, Reddit, Netscape) by visitors easier.

In the next installments in this series, we’ll cover these techniques in more detail. 

—Louise Rijk, co-founder and vice-president of marketing and sales at Advanced Media Productions