As most businesses have realized a number one and most used method of marketing is word of mouth. This type of marketing is the oldest form of marketing and probably the most successful! While years ago the most popular method of getting the word out was door to door sales, today, with the “Social Web”, which is a combination of social networks, from photo sharing, blogs, video sharing like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you can literally market your product or service from your own home office. Your audience is much bigger as well.

Even still, many businesses have not caught on to the “Social Web” as a marketing tool. The Social Web is an excellent place to gain influence by becoming a respected member in the communities that you care about. The Social Web provides a powerful connection between participation and influence. As consumers turn to each other in forums, blogs, or other social networks to avoid ads, the smart business and savvy marketer will turn to social media as an opportunity to market without even using ads. In contrast to catalog delivery, email solicitation, post cards, flyers, social media allows both the consumer and the marketer to have equal voice in terms of permission to speak. If you as a business or marketer want to gain trust of the consumer, what better way than becoming involved in a conversation that your customers are participating. 

While a lot of social media is designed for fun, and the comments that are shared may not seem “business” related, think of all the conversations that exist where people share experiences that relate to products, events or services that perhaps you may sell. A marketer can gain much insight from these conversations about what consumers think about specific products and services. 

There are many, many methods of Social Media Networks and Software that you can explore for your marketing goals. Here are a few that you may want to check out:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Ning
• Pluck
• Jive
• Flickr
• YouTube
• WordPress
• Blogger
• FriendFeed
• BrightKite
• Twitter
• Eventful

Listening and responding to your customers by paying attention to their conversations is a great way to use social media. You can actually have an active part and influence the discussions among your customers. The Social Web is just getting hot and it’s not going away so now is a great time to explore how you can start building your marketing campaign right in the center of it all.
 

 

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 @ 5:14 pm on the category Business Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.