thank you for great blog

Social media marketing is essential in this era, more and more big brands are adopting impact of social media marketing due to increase number of users of social networking sites…….

I really enjoy reading on “social media strategy” and infect comments also are useful. i think every companies has to implies social media strategy for social media marketing, it will help them to build a brand and authority over internet for long term benefit.

Man, we must be on the same plane of thought because I wrote something very similar to your thinking (I really focused on Twitter and Facebook though).

I think that people forget the “social” part and get so caught up in the “what we are going to do for you” strategy that it kills any viable way to market socially.

If you get enough people doing this, you wind up with a bunch of static and noise…not conversation.

It is definitely horses for courses.

I’ve done marketing strategies that include large dollops of social tools for those companies whose customers, or thought leaders, are social.

And I’ve also done strategies where I’ve included a only a small number of social marketing tools to help the clients keep an eye on their sector and see whether customers begin to use social media more.

Jim

Where do your audience gather? Collectively online? Nowhere. Many probably not using social media of any kind anyway. Unlikely that those that are are using it with reference to my companies’ products. Small amount of action in tiny hyper-local forums but unlikely to generate much traffic or business.

What do your prospects care about? All sorts of things but not really relevent under the circumstances…

What are they talking about? Online? nothing that relates to my companies’ products

What do they say about you? Online? nothing

What do they say about your market, industry or niche? Nothing that I have seen. Some bloggers promoting themselves. Few companies jumping on the SM bandwagon. No customers.

How can you help them? In all sorts of ways but cant see how via social media…

What percentage of companies would that be true of?

Maybe a channel for customers could be created on twitter of facebook. But lot of work for uncertain ROI.

Maybe I’m being negative. But maybe that has something to do with the excessive amount of effort and words, words, words being devoted to social media at the moment.

Stimulus and response. Listening to the consumer.

Sure, we can throw it in with a pitch or marketing plan, but Social media is far more time consuming (or less time consuming) than you can predict in initial documentation. It’s about engagement, not ‘cut & paste’ or opening a YouTube account (etc.) and walking away.

Often, for product specific knowledge and a future to any given campaign, it’s about facilitating their initial venture into social media, then training the customer in how to engage.

Thanks for this Chris, I’ll be Twittering it on and highlighting it as an example to a few of the agencies I work with

Fully agree with integrating Social Media into the whole business/marketing strategy (Ian, you are a lucky guy – have you got any vacancies?). It’s important to engage with important markets (customer, referral, employee etc.) to build brand value that is consistent and actually means something. That is the key.

Thanks a lot for clarifying that for me.