What is Social Media Marketing?

You tell me. Seriously, I’ve heard of it murmured all over the place now. However, I don’t really know what is social media marketing (SMM) in detail, how it works and what are the results from it. As far as I know, social media marketing is about utilizing social networks or online applications (and communities) for marketing. That made sense, right?

For example; using social media networks like Facebook, MySpace and etc to spread word of your marketing campaign on a product or launch. From the online application view, it could be using tools like Digg or StumbleUpon and etc. The whole gist of it is using online channels to do Internet marketing. Even creating a self-promotional video and publishing it on YouTube is part of social media marketing.

So where did this social media marketing come from? Well, Wikipedia says social media marketing is really part of what is still called; Internet marketing. One of the conventional methods (and still is) in Internet marketing is email marketing. Yup, the one where you harvest emails (or the polite word is; capture) then use it to mass communicate directly will past interested users.

Man…to think that Internet marketing has now evolved into social media marketing is just…crazy. But one of the better part of social media marketing is at least you won’t have to deal with much spam. No, you won’t. Because social media marketing isn’t about spamming but creative marketing (as I would call it). And I quote a great line by Wikipedia:

Most online communities don’t welcome traditional direct or hard sell techniques so an effective SMM campaign will require more finesse to execute properly. SMM campaigns must be targeted to the community you want to reach with a message that appeals to them and invites contribution.

Love it! Due to the fact we’re dealing with users and not robots, social media marketing makes it very clear if you’re implementing the direct sell approach, it’s not going to work. Hah, take that you spam insects!

Anyway, that’s my take on social media marketing. And I’m going to be blunt by saying, not everyone can do it and not everyone knows how to do it. Just because he knows about YouTube or Digg doesn’t mean they can get you the awareness ratio you need for your campaign. To be honest, I’m not one who knows its in and out either.

So what you need is someone experienced in creative marketing. Someone who isn’t a block of wood (Malaysians call them “ka-yu”) and wants to think out of the box. It needs to grab attention. And I’m not talking about using sex topics like; Why Malaysia Bloggers Covered The Edison Chen Sex Scandal? You can use that kind of thing if it fits your campaign otherwise don’t. Else you might be delivering the wrong expectation and receiving more hate mail.

Well, there’s my take on social media marketing. Anyone have anything else to add to social media marketing? I welcome the ones specialized in it to share a word or two.

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