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. :)
hey man, lama gila tak jumpa
My take on SMM, can save cost on web application development (rather than pening kepala code a flash video player or some event calendar, use vimeo or google calendar widget)
I think its appealing because, sometimes its hard luring people to your site, so I rather go out to where they are and lure them in, if not, at least lure to my content or get them talking about it. I know this is like a shotgun approach, but I’m still experimenting (in other words, belasah je beb).
I recently updated http://www.monkeybone.com.my and have registered on vimeo.com to start monkeybone TV. http://www.vimeo.com/channel8741so that users can talk about it. Will also open something similar to youtube, but vimeo rocks more.
So how to measure awareness? got ideas? I was just thinking about measuring in terms of activity, how many loads, how many comments left, how many views, how many emails blablabla. and measure it weekly :) and oh yeah, have to promote also to the fans that they can view stuff on a few places (email blast la ni)
like you said, not everyone can do it, or not anyone can do it. Trial and error man.
ciao!