A great social media marketing industry report. Inside,

A lot of detail here gathered from a survey of nearly 900 people in marketing.

• A look at tactics
• A look at the time commitment involved
• An introduction to the percieved benefits from social medial marketing.
• A look at the most popular tools

At 26 pages, it is a nice introduction to the current state of social media marketing. If you are just joining the game, this is a good place to start in order to get your bearings.

Mashable reports on 10 Must-Try Social Media Sites for College Students

This is a nice list but everytime such a list appears (for students, stock brockers, programmers, cooks etc). The need for an infrastructure which can seamlessly link these different sites together become apparent. People are singular, but they are plural in the sense that they have many roles to play. At present, social networks serve only one facet of a person. Creating a social network that can handle all views of a person is not only daunting, but also a bit too Big Brother in scope. People would likely reject this attempt in favor of an inferior implementation running under a separate business entity. What would be more acceptable is a series of data pipes (or tubes, if you will) that can parse and distribute relevant data across social networks. An OpenID that releases personal data that has been released for public view. Networks that can offer this will get and retain more users simply because signing up requires no additional data input.

20 Ways to Engage Contacts in Social Media

This is a nice list on engaging your contacts with social media. There are 20 tips and when you factor in the myriad other 10,20 or x number of tips you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed with strategies. Reading through the list, what comes across as most important to keep in mind is aquiring a balance between engaging others and maintaining a focus. It is simply too overwhelming to respond to and take part in hundreds and then eventually thousands of conversations. Likewise, becoming an active member in 20 different social networks is also too much for one person to deal with while at the same time managing the product or service that your efforts are driving attention toward. The idea is to be selective with regards to how to converse and who you converse to. Reach out via networks and people who create the widest ripple effect. This does not necessarily mean trying to get the ear of someone with hundreds of thousands of followers. They are unlikely to reply and you’ll also find that the most interesting conversation is not happening with that person but around the point that they have made. Look to those people for insight and replies that move the conversation forward.


Beyond that, it is important to realize that many of those people who follow the conversation, but don’t have the large number of followers are a) more willing to reply and b)many times the original source of a link or idea. Invest in a relationship with them, they may become big on the network and will at that point have already established a productive dialog with you. This will result in greater exposure on your part. At the least, your discussions with such people will be a great source of ideas and information.

Media utilizing social networking sites

This has been apparent for some time now and the gravity of this transition was most potently realized during the campaign and election of Barack Obama. An interesting point is made in the article about how universities at some point soon will have to start preparing students for jobs, technologies and trends that do not yet exist. While the employed deal with the realities of adjusting and trying to leverage social media to expand reach at a lower cost, students are working harder than ever to match their learning path with various trajectories of technological development. Since this is happening in more and more of a social space soft skills psychology and sociology will become as important as the actual technical knowledge. What isn’t so apparent is the persistence of the need to continue maintaining journalistic and information checking standards. At the pace with which data flys across the web, who is checking the facts? If value is driven by attention and buzz, do we still need factual information?

6 Tips on How to Simplify Social Media Updates – e

These tips are nice but perhaps it’s now time to think not of a list of things to do, but in terms of a mix. Like a marketing mix, your social media mix should be a blend of the factors that drive your efforts:

• Your company products and services. What you business is should drive how you communicate. If you are in consulting, you should be providing valuable information and driving a conversation that raises
  
  
  
  
  1) Questions you can answer and
  
  
  2) Needs that you have not yet identified.
  
  
  
  
  If you can do this, you have a following and also some valuable data.




• Customer – Customers of products will be interested in how others are using a product or service, they will be interested in how you are handling complaints as well as news on new versions and updates. As above, customers of a service will be interested in how best to leverage the services they have or are considering paying for. Social media can often been seen as obligitory because ‘everyone else is doing it’. That is not the view to take. Social media is an incredible opportunity to collect very useful information as well as retain customers, to even win evangelists.




• The network – Each social network is different. There are different protocols, jargon and value systems. Your approach is going to vary from network to network. This eventually becomes a rather complex task and this is why large companies like Coke have already set up a separate department to handle this kind of communication.
• Time and effort distribution, evaluating the ROI for your efforts is a continual process, network crowds change, your business changes and needs change. Some networks may be of more use to you for audience than others. If you find a great source of traffic in one network that’s wonderful but don’t neglect the others. Many people use social media to GET information as well. Shouldn’t you be doing the same thing? Don’t always approach social media as a distributor, make sure to spend time as a consumer as well. This is essential to understanding the mindset of the people you are targeting.

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