As President-elect Barack Obama proved during the campaign, there is great power in building online communities. Now, marketers and Internet entrepreneurs are trying to emulate his style of social marketing in order to build and expand their own networks of online users. As usual, it's about building an experience and a deeper relationship, but there's more to it than that.
If you work in big corporate, you'll resonate with online growth of Visa, who launched the Visa Business Network on Facebook this year and already signed up 20,000 small businesses; but if you're an entrepreneur you'll be pleased to hear about new synergies between social network sites, publishing sites, and share sites. For example, this NetLingo blog will get mentioned on Twitter which in turn gets published on Facebook.
The key for small businesses is to embrace a social media ;-) You need to dedicate a certain amount of time each day to cultivating your fan base. One way of doing this is to remain committed to PUBLISHING your content on Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Squidoo, FriendFeed, Wikipedia, and Flickr -- then geta group of people to SHARE it on sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us -- and finally post the content to your NETWORKS on MySpace, LinkedIn, and others, all the while, subtly promoting a new piece of content on your website.
I've seen this method work in action, resulting in Twitter or StumbleUpon generating the most traffic on a given day the plan is put into effect. Sound like a lot of work? It's heavy lifting in the beginning to get it all built and established, but once you get into the routine, it can be one of your cheapest and most effective marketing campaigns.
TTYL,
Erin
How to Make it Work for You! Here's one Way to Leverage Social Marketing
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Erin
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