Marketers are getting so excited over the emergence of this new marketing tool (or medium) known as social media. All marketers have to do is join Youtube, Digg, and Twitter; add a bunch of friends, and start shoveling content at them…right? Wrong, on several accounts; first, social media is not a marketing “tool” at all; it is a way of life. Second, adding friends and shoveling content at them is almost a guaranteed failure.

If I had a megaphone and started running around the streets shouting at people trying to convince them to buy my products, would they? Of course not. Why? Because I cannot interrupt people that I do not know, to sell them a product that they probably do not want. Marketers are using social media as their megaphones. They are yelling at people, trying to interrupt them and convince them to buy a product that they probably do not want.

If however, I were to approach people on the street one by one and engage them in a conversation to find out what their general preferences are, then I would have a much better chance of selling them one of my products. Why? Because I am building a relationship with them, and that is what social media is all about, relationships.

So what is all this mumbo jumbo about social media being a way of life? Well social media profiles are extensions of physical people. Profiles are designed so that you can learn about a person based on the information they have filled out. When people are not out and about, they are online interacting with one another through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. Your social media profile IS YOU. It has your picture, your interests, and even a list of your friends.

The most effective marketing is relationship marketing. Engage your customer base in a conversation and only then can you begin marketing your products. If you engage them with marketing pitches and advertisements too soon, then they delete you from their friends list and you have just lost a prospective customer. Do this enough times and you lose all of your customers (online anyway).

Build a relationship with your customer base, and then they will be the ones asking you to market to them.

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!

There are some great events coming up in the next 10 days that I am going to be attending, and one event that I am going to be hosting. Click on the links for more info.

Thursday, March 20, 2008 8:30 am

Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and friends) in San Francisco hosted by Social Media Club
Sears Fine Food, San Francisco, CA

Tuesday, March 25th 6-8 pm

Blogger Dinner 21st Amendment, 563 Second Street, San Francisco

An informal dinner with Josh Bernoff. Attendees include

• Charlene Li
• Josh Bernoff
• Jermiah Owyan
• Adam Metz
• Chris Heur

and many others, should be a great event.

Ok, and now for the event that I am hosting I will make a separate post about this later, but for now here are the details. I am a creator of the Search Marketing Salon and we are having our launch event next Thursday March 27th at the Otis Lounge in San Francisco.

Please RSVP if you wish to attend and to get more info, it is going to be a fun time. I won’t mention the attendees for now, but a lot of great folks are attending, you’ll just have to stay tuned for my Search Marketing Salon blog post (in the next few days).

I look forward to meeting many of you at these events, or at least at mine

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!

I am an avid user and experimenter of all things related to social media and social media marketing. Recently I have come across a few tools which I think are beneficial to any StumbleUpon or Digg user and I wanted to share them with you.

The first tool is a StumbleUpon Alerter from Adamant Solutions.

This tool allows you to track your discoveries via a simple application that you download to your desktop. When the application is open, you will receive information on your Stumbles. This tool lets you see who likes your discoveries and who doesn’t. You can also analyze your friend’s data as well to see what they are stumbling and how they are rating their stumbles. And just add the icing on the cake, you can also check which one of your domains are performing the best. Say for example you are submitting several stumbles from several of your own domains, you want to know which domain is performing the best so that you can continuously monitor and add quality stumble content right? Well now you can.

The next tool is the Digg Alerter Tool, also from Adamant Solutions

This tool is very similar to the StumbleUpon alerter. It allows you to see who is digging your stories and what comments people are making on your stories. The new update that was release also allows you to look at buried data as well. This simple Digg tool can be left upon on your desktop (along with the StumbleUpon one) so that you can check your stats as they are updated. Simple to use and very effective.

Enjoy the tools and happy stumbling and digging!

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!

Jeremiah Owyang recently put up his findings for online community best practices. The presentation can be viewed below. Jeremiah outlines a 4-step approach to the “groundswell,” which is defined as the new trend of getting information through technology (such as twitter, blogs, etc) as opposed to getting information via traditional sources.

| View | Upload your own

The 4-steps(POST) are broken down into

• People- Assess customers’ social technographics profile
• Objectives- Decide what you want to accomplish
• Strategy- Plan for how relationships with customers will change
• Technology- Decide which social technologies to use

My biggest issue with this process is that it eliminates a crucial factor, the “why.” Why do you want to create and online community? Why do you want to create a blog? I asked Jeremiah about this and he responded with,

“We believe there’s a power shift, so companies need to first ‘listen’ and learn about the participants “P” before aligning a marketing objective.

The power is in the hands of the users, so start with them first.”

There are several problems with this response.

First, if I am a company trying to create a blog what do I do? I have to start posting something right? However, without feedback and without listening to my users, what do I write?

Second, learning about participants is great, but that should not dictate the “why.” I agree that power is being shifted to the hands of the users and companies need to listen and learn about them, but that should help dictated the “how” not the “why.”

In order to be successful online (whether it’s creating a blog or a social media platform) you must first answer, “why?”

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!

The Google Quality Rater Guideline have been leaked on the net, and here they are

This document is a gold mine because now SEOs will be able to understand what Google considers relevant content or spam content. For a good explanation of why internal documents can be so valuable for SEOs and marketers read Aaron Wall’s post about spying on google.

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!