Social media marketing, according to Wikipedia:

Is a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flicr, Wikipedia, Orkut and YouTube.

Essentially, it’s important to join the conversation and add relevant material to create value and build a brand. It’s not about one-sided brand narcissism. A two-way engagement, leveraging crowdsourcing, helps establish a network of peers willing to endorse your brand and become a fan, follower and eventual customer.

Why Social Media?

Social media will improve your brand and provide a new outlet for go-to-market initiatives. It develops new sales channels for marketing and brand building, in addition to the traditional vehicles. It will provide a mechanism to build public relations and foster warm leads and open new markets.

Companies like Comcast and Dell have used Twitter to handle customer service concerns. Having access to a real human instead of a Corporate Goliath, builds customer satisfaction and a unique method to address customer concerns.

Social media allows a quick and free method to announce company events, new products, blog posts, data, information, bundled services, etc. It sure beats paying a PR firm. Although paying a PR firm, using traditional marketing methods and leveraging social media outlets gives added exposure.

Social media can save time and build a brand if you devise an innovative way to develop user-generated content. User-generated content will provide peer-to-peer free endorsements that carry more weight than a company generated advertisement.

In today’s super-fast fiber optic Internet world, it’s important to be involved. Interacting with stakeholders, clients, customers, prospects, evangelical supporters, etc., on the web is an important building block in developing brand awareness. You might as well get involved with your demographic, young and old, where they hang out – on the Internet.

Benefits

Leveraging social media will provide you with the following:

• • Brand perception
  • Brand appreciation
  • Peer-to-peer acceptance
  • Low cost entry
  • Open new markets
  • Finding consumers where they hang
  • Leverage user-generated content
  • Public Relations
  • Customer Service
  • Quickly get the word out

Approach

Before jumping into the social media ocean, develop a social media marketing strategy. When developing the strategy, think in terms of an “engagement” and not necessarily a “campaign”. The Internet is filled with savvy users that have highly sensitive BS meters. They can smell disingenuous marketing a mile away. Social media is not about selling or pushing. It’s about developing a two-way street. A campaign tends to have a one-sided agenda. Engagements however, are warm, friendly, inclusive and inviting.

It’s important to match your social media plans with your business objectives. Weaving your core initiatives and business goals into your social media engagements will create a significant social media footprint.

Make sure you are interacting with your user-demographic with an eye towards new markets and new clients.

Determine your goals up front. Be certain of the milestones you want to achieve set within a certain time-frame. Develop an ROI metric to measure the success of your social media plans. Even if you just increase followers, friends and fans, these are certainly soft metrics, but it could lead to building brand acceptance and eventually lead to increasing revenue.

The key is to open two-way conversations and provide valuable relevant content. Remember, we are all humans and like to interact in socially acceptable ways. Social media is not a place to bash your competitor.

Social media is about cooperation, not competition. If you keep that one key in mind, you will find building a brand community is even more rewarding.