Making the Business Case for Social Media

In the best of all worlds, social media — a suite of online services that
facilitates two-way communication and content sharing — can become
a productive component of your overall marketing strategy. These services
can enhance your company’s online visibility, strengthen relationships with
your clients, and expand word-of-mouth advertising, which is the best type.

Given its rapid rise in popularity and its hundreds of millions of worldwide
users, social media marketing sounds quite tempting. These tools require
minimal upfront cash and, theoretically, you’ll find customers flooding
through your cyberdoors, ready to buy. It sounds like a no-brainer — but it
isn’t.

Has someone finally invented a perfect marketing method that puts you
directly in touch with your customers and prospects, costs nothing, and
generates profits faster than a perpetual motion machine produces energy?
The hype is yes; the real answer, unfortunately, is no. Marketing nirvana is
not yet at hand.

This chapter provides an overview of the pros and cons of social media to
help you decide whether to join the social whirl and gives a framework for
approaching a strategic choice of which media to use.

Making Your Social Debut

The bewildering array of social media (which seem to breed new services
faster than rabbits) makes it hard to discern what they have in common:
shared information, often on a peer-to-peer basis. Although many social

media messages look like traditional “broadcasts” from one business to
many consumers, their interactive component offers an enticing illusion of
“one-to-one” communication that invites individual readers to respond.

The phrase social media marketing generally refers to using these online services
for relationship selling — a subject you already know all about. Social
media services or channels make innovative use of new online technologies
to accomplish familiar communication and marketing goals.

Everything you already know about marketing is correct. Social media marketing
is a new technique, not a new world.

You can categorize social media services (or channels) into categories. The
channels have fuzzy boundaries: They may overlap, and some sites fall into
multiple channels. For instance, some social networks and communities
allow participants to share photos and may include a blog.

Here are the different types of social media channels:

✦ Blogs: Web sites designed to let you easily update or change content
and allow readers to post their own opinions or reactions. Figure 1-2
shows you an example of a business blog with verve, from Crafty Chica.
Her blog, which is only part of a suite of her social media activities,
exchanges messages with Facebook and Twitter.
Examples of blogging software are
• WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger (formerly Blogspot) (freestanding
blog services)
• Other blog software, freestanding sites or integrated into standard
Web sites

✦ Social networking services: Originally developed to facilitate the
exchange of personal information (messages, photos, video, audio) to
groups of friends and family, these full-featured services offer multiple
functions. From a business point of view, many of them support subgroups
that offer the potential for more targeted marketing.
• Full networks such as Facebook, MySpace, or myYearbook
Figure 1-3 shows the Facebook site of ArtBizCoach.com, which
teaches artists how to promote their art.
• Microblogging (short message) networks such as Twitter or Plurk

✦ Social news services: On these peer-based lists of recommended
articles from news sites, blogs, or Web pages, users often “vote” on the
value of the postings:
• Digg
• reddit
• Other news sites
✦ Social geolocation and meeting services: For a change, these services
bring people together in real space rather than in cyberspace:
• Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt
• Other GPS (global positioning system) applications, many of which
operate on mobile phones
• Meet-ups and tweet-ups
✦ Community building services: Many comment- and content-sharing
sites have been around for a long time, such as forums, message boards,
and Yahoo! and Google groups. Other examples are
• Community building sites with multiple sharing features such as Ning
• Wikis such as Wikipedia for group-sourced content
• Review sites such as TripAdvisor and Epinions to solicit consumer
views
Dozens, if not hundreds, of social tools, apps (freestanding online applications),
and widgets (small applications placed on other sites, services, or
desktops) monitor, distribute, search, analyze, and rank content. Many are
specific to a particular social network, especially Twitter.
Others are designed to aggregate information across the social media landscape,
including such monitoring tools as Google Alerts or Social Mention
or distribution tools such as RSS or Ping.fm.