I was part of the Virtual Community Marketing panel last night for the Ateneo CCE – IMMAP Digital Marketing Diploma Program and we listened to several graduate students present their social media marketing plans. There were brilliant ideas shared and I’d like to commend Coni Cruz and the rest of Blue Blade Technologies for putting together such a great program. Anyway, one of the things I noticed was that people keep equating social media to social networking sites. This might be a little academic but I think it’s important that we clearly define both terms. More after the break.
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES
Social networking sites are websites, portals, or channels where people get together and share information with one another. This can be in the form of pictures, text, videos, updates, etc. The most popular social networking sites are Facebook, Friendster, Youtube, MySpace, Twitter, Plurk, and Multiply.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is the CONTENT that gets shared, passed, or circulated amongst the various social networking sites. When you say “SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING”, you can’t just limit the discussion to what you’re going to do on Facebook and Twitter. Social Media marketing will rely heavily on the content that you want to spread virally. If your content is boring and average then most likely it’s not “social” enough to be considered a good social media campaign. Everything now can actually be potentially social media. By just adding social media buttons and plug-ins to your website you’re exponentially multiplying the potential hits and visits you can get from your regular and transient readers. With one click of a button they can push your content to their network of hundreds or thousands of friends.
You can’t say social media marketing without clearly defining your content strategy. Social media marketing is not just about placing banner ads on social networking sites. That’s definitely part of it but that’s not everything to it. The magic really happens during the engagement process of your brand and the consumer and that can only happen if you have remarkable content.
PS: It was great bumping into my fellow digital marketers — Nars, Country Manager of Friendster and Jonas, Community Manager for Yahoo! SEA. Keep on rocking guys.
Heaps of useful information here, thanks. Will visit again.
Now I understand! thanks for the info
I agree that placing ad campaigns, measuring click-throughs or impression and or using social bookmarking buttons will NOT give you the instant social marketing BOOM! It would really rely your Marketing CONTENT!
In a common sense way, if people would actually see you through your viral campaigns and read your stuff and didnt get interested what would be the effect on your business?
The bottomline is that companies should also consider reforming their contents first while utlizing these social networking tools in order to achieve full online marketing campaign. Besides who cares about the numbers of visitors if it can not be converted into sales?
its a new site with all kind of selected videos of youtube