Social marketing is all about merging content and marketing. In a recent interview, Jamie Kantrowitz, Myspace senior V-P for marketing & content, made the following points:

1. Just like you have a home address, we’re closing in on the point where everyone will have an internet address, which will be their social profile of choice.
2. The web will get even more portable & more responsive. Users will be able to get the content they want, no matter when or where they want it.
3. The number and variety of bells and whistles offered by social networking sites will skyrocket, with MySpace leading the way.
4. MySpace has almost 110 million monthly active users worldwide. More than a quarter-million join every day, and 85% are over 21.

Kantrowitz notes some interesting recent stats from MySpace research conducted by The Future Laboratory:

• 22% of 18-24 year olds said that brands ‘have to work harder to earn our respect’
• 11% stated social networks have made them expect more from brands and content online
• 14% believe brands appear more friendly and creative on the social web
• 13% said social marketing sites have made them see brands as experiences they can become involved with.

Kantrowitz concludes that a big social marketing value of MySpace is, it can specifically target users, therefore ensuring that the right messages fall on open ears.

The idea of the social marketing team was probably invented in a coffee shop. Isn’t it ironic that Starbucks is now looking to social marketing to save its coffee shops?

Not long ago, Starbucks was the golden child of business, with meteoric growth. Times have changed. Starbucks will close about 100 stores in 2008.

So Starbucks has come up with “MyStarbucksIdea”, to mine the creative promotional minds of the best social marketing team they could find … their own coffee-drinking customers. This is a great model. And a company doesn’t have to be in dire straits to take advantage of their customers’ ideas.

Starbucks has set up a social marketing website where you can submit promotional ideas, comment on the ideas of others, and vote on which ideas you like best. A team of Starbucks employees will then screen the most popular and most innovative ideas and present them to company decision-makers with a recommendation.

Starbucks has a screen where you can see the Most Popular ideas, Top All-Time ideas, and the ideas with the greatest number of comments. And chances are, a social marketing team mastermind group like this will come up with ideas that can be adapted to a lot of businesses, not just Starbucks. It’s an idea that costs practically nothing, and it could deliver some very useful results.

When it comes to social media marketing, there are strengths and there are strengths. For one thing, there are different types of social media and different types of social media marketers. Each type of marketer has a strength they can play to, but most social media marketers need someone else to fill the gap.

Developers are typically technically proficient personalities who are capable of building cool applications and widgets. They are the bells and whistles guys who can make your MySpace page look first class or your Facebook profile attract attention. But bells and whistles without real marketing savvy is just a loud clang with no oomph behind it.

Planners are guys with real marketing genius. They know how to market a product or a service and get attention for achievements. But their technical knowledge is limited. While they can envision a plan and implement it, their knowledge and planning skills go only so far. Without the technical proficiency of the developer, they really can’t push the limits of the social media marketing mind.

Implementers are great at carrying out the plans of the planners and are good at learning the tools developed by the developers. They are not so good at the planning usually. They don’t know how to plan a marketing strategy. They can do all the hands on work that is necessary to make a marketing plan work, however.

A good social media marketing teams should consist of one planner (you can’t have more than one chief), at least one developer, and several implementers. You’ll need someone with the vision to know how to plan a marketing plan and specifically how to put together a plan that addresses the uniqueness of your product or service. You’ll need someone who can communicate with developers and implementers and keep them motivated. For your development team, you’ll need someone who can build practical tools that will play to your vision. You need someone who has no knowledge of “I can’t.” Your chief developer needs to be a know-how geek who will tackle even the toughest of challenges with optimism and be persistent enough to keep trying even against all odds. Your implementers need to be creative and able to learn systems quickly enough and you should have enough of them to accomplish the task you want to set before your team.

One final note: When setting out on your social media marketing path, don’t let failure discourage you. It’s a tough run and even the best marketers in the world have trouble navigating the social media marketing ocean.

Do you need a developer API?

This is a question that you’ll need to answer for yourself at some point. Many social networking sites like Facebook, now MySpace, and Digg allow users to develop their own user and social marketing tools using networking site’s API.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It allows users of social sites an opportunity to customize their user experience and the experience of their friends and networks by developing their own applications. These applications can be used at marketing tools to attract new people to your network and to get them to your website or blog. The key is in the skills you use to develop those applications.

If you do not have application development skills yourself then you might consider looking for a developer or programmer who can help you achieve your goals. Such a person can be a huge asset to your social marketing team. Social applications range from the silly to the viral, but if you can’t attract attention to the application itself then you’re not really doing your organization any favors so behooves you to give it some thought before you spend money on hiring a developer.

Do you have a social media marketing team? If not, you might consider getting one. I believe that the future of Internet marketing is going to consist, to a large degree, of social media marketing and if do not put together the right team to help you navigate the waters of the social media marketing ocean then you will not get very far. But what should your team consist of?

I believe a good social marketing team, at a minimum, should consist of the following people or teams:

1. Blogging Team - I say you need a blogging team because it may be more than just one person. You may have several blogs, one that targets each market that you are trying to reach. But whether you have one or 100 bloggers on your team, you will need to develop your blogging team and keep them motivated.
2. Social Bookmarkers - Social bookmarking and tagging have become a niche unto themselves. There are all sorts of social bookmarking websites online now. Not all of them are helpful, but many of them are. And social bookmarking is an activity that takes time. The benefits, however, are well worth the payout. You’ll need someone to bookmark your content and use it to drive traffic and increase your search rankings.
3. Networking Agents - Whether you use Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ll need someone to serve as your organization’s networking liaison. This person will be responsible for applying to the various networking websites that you believe will benefit your company the most and manage those profiles. That includes approving friends requests, sending friends requests, testing and using applications, and performing all the functions of managing a networking strategy, whether you use just one networking site or several.
4. Reputation Manager - Reputation management has become very important online. Companies of the future will need to spend some time managing their online reputations and you’ll need one person who is devoted to that task. It could be your social media marketing manager, the head of your team, as reputation management really involves all aspects of social media marketing.
5. Market Research Team - Someone needs to gather the information that your company will use to market products and services. This team will be responsible for creating polls and surveys, analyzing the data you receive from your efforts, researching the competition, and doing all the things that traditional market research firms have done, but applying the tasks to Internet marketing strategies.
6. Content Writing Team - You can’t have social media content with a production crew. Usually this means content writing. It may mean videos, photos, or audio production (see below), but even if you do have those professionals on your team, you’ll also need content writers. No organization should go without a writing team.
7. Technology Administrator - You can’t go online without the guru of gurus. Don’t even think about it.

This is the bare minimum list. Other members of your social media marketing team could include:

• Viral Video Manager - Someone is going to have to produce those videos for you.
• Podcasting Specialist - You’ll need someone proficient in the use of audio technology to manage your downloads.
• Photo Marketing Manager - Does your organization use photos in its marketing plan? Someone will need to organize and manage that effort.
• Wiki Expert - Wiki technology has not caught on across the board yet. But some industries have managed to use it very effectively. If it proves useful to your company, you might consider having a wiki expert on your team.
• Forum Administrator - Not every company will have a forum, but if yours does then someone will need to manage it and that’s a full-time job. Even if you don’t manage your own forum, you may need someone who visits forums and interacts with other forum participants. That’s a special skill. Who’s going to do it?
• Use Your Imagination - This list is not comprehensive. Future technologies will require more specialties. You might as well start planning for the future now.

Now is the time to organize your social media marketing team. If you haven’t put any thought into how your business will organize its social media marketing efforts then you haven’t started your planning yet. It’s not too late.

Rand Fishkin always has insightful commentary. Yesterday’s blog post on social media marketing at SEOmoz had a lot of useful insight in it and I won’t comment on all of it. But I would like to address one essential point: The value of social media marketing in terms of SEO.

This is something that doesn’t get a lot of airplay, but Rand shows a screenshot of his own profile at various social media websites. The screenshot illustrates the SEO power of doing nothing more than setting up profiles at the various sites. Typically, the search engines count those links in your profiles to your website in their inbound link algorithms. You never have to participate in the social media site to get that benefit. Just setting up the profile will do it.

But that’s not to say that’s all you should do. If you want inbound links, there are other ways to build lots of inbound links. But these social media site profiles will provide you with valuable inbound links to your website. The problem is, there is a ceiling because you can only have one profile at each site. You might be able set up alias sites at some of them, but that’s only going to be effective so far and for so long. The true value of social media marketing is in the participation at the websites.

Whether you prefer LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, or an industry-specific networking tool, social media sites are very powerful. The real value comes in establishing a presence, mingling with other members, building relationships, and through that developing those contacts into truly meaningful prospects. Keep in mind, though, that individuals are merely individuals. The real value here is in finding the influencers and to convince them of the value that you can provide to their audiences. One key influencer can potentially lead you to thousands of new visitors to your website and new customers. All it takes is one rock solid relationship with a key influencer.

We talked not long ago about making all your social friends in to an advertising force, but, can you build them in to a full-fledged social marketing team?

Record companies have had something known as “street teams” for years. They give them posters to hang, fliers to hand out, stickers to put on polls, the works. They then award prizes to the street team members who meet goals or do the best job. There’s no reason why this same idea can’t be applied to your “friends”.

Give them banners, buttons, video clips via YouTube, anything that they can place in their profiles that will link back to you and spread your brand and name. As for prizes, in a situation such as this, unless you want to go through the trouble of creating a ton of affiliation links, you can just award prizes based on most creative use, best layout, and so on. The point is more to get your name spread far and wide, and that’s exactly what a social marketing team can do for you.