Some would say, if my customers don’t use social networks, why should I? One response could be, ‘what about the potential for new customers?’ I tend to take a different path.

Everyone has the potential to be influenced. This post may influence you. When looking at social marketing we are often told to segment that market and to target those that fit our potential customer profiles. That is fine. What if my customers are children? I know they are not going to be using social sites and even if they were, targeting them could be difficult.

Marketers would argue that children are not your customers. The parents are the ones holding the purse strings and the ones doing the buying. The children maybe the influencer’s, but the parents are the customers. This scenario has been the cause of many arguments between marketing people for many years. Who do you target - the parent or the child?

In this case, our social marketing cannot target children, we have to target the parents and the aim now is to turn them into influencer’s. We need to ’sell’ the product to the parent in the hope that they will in turn ’sell’ the product to their children.

If your customers are not using social networks, rather than ignoring the process of social marketing, you need to find which group can be targeted to influence your potential customers. Target those influencer’s and the job is almost complete.

Microsoft will next week reveal their latest addition to the family with a new social bookmarking feature for MSDN and TechNet.

According John Martin’s TechNet blog, the new social bookmarking feature will be unveiled for preview next week and showcased ad TechEd North America the following week. The new social bookmarking feature will allow the user to:

• Bookmark any URL on the web
• Apply tags
• Save bookmarks in the new My Bookmarks tool

The report also revealed:

All bookmarks, bookmarkers, and tags will also be enabled as links and can be “surfed” to discover new content and people.

It will be interesting to see how this works in action and whether or not it can be used to help drive traffic to your web page in a similar fashion to many other social bookmarking sites.

You can bet that Microsoft will not ignore the possible data collection potential of a move such as this particularly when the data from tags could be invaluable. Social bookmarking is a popular tool at present and there will always be room for more players as long as they remain functional and of benefit to users. Time will tell.

Social marketing can be a time consuming activity particulalry if you are starting out for the first time. You can make a little easier for yourself by being organized and following a few straightforward steps.

The biggest problem that new social marketers face is getting themselves known. The biggest mistakes they make is trying to do to much to quickly which can often have the effect of making the social marketer look like a social marketer. Follow these steps and you will find that your start in social marketing is smooth and in the long run, profitable. Set goals to achieve each of these steps:

• connect with at least one new person on each site per day
• comment on at least one post, article or profile page each day
• submit a site, post or article to one site at least every other day (not your own)

By adding one new person to your list each day you can actually spend a moment connecting with them and starting a communication stream. By commenting on someone else’s material you are participating and continuing your communications. Finally, by submitting material that is not yours you are sharing and contributing to the community.

By following these steps you will gain a reputation for being a top participant and a valuable community member. Once established, other community members will either submit your material or start discussing your products - the aim of all social marketing campaigns.

According to a post on e-Consultancy, perhaps not. The post looked at research by Forrester who are advising marketers to spend more on social marketing.

Part of Forrester’s argument included:

“Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.”

E-Consultancy responded with:

The idea that brands are having consistent success leveraging social media to get their “messages carried further than ad impressions” is a myth in my opinion.

Word-of-mouth is not necessarily synonymous with social media. That is, just as with any other form of marketing, there is no guarantee that consumers are going to take your message and carry it on.

The problem with both sides of this argument is that they are using too broad a brush to paint the scene. As with all marketing strategies, you will not know if it is going to work until you test it out. Social marketing is no different.

In fact, the important words from eConsultancy is the “with any other form of marketing, there is no guarantee that consumers are going to take your message and carry it on.” To this I do agree. I doesn’t matter what type of campaign you try to launch, there are no guarantees.

Broad statements do little to help the average internet user. Social marketing consultants have been able to see quite good returns on the investment dollar. Other campaigns have been big flops.

Social marketing, as with any marketing, is always going to be trial and error. However, with social marketing you can be a little more proactive in your approach by being a part of the social scene that you are trying to engage. Social marketing has the potential to do more for a product or brand than traditional offline marketing.

Market segmentation has been a major part of marketing for many decades. Do you apply the same principles to your online social marketing and through your social bookmarking?

According Wikipedia:

A market segment is a subgroup of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to have similar product needs….

and

Market segment is the processing of marketing of characterizing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in similar ways or have similar needs.

If you were to take this approach, your would break your potential social market into subsets depending on different characteristics. For example, if you marketed and sold pet food, you may break your market up into cat, dogs, birds and fish. To take advantage of this, you would need to change your social bookmarking and social marketing strategies.

You could set up different identities within each of the social sites; one identity for cat, another for dog; and so on. You would then only have the cat fanciers in your cat group. Now when marketing a particular product aimed at cats, you would be marketing to and audience made up entirely of can fanciers rather than an audience with a wide range of pets. You could then use your social bookmarks to identify information that is far better target; this should result in a much higher conversion rate for visitors.

Segmenting your market can be rather time consuming if you have a broad base that you are targeting. However, if you start by taking one segment at a time and optimizing your social marketing and social bookmarking to that segment, the returns could be much higher than what you see at present. Market segmentation and social marketing or social bookmarking can go hand in hand.

I am not sure if social marketing etiquette exists these days unless you have your own self imposed rules. Sure, social sites have their own rules or conditions for use, however these seem to be red flags to some marketing bulls who just want to charge through them.

The last twelve to eighteen months has seen the development of social marketing skills to the point that many individuals are able to market their sites quite openly - not etiquette at all. They would argue they have been there and done that.

To that point, I totally agree. I like the analogy has done the rounds where social marketing is being compared to your local high school. If you’re new at a high school, you need to find a group that somewhat meets your ideals whilst at the same time accepting you as a member.

Once you become accepted into the group, particularly if you are seen as a leader or a person with influence, the sky is the limit. The same can said for social marketing. Once you have been accepted it appears you can do no wrong - unless that is you breach etiquette the group has established.

So there is a degree of etiquette within the social sites - the difficulty is in learning what that etiquette is within your group. Find a group where you can fit in. Learn the rules of engagement and from there, social marketing becomes a breeze.

Today is Mother’s Day in many parts of the world so you can imagine how busy many of social sites such as Facebook and MySpace are going to be.

We live in a world where distance is no longer measured in miles, it’s measured in how long it takes to send an email, and whether it’s day or night where your loved ones are.

Special events like Christmas, Easter and Valentines Day have been commercialized to the extent that the true meanings are often lost. Mother’s Day seems to have survived thus far although the power of online marketing is starting to have its effect.

One of the best gestures that I have seen in recent years was a company that, rather than pushing its products with loud glossy ads, promoted one simple message:

Social marketing is not about advertising, at least not advertising on its own. Social marketing is the art of getting others to talk about your brand or products. Brand awareness or product awareness should be your ultimate aim with social marketing. When someone wants one of your products, it should be your site or business that first springs to mind.

How you achieve this depends on the amount of time and energy you can put into visiting social media sites and, basically, socializing. The more time you can devote the more you will recoup. Social marketing is, in the early days, all about what you do.

Once you get people, particularly your customers, talking about your products or services and associating it with you, the more traffic and eventually the more sales you can achieve. There are several things you need to accept for your social marketing plan to work:

First, and most importantly, you need to place some trust in your customers. They will not always get it right, however you need to let them have their say without constantly jumping in to correct them. If a customer makes a statement that is bordering on the untrue, let it stand but take action on your site so that any visitors can see immediately what the real situation is. You need to let the conversation grow.

Second, the good, the bad and the evil. You need to accept that you will receive many different types of reviews. Some will be positive whilst others will be negative. People only ever talk from experience. If they have had a bad experience, fix it. If someone says that communication is poor, find out from them what the problem was and fix it. This can often be turned into good PR if they then discuss the positive outcomes.

Social marketing is the future so learning to get it right is very important. If you can participate and develop your brand or product awareness then the door opens to advertising both direct and indirect. Use the social marketing strategy carefully and and the results can last far beyond the end of any planned campaign.

Social and viral marketing is a trust issue - not a trust in you - more a trust between friends. It just needs the seeds. For any issue to become viral, the word needs to be spread, and that is done through trust, or at least perceived trust.

Social sites are everywhere and on many of these sites, your online friends are also your offline line friends, relatives or acquaintances. You may have five of these friends who each have another five friends. I need not go on - you know the story. One person says something positive (or negative) and it starts to spread.

What most people don’t realize is that many people will also accept recommendations from complete strangers. This happens frequently throughout the various social sites. Here the emphasis is often either weight of numbers, or the quality of the recommendation.

Take as an example, an individual who asks “who sells the best green widgets”. One friend may say company A. Fifty complete strangers may say company B. One stranger may say company C and provide examples - a good testimonial. As all three have levels of trust, who would you buy from?

I am not going to over analyze this - the answer is either A B or C. And that is my point. When it comes to social and viral marketing campaigns, you can trigger the viral component either through a close friend, or by simply having someone provide a good recommendation; we just need to be able to capitalize on it.

One aspect of social marketing which every business owner should be aware of is that it’s completely free. However, the most preventable marketing mistake that a business can make is to focus to heavily on themselves, their product or their service.

Don’t get me wrong, social marketing is all about promoting, but it is how you promote that matters. Social sites are, by their definition, places where people meet to socialize. They don’t want products shoved at them from all directions. What they do want to hear is what you can do for them.

Solving questions or providing solutions to problems will win you many fans and should be the starting point for any social marketing plan. Gently promoting your product or service along can be done if it is part of the solution. Social media can be a great vehicle for releasing new products, again if you can feed the ego’s of the members of these site.

Many sites don’t approve of open promotion, or the social marketing of products or services, and for good reason. The focus on many of these sites is to provide a forum where people can meet and socialize. People in these situations will naturally discuss anything and everything. It is through these general discussions that you can develop your own following.

If you really want to capitalize on the wave of traffic that flows through many of these sites then you could purchase open advertising on a pay-per-click basis. To date many of these campaigns have failed. The reason behind these failures comes back to the nature of the sites. People are gathering to socialize and share stories, not buy. Social marketing needs to be subtle.

Find the knack of delivering your social marketing strategy in a subtle way and you will find success. The number one rule for social marketing success, answer the question, what can I do for you? Social networking will be so much easier.

Social marketing has become an important aspect of general web promotion activities and the first question most people ask is ‘where do I start’. The answer is easier said than done.

Research is the key to any social marketing campaign. You need to spend time visiting the various social sites in an attempt to determine where your potential customers/readers/visitors hang out. Once you identify those sites and the areas within those sites, then you can start to target your efforts.

Bloggers are particularly bad in this respect. They tend to hit as many sites as possible and often take a scattergun approach - if I spray enough about, I am bound to hit some targets. The scattergun approach is often caused by time, if you are targeting six or seven sites, you simply do not have the time required to network effectively within each one. Unfortunately that approach can lead to some negative aspects for social marketing.

You do need to target more than one site, however if you can identify where your ‘market crowd’ is then you can avoid the scattergun approach and spend quality time developing your image within that site. Social marketing is after all dependent on developing a good reputation.

Social marketing is about finding your target audience and wooing them. This takes time and patience however the rewards can be very satisfying. Your target group will not come to you unless you can get to them and that is what social marketing is all about.

It appears many of the top online marketing people do. And its not only the marketing guru’s that twitter. From news stories it seem that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was in the habit of ‘twittering’ whilst on his recent trip to the US - perhaps not Gordon Brown personally, but certainly members of his entourage.

Twitter has not appealed to me to date, perhaps because I haven’t had the time to sit down and really look at it. From what I heard, it seems to be growing rapidly in popularity with many influential people getting on board.

Social marketing is making its presence felt with more and more marketers getting on. They are learning to market their products - SMS style.

If you are out of the loop, Twitter enable users to stay in touch using short SMS style messages. The trend is growing with many businesses incorporating Twitter into their communications toolbox. I heard a recent radio interview where one of the Twitter proponents was discussing the writing of dedicated intranet twitter style software.

Since the rest of the world is getting on the Twitter roller coaster, perhaps its time I had a closer look. Tell me - do you Twitter? If so, any advice!

If you are a frequent user of YouTube you will know that they have some fairly strict conditions related to what you can and cannot do on the site. It seems that some of these restrictions are being eased.

Apart from copyright violations (that never expire), YouTube is giving most offenders a clean bill of health as of 16 April 2008. In the past, three violations in a 12 month period would see you suffer a YouTube sin binning. Under the changes:

[source - YouTube]What we’ve come up with is to temporarily mute users, so that they can still use the site and watch videos, but they can’t post new content. Right now it is set up to affect users who have two Community Guidelines warnings in a six-month period and will last two weeks.

Other changes include notifications. In the past a user was emailed with any warnings. However, due to spam filters often removing these notices, YouTube will now also advise the user the next time they log in. There will be no excuse to claim non receipt of any notifications.

The change is has been introduced to bring in a little fairness. Under the previous system, someone who committed a three breaches over 12 months were treated in the same manner as someone who committed the three breaches in a week. Breaches will now expire after six months.

To stay on top in the social marketing game you have to know what is going on around you. The best way to do that is by subscribing to those who are recognized as leaders, authorities and news makers within the social marketing niche.

You can subscribe to wither newsletters or RSS feeds through either the later arriving either by email or RSS reader. These subscriptions will enable you stay up to date with the latest news whilst providing you with the relevant information required to make decisions or put in place different social marketing strategies.

If you spend a lot of time undertaking social marketing the last thing you want is to have it all undermined because you haven’t stayed up to date. One of the keys to successful marketing is to beat the other guy to the punch, that is done by being one of the first to successfully react to changes in the marketplace or environment.

For this reason, make sure you also subscribe to content that comes from a broader or more generalized group of writers. This will also provide a more rounded view of the on line environment which will enable more relevant social marketing strategy decisions.

Subscription services are always free and it only takes minutes to scan information for value - those minutes could save you hours down the track when it comes to social marketing for your web site.

There has been a lot of discussion recently revolving around the concept of tracking a users movement on the net and then targeting them with advertising based on their activities. Most of the chatter seems to indicate that consumers are not appreciating this target advertising. It then raises the question surrounding social marketing through the various social bookmarking sites.

One some forums however, the talk seems to indicate that consumers have a general dislike for advertising in general but if they are going to be shown ads, then targeted ads are more preferred. It also seems, as the internet experience of many consumers matures, that many now expect to see some form of social marketing.

The future may well be bright for social marketing as consumers start to use social platforms to find information on proposed purchases. Generally speaking, doing a search on a search engine is likely to return results related to sellers. Doing a search through a social platform is more likely to return results based on user experience and social marketing information.

These results provide consumers with what they want prior to their purchase, either validation of the their choose, or information on which they can base their choice. We are already seeing tech savvy people using various forum communities to discuss products prior to their purchase. One of the reasons for this is that tech companies and those selling tech products have undertaken social marketing strategies through those forums.

Young people and those in the music industry are now using platforms such as Bebo to either deliver their social marketing messages or to connect with others with like interests.

Social marketing is here to stay. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the information that can be found through these sites. Whilst search engines will probably never have to fear them, social bookmarking and social media sites will soon be a consumers first choice to search. Are consumers ready for social marketing? If they are not now - they soon will be.