These are all good questions to ask as we face the new media marketing trend. The tools of marketing have expanded and for many businesses, this new media is an unknown territory that complicates the marketing mix.

Whether your business sells to consumers (B2C) or to businesses (B2B), new media marketing will have a profound effect on your marketing plan in the future. You need to prepare to join the conversation, listen to your customers, and build a long term relationship with them that helps your business succeed.

Social Media Tools

The new social media tools enable users to publish content easily, building a brand not only for their businesses, but in many cases for themselves. The following are the tools that you need to be aware of and work into your marketing mix over time. There are others, but we’ll focus on the basics first.

• Blogs – A blog is a web site using technology that makes it easy for anyone to post information to the web. The blog itself is a frequent post of information about a particular topic welcoming comments and discussion. If you don’t have a web site yet or are considering an update, consider moving to blogging software as the foundation. It makes updating content easy and you can add the blog to your site when you are ready to do so.
• Podcasts – A podcast is an audio file that automatically gets delivered to your computer and can be transferred to your portable MP3 player so you can listen to it wherever you are. If you are familiar with RSS, simply think of podcasting as RSS for audio. (If you need more on RSS, read my last article on The Benefits of Using RSS.) You do NOT need an iPod to listen to a podcast.
• Social networks – A social network is a community of people who share interests and activities. Social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, provide an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users.

Why are they called Social Media?

Internet technologies we have been using have enabled us to push our marketing messages out into the marketplace. Web sites spoke to your audience, explaining what you have to offer. Getting qualified prospects to your Web site was a matter of creating a compelling offer and using direct marketing, search engine marketing, Internet advertising and other marketing activities to direct their attention to your landing pages.

Social media marketing enables you to build relationships with your prospects, enabling them to voice their ideas and opinions with you. In order to make this type of marketing work for you, you need to develop a safe environment that invites people to speak with you. You need to join the conversation and build your brand through your words and actions.

Where Do I Start?

Businesses interested in employing social media tactics as part of their marketing plan should begin now to research how these are being used and how to get started. There is a culture and etiquette associated with the use of new media that you should understand before diving in. If you are a small business that sells services, a blog may just be the thing you need to boost your credibility and attract new clients. If you have a lot to say and want to make it easy for folks to listen to your opinions and information, then consider creating a podcast of your information. Social media marketing may seem like it is just one more thing to add complexity to the already complex marketing world, but diving in and learning how to take advantage of these as marketing tools will pay off in the long run. Don’t get overwhelmed – pick one area and learn it.

For example, start with learning how blogs work by visiting a number of them that cover a topic you are interested in. To find blogs, you can go to the Google Blog Search and type in the topic you are interested in. Read a few, subscribe to some with RSS, and watch, listen and learn. Create your blog and start posting regularly. Then start adding comments
to some of the posts you read with useful information on topic, sharing your knowledge and opinion with others while getting links back to your blog. Like all marketing activities, getting your blog visible to the search engines will take time, but adding fresh content and getting links back to your blog will help it rise in the search engine rankings so people will be able to find you.

Join the Conversation

Whether a business targets consumers or other businesses, social media marketing is going to have an impact on the marketing activities very soon. Learning what is available to you, determining whether your market can be effectively reached through social media and tying it in with your traditional marketing activities will benefit your business in the long term. Using these tools to market your business is more than worth investment.

As a B2B marketing person, you might think this list is overwhelming. However, in my view this is a wonderful list of potential tactics that you might employ depending on the goals you plan to achieve this year.

If you are new to Web marketing or have only dabbled in some search engine marketing, email campaigns or Internet advertising, this is a great list to get you thinking about other ways to get your message out or better, let your constituents get your message out for you.

If you are a veteran Web marketer, this is a great checklist to help you stimulate news ideas for your marketing plan.

In all cases, develop the plan, research the opportunities and execute effectively. Web marketing is no different from traditional forms in this respect.

This solution took a little more time to understand and set up, but the demo that comes with it is easy to understand and mimic for your own site. If you are looking for a nice way to feed RSS to your static site to make your visitors come back more often, this solution is another nice option to consider.

I took my cues from David and searched for an easy to use widget to load my blog entries into my web site home page. I came across Kent Brewster’s Badger application that creates Web badges out of any RSS feed. With a little tweaking of the css provided, I was able to integrate the information into the site pretty seamlessly. Being able to put my new posts headlines on my home page makes my web site more interesting to new visitors, encouraging them to visit my blog for more information.

I also updated the web site design to more closely match my blog design. I like the clean look of the blog and wanted to make the same look work for the Web site. With a bit of rearranging and rewriting some of the content, the site looks as good as new. There’s still work to be done, but the site has received the necessary facelift and is ready to go back to work.

Your web site is still very much an important part of your marketing effort and needs to remain equal to your blog if it has served you well. With a little bit of love, your web site can continue to work for your business in conjunction with your blog. It takes a little planning and strategy, but it can be done.

Along came the Internet which has given marketers an additional medium in which to communicate their messages to their target audience. And although it took a while for companies to incorporate Internet marketing within their corporate marketing functions, the Internet is now an integrated part of their overall marketing plan.

So if you have Internet marketing activities in your marketing plan, does that mean you are implementing social media marketing?

Many corporate marketers would like to think so, but there is a fundamental difference between Internet marketing, using the Internet as a means to communicate your message to your target audience, and social media marketing.

Social media makes marketing a multidimensional exercise. It is no longer about pushing your message out to your audience. Social media marketing takes the same Internet technologies and adds interaction with your audience. It’s having your constituents spread your messages for you rather than you talk deafly to some cloud of people who may or may not care about what you have to offer. In some ways it really isn’t much different from word of mouth marketing where your happy clients, colleagues and partners say good things about you and provide you referral business. The difference is the speed with which your message is carried via the social network.

And it’s because of that speed that many corporate marketers are frightened of it. The key is to embrace it and use it because your company is being talked about in social networks and there is nothing you can do to stop it. By participating in the social networking world, letting your customers speak directly to you, and listening to what they have to say, you are more likely to win the hearts and minds of the masses than you will if you hide behind the corporate veneer.

How do you turn your Internet marketing activities into social media marketing?

I am an extremely strong proponent for Internet marketing. It has worked for my business and my clients’ businesses and now we are extending that Internet presence by adding on social media marketing. Every business, small or large, needs to open the communications channels with their audience. Look for opportunities to get feedback on your company, good or bad, and respond. For small businesses, start a blog. It doesn’t matter whether you market B2B or B2C, a blog provides benefits you normally will not get from Internet marketing alone.

In 7 reasons why small businesses should blog, Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba, authors of Citizen Marketers, provide reasons and advice on why you should blog.

Adding social media marketing to your marketing mix is not a difficult project. It does need to be planned so that your social media marketing activities stay on brand with all of your marketing activities. And depending on your company, you may need to evaluate the effect social media marketing has on the culture of your business. But there are ways of evolving your company to take advantage of this new and exciting marketing area. It’s really not that scary afterall.

So how will businesses integrate Web 2.0 capabilities into their marketing mix? How will they start? Where will it lead?

Let me know what you think.

Part of the reason for this is that I dove into creating my blog one weekend. I had been planning on launching a blog for my business, and like most other things I do, all of a sudden I get the urge to just dive right in. Since my hosting company had the blog software available as part of our hosting plan, I thought I’d take a look and see what it would take to build a blog. The diving was fun, I learned a lot about WordPress, diddled with the template to make it look like my web site, and wrote a few posts. I added the WordPress software to my web site as a subdirectory. Little did I know that my experiment would catch a few folks attention right away before I even launched the blog.

Next fun part was that my hosting company advised me to deinstall WordPress to determine if issues that arose were due to the installation of WordPress or some other issue with PHP. Well, bye bye posts, comment and my patience.

After reconstructing the site and re-entering my posts, I got the blog back online and added a couple more posts. Another comment appears. All is well until I decide to check and see if the domain name vistaviewpoint.com is available just for grins. Not only was it available, I also found vista-viewpoint.com available. With all the activity around Microsoft Vista, I figured I’d better grab those domain names now or they will be gone forever. So now I have the even more interesting exercise of creating the blog at the new domain name. I figure I best do it now before I get more comments, more visibility and subscribers.

I have just finished recreating the blog at the new domain name. You have to admit that being able to point people to www.vistaviewpoint.com rather than www.vista-consulting.com/vistablog/ is much neater.

If you are actually reading this post, then you found the new blog location. Wonderful! Welcome back. Better I do this on my blog than a client’s. Hopefully I have saved a few of you from this exercise. Planning all these details ahead of time certainly makes life easier.