I am working on finishing the update to my book this weekend for McGraw-Hill.

Here's the new content being added to the updated version on Social Media Marketing within the Web Marketing section on my book. I know this topic pretty well, but not as well as some of you... take a look at this new section and let me know if I'm missing anything. Thank you.

Cheers,
Ryan
ryan[at]icontact.com

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media marketing revolves around creating interactive conversations with your visitors, often through new mediums such as blogs, videos, podcasts, and social network communities. It is a relationship building, and not a promotional, form of building your brand.

Blogging can be one of the most effective ways at building quality related content and incoming links to your web site, as well as creating a transparent participatory discussion with your customers. You can blog using tools like Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad, or iContact.

A normal blog has its content in reverse chronological order with datestamps, a commenting system, a method of tagging and categorizing posts, a method of archiving posts, and a method of subscribing to the blog’s feed. Some blogs utilize a tool like Feedburner or iContact to track the number of their subscribers as well as to distribute their blog posts automatically as email.

Most blogs show the most recent content on the home page with archives by week, category, or individual post. At the bottom of most blog posts are interactive buttons that allow a user to share the post on a number of Web 2.0 services such as Digg, Facebook, iGoogle, MyYahoo, Reddit, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Fark, Furl, Ma.gnolia, Newsvine, Slashdot, Spurl, and TailRank. I’m feeling very Web 2.0 right now.

Blogs can also utilize widgets that allow additional interactivity by showing information such as the avatars of the community members (MyBlogLog), recent videos (YouTube), photostreams (Flickr), slideshows (RockYou), bookmarks (Del.icio.us), favorite blogs (called a blogroll) favorite music (Last.fm), social network updates (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace), what the blogger is currently reading (Goodreads), or what the blogger is currently doing (Twitter). Other forms of social media marketing include:

1. 1. Creating a community of your users through a off-site social network like Ning, Facebook, or MySpace, or an on-site installed tool like Drupal, Shark, OneSite, CommunityZero, or CommunityServer.
2. Creating a presence in virtual worlds such as SecondLife (yes this is being done);
3. Creating a unique or controversial story and submitting it for exposure on Digg and Netscape.com;
4. Claiming your blog and building up reputation for it on Technorati;
5. Exchanging blogroll links with other related bloggers;
6. Adding a discussion forum to your site;
7. Participating in online forums that discuss your field;
8. Adding information about your company on Squidoo, ZoomInfo, or Wikipedia (if it is noteworthy enough, that is);
9. Creating interesting videos showing what you do and posting them on video sharing sites such as YouTube and MetaCafe; and
10. Creating podcasts and then distributing them via iTunes and Odeo.

Through all these methods you can go from being a company that communicates via a one-way broadcast tool into a company that builds authentic open dialog in a democratic participatory manner.