Yesterday I attended the latest edition of Crain’s long-running forum, and listened to an expert panel share their insights with a room full of business people about how to approach digital marketing and social media.  One of those speakers was Matt Moog, founder of the Viewpoints Network, and a serial entrepreneur  (he was previously CEO at CoolSavings/Q Interactive, an interactive marketing services company). Matt decided to use the Crain’s event to demonstrate how quickly buzz can be built. Before he arrived, he posted some of his planned remarks on his blog, using the name of the event in the title. The idea being that within a day or so, anyone searching for information about the event would also find his post.

I’ve extended the experiment by doing the same thing in my own title here. Let’s see how that goes.

What I liked about this panel was that they showcased a pragmatic approach to the topic, even as they made suggestions about how to think creatively to generate an army of fans. Moog’s first point was  the continuing importance of email – he still sends out monthly updates (essentially a newsletter) to a list he has built over a number of years.  And Nancy Munro of KnowledgeShift stressed the importance of press releases, using one or more of the low-cost online distribution options that now exist.  

So if email and PR are still in the top five, what has changed in digital marketing from 10 years ago, when these Crain’s forums got under way amidst the “irrational exuberance” of the dot-come era? Part of that answer is the explosion of online tools, including social media that help us communicate, connect, and analyze. And yes, many of these innovations are free, or close to it. By the end of today, for example, I could publish a blog or create a simple website.  Yikes – as an Internet solutions professional, am I staring obsolescence in the face? Well, no. As Julie Roth Novack of Razorfish, another panel member, made clear, some things haven’t changed: the online solutions that do most for your business begin with definition of business objectives, listening to customers, and paying attention to the competition. There are still no instant solutions for that.

Just to round out this post, here’s some interesting data published this week by Marketing Sherpa about how marketers see the impact of social media over time:

Do You Agree or Disagree That Social Media Will…

Social Media has become a topic at many marketing meetings.  As an individual, you may be actively interacting with others online through blogs, discussion boards, or social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook.  But should your organization be actively participating in social media too?  

There are many types of social media:
•    Multimedia Social Media - Sharing photos and video on Flickr or YouTube
•    Collaboration and Opinion Social Media - Adding content to Wikipedia or sharing your opinion on Yelp
•    Communication Social Media – Blogs, Twitter (a.k.a. micro-blogging), and social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook

Organizations are most often utilizing Communication Social Media.

Determining if your target audiences are actively using any of these forms of social media is the first step. For example, an audience made up of business professionals is likely be using professional connection sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo rather than a more personal site like MySpace.  Wherever you decide to focus, build connections and relationships first, and then use the features of the site (such as LinkedIn and FaceBook groups) to expand the value of each site. Start small; don’t try to cover too many sites at once.

Using social media to market your organization can create a positive buzz and help build awareness of your organization, but it does open your organization to negative messages as well.  You risk losing control of the messages being posted about your organization, since anyone can add a positive or negative message, anonymously in some cases, to many social media sites.  If you are concerned about the messages being posted, a blog is a good way to get started.  

If you do decide to make social media part of your marketing efforts, make sure once you start to keep the effort going. While one of the benefits of this activity is attracting individuals to your organization, keeping their attention depends on the generation of new and up-to-date information. As the Harvard Business Review reported recently, most Twitter users send messages (or tweets) very rarely. The top 10 percent of those using the service represent 90 percent of the messages sent – so if you add Twitter to your social media plan, you want to be sure you are in the 10 percent that attracts followers.  Looking across all your social media initiatives, it is important to create a schedule to ensure you keep posting information. You will lose opportunities to interact with potential visitors if you invest in a blog but post very rarely.   

Another decision to be made is whether to advertise on a social media site.  These sites generally have low click-through rates when compared to advertising on a search engine such as Google.  You will have a better return on your resources by building awareness virally through social media, and investing in advertising via search engines and other proven channels.

By determining your social media goals, and focusing your effort and available resources, you can use these viral channels to increase your organization’s brand awareness and your ability to build new connections within target markets.  

How many points of interaction can you give your site visitors? Plenty. That’s why ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ get so much attention. Potential online tactics for engaging your audience include blogging, polling, forums, rating a product, Facebook, Twitter, desktop widgets… it’s a long list, and getting longer. And implementation is getting easier, which is fortunate, because your visitors, as they catch on to the social media trend, tend to expect more.

Just the other day, YouTube became the second-largest search engine behind Google – bigger than Yahoo, MSN, or Ask. Yet even in Internet terms, YouTube is a young company. Its success results from providing an interaction point that, in hindsight, everybody wanted and therefore enthusiastically adopted. And let’s be clear: it’s also blurring the traditional distinction between content ‘publisher’ and content ‘consumer.’ Basically, it’s increasingly easy to be both.

To take one more example of social media, and how it connects consumers and business: Tehcnorati, originally a blog search engine, now connects blogs and social media sites with advertisers and indexes more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time every day. Technorati likes to describe itself as 'placing brands at the center of a global conversation.' 

Thanks to Web 2.0 innovations, online communities now arise with surprising speed. And while we can’t all be as successful as YouTube and Technorati, we can learn some lessons from this measurable phenomenon.

Click here to learn how Quicksilver integrated social media into a new consumer site for the Academy of General Dentistry.