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For internet marketers, nothing compares in value to the house list. It’s gold. You know that you can blast an e-mail and count on a certain conversion rate, yielding a comfortable predictability to your revenue stream. Yet, there are limits to e-mail marketing. After a while, you have to limit your campaigns, for fear of winding up in a spam folder or seeing the unsubscribes tick up. You’re ability to interact with your most likely buyers, therefore, is inherently constrained. Social media platforms can cut the ties that bind, however, and bring new flexibility to your internet marketing efforts.

Doubtless, direct pitches to your fan base will eventually meet with the same malaise triggered by e-mail saturation. So, keep your blasts to a minimum. Instead, use other methods to attract the attention of your fans or followers — which is effectively your social media “house list” — and you can stimulate buying activity much more often.

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Does having a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group and a blog mean you have to content — regularly — for three different platforms? It’s a scary thought, probably enough to turn even the most zealous social media advocate away from the space. Well, here’s the good news: write content correctly, and you can carve it up for use across your entire integrated social media environment. There is no bad news.

Start with the blog post — it’s going to be your anchor. The material you publish on your blog will tend to be longer and more complex than what you put on Facebook, LinkedIn or certainly Twitter. Everything else you write and post should be pulled from this source. Not only do you only write once, with the exception of small modifications, but you ensure consistency across your entire social media environment.

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We routinely field questions from our clients about social media. They ask if Facebook is better than LinkedIn, how to promote their services effectively on Twitter and what type of information should be used for a corporate blog. These are all important questions to ask before jumping into social media marketing — and they all share a specific problem: they revolve around platform. To use social media effectively, you need to think past platform and focus strictly on content.

The social media platform you use is really nothing more than a mechanism for pushing content and managing your community. You can keep track of friends, fans and followers and receive some great features for pushing information, receiving feedback and tracking interactions. On its own, however, platform provides no real advantage. Everyone has access to the major social media platforms, and the major decision involves whether or not to create an account and get started.

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As you begin to enter the social media marketing space, you’ll start to hear about “fans,” “friends” and “followers” — variations on the connections that people make in these environments. These relationships provide a first layer of measurement for social media marketing success, as they define your primary high-value audience.

While you don’t want to evaluate success strictly in terms of the number of followers or fans you amass — their activity, particularly relative to blog pageviews or, even better, purchases is far more important — this is the foundation from which you will drive the interactions that yield returns.

So, why do customers and clients become company and brand fans? Well, the answer varies with the type of social media user involved.

According to MarketingSherpa, there are three basic categories: Daily Users, Max Connectors and everyone else (i.e., “All Respondents”). Max Connectors are users with more than 500 social connections (e.g., on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter). Daily Users are exactly what you think they are, though they lack the number of relationships as Max Connectors. Finally, All Respondents consists of Max Connectors, Daily Users and everyone else who participated in the study.

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There’s always a stiff debate around the role of marketers in such environments as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Purists believe that the use of these platforms for product or service marketing disrupts what would otherwise be an online place where friends can get together. Yet, in order to support the operation and growth of social media platforms, there’s an important role for marketers to play. Read our guest post on SocialTimes to learn more.

[Source: SocialTimes]

IT manufacturers and resellers have been looking into social media marketing, unsure of whether there’s an ROI case in it but understanding that eventually they’ll need to make the plunge. Well, an announcement by Dell yesterday shows that you should explore social media marketing … for all the right reasons.

Dell says that it has generated more than $6.5 million in sales via Twitter alone. The company’s broader social media presence – which includes Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube – has more than 3 million members, according to Manish Mehta, vice president of social media and community for Dell.

Let’s be realistic: $6.5 million is a drop in the bucket for Dell. At the same time, social media is but one part of its overall marketing strategy. So, it looks as though the return Dell has generated is at least close to proportional.

So, we should all rush over to Twitter and get started, right?

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Forrester Research offers a pretty grim assessment of the future of social media marketing on its blog: Though social networks are the “future of online life,” James Kobielus writes, we could reach a point where “social network analysis – automatic, real-time, effective – will become too popular.” Everyone will wind up scouring social networks for business opportunities and crunching the same commodity analytics from platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook. The competitive edge, effectively disappears.

Well, the reality is a bit more complicated than the eventual degradation of social media’s value. As these platforms continue to gain adoption, especially as marketing platforms, look for the following to emerge. Look for three IT market drivers that will come from the ubiquity of social media marketing.

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Even with 60 million people riding it, there’s still room on the Twitter bandwagon. While you’ll never care about most of these people or anything they have to say, there is a rich exchange of IT ideas occurring on this service. Check out “virtualization,” “cloud computing,” “data security” and “green IT” to see what I mean. And, most of the OEMs have active Twitter presences, including VMWare, Citrix, Cisco and EMC.

So, Twitter has marketing potential: relevant audience, reach and intelligence/analytics (we can help you with this last one). With a touch of common sense, it’s hard to do anything “wrong.” However, it can take some planning to generate a marketing impact you can measure by ROI. The first step is to understand what Twitter isn’t.

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So, if you have to choose between Facebook and LinkedIn, which one should get the nod? Well, both of them. Ultimately, an integrated social media marketing environment with varied content and different tools used to engage different segments of your target market could benefit from both connection platforms. Unfortunately, getting initiatives in both LinkedIn and Facebook off the ground at the same time can be daunting, especially when resources are scarce. The decision to use one platform over the other should be driven by specific marketing objectives and the content behind them.

The primary difference between LinkedIn and Facebook comes down to intent. LinkedIn users tend to develop their profiles to reflect their professional interests and experiences — LinkedIn is a business environment. Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be more social. Connections tend to be friends, photo and video albums emphasize the personal, and there is plenty of functionality available to distract you from whatever should have a claim on your time. Of course, these descriptions aren’t absolute. There is room for the personal on LinkedIn, as there is for the professional on Facebook.

The four primary factors that should drive your decision are:

1. Richness of the user base relative to the profile you’re using to search

2. The content you have and how you want to present it

3. The features you want to use

4. The nature of the engagement you hope to cultivate

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Forget about blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and everything else for a moment. Platforms come and go, and linking your marketing future exclusively to a tool could leave you at the mercy of a company that isn’t your own. Instead, focus on the content, and use that starting point as a way to reach your target market on whatever platform has the highest potential. As they enter and fall from favor, the impact to your company will be minimal, and while your competitors are scrambling to adjust to a new reality, you’ll find the transition to be nearly effortless.

It’s hard to imagine the decline and fall of Facebook or LinkedIn. They are just too popular right now. And blogs … they’re everywhere. How could they ever go away? But, as you know, shifts in media and technology are a fact of life. Newspapers were once thought to be unassailable. In the social media space, we’ve seen patterns change already, too. Remember MySpace? Once upon a time, nobody could imagine anything replacing it – and the converse proved true with unprecedented speed.

Don’t misunderstand me on this one – social media marketing is important; it’s perhaps the most powerful development in business-to-business marketing since the commercialization of the internet. To write it off as a fad is to cede at least some of your business to the competition. But, you have to have a prudent approach to this space in order to win, and that starts with not pinning your entire social media marketing strategy to the success of the platforms you choose.

Instead, start with content.

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