I first heard about social media marketing about 2 years ago, as a paying subscriber to Stomper.Net Internet marketing training. The StomperNet faculty, combined, had earned hundreds of millions of dollars using search engine, pay-per-click and affiliate techniques to drive website traffic. I found their expertise genuine and trustworthy. And, I demanded expertise for the US$800 per month subscription fee we were funding from our Dunedin consultancy.
Part of the Internet marketing training included a number of DVDs teaching social media marketing (circa 2007). At the time, the trainers insisted that social media marketing must be mastered as soon as possible. Because, they claimed, only about a 1 year window of opportunity existed before masses of people caught on to the unfair marketing advantage provided by social media.
So, we learned about social media networking, bookmarking, photo-sharing, video-sharing, microblogging and each of the proven strategies effective for using social media to the advantage of our client’s product promotion: all from a little office in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Fast-forward to 2009. Social media is the buzz phrase. Everyone wants a piece. Companies want blogs. Consultants live on twitter. Multi-level marketers eat digg. The good, bad and ugly have got on-board. Just last month, 301,000 searches were done on google for the phrase “social media.”
But, social media marketing is a virtual minefield. Every social media site has its unique rules, culture and policy towards users. Google must be tweaking its algorithm to account for social media spamming efforts. And, pushing your brand out to as many social media sites as possible can backfire – causing irreversible damage to the corporate online presence: memorialized to the permanent archives of our trusted servant, the search engine.
My recommendation, for those wanting to use social media marketing as part of the marketing mix, is to tread carefully.
First, try:
- learning about the different categories of social media
- signing up for just a handful of the most popular social media websites
- playing around for a few months and getting a feel for the cultural norms
When you are ready to roll, engage a social media marketing expert to develop a precise campaign for you or your company. Then, you can proceed without the blinders on.
Happy marketing. Well, really, it’s now “happy engaging.”
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