Ought to know best practices in social-media marketing.

Respect the consumer’s intelligence.

Don’t patronize them. Don’t constantly paint a rosy picture about your product. Instead give them a community, a comments feature or a forum on your site to enable them to express their views. Once you have the feedback ,interact with them and use their suggestions. For instance: In one of the laptop manufacturer’s forum many consumers complained about how the keyboard wasn’t smooth to use. In their next release of the laptop series they modified the feel of the keyboard and the result was an increase in sales.

Listen to consumers even on other sites.

If a consumer is annoyed about your product, he is more likely to go to a third party site and spread a negative word of mouth. Apple has its own forum but if I wanted to pour my frustration about unavailability of copy/paste option on iPhone, I would rather do it on a third party site like iphonedownloadblog.com to express my discontent. Its important for companies to regularly keep track of such forums to better understand their market.

Buzz about your product in the digital space.

Say you launch a product. Is it creating the right buzz online is the first question you need to ask yourself. Visit sites like digg.com and Del.icio.us to know your product/service popularity. Companies can also use influential bloggers to generate a buzz. For example: Samsung can generate more buzz about its latest plasma TV by giving it away free to a top blogger at engadget.com and asking him to right a review with no strings attached. “No strings attached” is very important or else the blogger may place a negative review or worse allege that the company was trying to bribe him.

Remember its about conversing and not just selling.

Once you have an online community and a huge consumer base flocking to join the conversation, its quite natural to feel tempted to bombard them with marketing messages. Don’t. Don’t Don’t. The moment the consumers get incessant messages they feel that they are being used as a bait by the company and tend to immediately leave the forum. So never take the route of selling instead of conversing in communities.

See which Web 2.0 tool suits you.

One person’s meal is another person’s poison. Go out there and explore whether its social network sites like twitter, facebook; virtual world sites like second life or tools like blogs, wikis, forums which suits you. Make a list of all that which falls in cohesion with your overall marketing strategy. Then try integrating them and turning them into killer digital marketing tools to drive customers into your kingdom.

Tagged as: digital marketing, internet marketing, new media, Social Media Marketing