Use Social Media to promote your brand or product on the web.

Are Social Media and Web 2.0 essential for your business?

... Or are they just hypes?

The article Before you start with Social Media mentions what being 'social' actually means. Just starting a blog because your competitor has one is just following the hype. And that will not help you.

For a long time many companies have done profitable business with traditional marketing techniques like advertisements, sales teams and account managers for maintaining the customer relationships. They didn't need a further or deeper relationship with the customer. This has gone well for many years and it might go well for the future too.

But now it is all different...

No doubt that social media has changed (and will continue) the world we live in right now. People don't want to be communicated at anymore. The power is with the people these days. People talk about your products and they reach more other people than the enterprise traditional marketing techniques did.

More...

What is Social Media?

Is your company already social?

You might answer this question with "Yes of course, we have a company blog" or "We tweet all our product updates" or "Stupid question, we have 14943 friends on Facebook" or something similar.

That is very nice, but are you really socializing with your customers? Does it bring you anything?

Just starting a blog or forum does not necessarily mean being social. It could just be using new media for an old marketing approach.

Social Media, what is it?

To get a better answer to this question we better should rephrase the question to a more simple:

What is Social?  - and skip the 'media' word.

This shorter question will return different answers. Some keywords that could be included: interaction, listen, interest, others, relationship, connecting, sharing.

An answer could be:

Being social is listen to others and show interest, invest in an interactive relationship, connect to strangers and share information.

I have no doubt that in 2010 and beyond Social Media will play a more dominant role in the enterprise marketing strategies.

Of course on-line Marketing and Social Media is a subject that contains more areas than the Social Networks listed here.

This overview is an excellent quick start on the most used Social Networks.

The original post can be found at: A CMO's Guide To The Social Media Landscape. On their site you can also find a PDF with a higher resolution image.