Over at Six Pixels of Separation Mitch has posed the question “What are your best practices for Social Media Marketing?” and has asked people to highlight what they consider to be their most important Social Media Marketing practice. There have been some great posts on this subject including Being Vigilant, and building a DINU.

While it was very difficult to single out a specific part of a campaign as the most important, after a bit of debating we decided that Conversation Monitoring is the key to a successful campaign.

In the spirit of complete transparency, we’ll be the first to admit that we aren’t experts in every single field that a client could represent. We market for a diverse array of clients in fields from beauty salons to Mexican real estate to virtual office assistants. The key to each of these campaigns is to take things slowly and listen to the conversation that’s out there.

Everyone has heard the analogy that Web 1.0 was a monologue and web 2.0 is a dialogue. Well it’s easy to jump into a social marketing campaign and start spewing forth messages, it’s another thing to enter into the existing conversation and actually participate. If you come in and don’t know what you’re talking about you’re going to lose the interest of your audience and you’ll find yourself talking to yourself. That’s exactly why it’s important to take your time and monitor the conversation so you can build a solid knowledge base. This allows you to come into the conversation and be heard, and more importantly, listened and responded to.

Tags: blog-conversations, conversational-marketing, Social Media Marketing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 6:39 am and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.