Social Media Marketing is built around a core concept…relationships. It is the distinguishing factor from older methods of marketing that involve corporation-generated content, sent out en masse. The late 90’s and early 2000’s were primarily a time of high volume information generation, scattered across a wide array of groups. Now, with the advent of Web 2.0 we have the opportunity to connect directly with people who share similar interests.

Through a wide variety of search methods, both sellers and buyers can reach each other directly. And as the web is full of virtual store fronts, it is often difficult to distinguish whether a company is small or large, reputable or not, in or out of a specific state, country or continent.
One one hand, that is an amazing way to level the playing field. Suddenly, smaller businesses have an opportunity to access customers in ways they never have before…they are free to bid competitively and fill orders that were once only given to larger companies.

On the other hand, the web is VAST…how in the world are you going to find customers? How will they find you? What is the use in having a great product if no one can find you in the sea of information?

Enter social media marketing…this phenomena of building large networks of loyal consumers through relationships is the hallmark of customer acquisition and management in today’s world. And for being such a goldmine of opportunity, there are certainly hazards to relationship building…the first of which is a lack of transparency.

If there is any place that I see businesses get hung up, time and time again, it is in a lack of transparency. Today’s customer has all kinds of information about you and can access it with the click of a mouse…so, start community building by being open about who you are, who your company is, what product you sell. In doing so, you will end up engaging their entire network as a part of your community…which is a much better outcome than alienating them.

Tags: community building, Social Media Marketing, social-media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 6:30 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.