My thoughts on Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Of late, the one thing I have seen bandied about a lot in the context of social networking is Social Media Marketing (SMM). As someone who had been in a role that entailed tasks that would have technically come under the definition of SMM, these are my insights (rather 2 cents) on the topic.

The massive growth of horizontal (or mass-market) networking sites like MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter etc. or vertical (niche) ones like Dogster with their primary focus on User Generated Content (UGC) has led to the phenomenon called the “social web“.

But (contrary to what some believe), just having a presence on each of these sites would not be sufficient in terms of exposure or awareness from a SMM point of view. Such a belief would be the real-world equivalent of opening a store and expecting massive footfalls from day one. That does not happen and more so in the case of an online presence, where distraction (or competition) is just a mouse-click away.

SMM, for any business, including social media sites themselves (after all, some of the biggest online advertisers are online companies), involves a strategy that takes into account the peculiarities of a particular online platform, including the type of content it generates, the demographics of the audience it caters to, the ebb and flow of its traffic based on time zones and its overall relevance to the product/service offering of the marketer. A no-brainer example is that LinkedIn may not deliver results if one were to promote a site selling cosmetics.

Also, nothing turns off the majority of the active participants on a social site as unsolicited and overt pitching of a product or service. Marketers have to remember that these are the people who could potentially be their brand ambassadors, since recent trends have pointed to fast-growing social sites experiencing the 90:10 syndrome – 90% of the content generated by just 10% of the users and it does not pay to be on their wrong side. The very nature of the “conversational web” makes it antithetical to “in-your-face advertising” and so the only effective SMM strategy is to join, listen and contribute in a meaningful way, that builds both relationships and expertise in a calibrated manner with increasing rewards down the line.

There is a key strategy that can be effective in the online arsenal of a marketer and that is to join forces with a dominant social site in a complementary manner that creates win-win outcomes. For example, Needgrub’s (a site that specializes in restaurant reviews) partnership with Sulekha for its Yellow Pages ensures that a visitor can read the review of a restaurant while looking up its listing in Sulekha’s YP. Similarly with burrp for events and TravelGuru for hotel reviews.

So, it is up to the marketer to look for creative ways to increase awareness, drive traffic and build “social capital” for the brand. Unlike the efforts used in building brands on other media like radio and TV which is akin to “carpet bombing” the audience, in the online world, especially the social one that democratizes the channels of information exchange and puts more power in the hands of the individual, the marketer has to be patient, persevering and participative, in order to be persuasive.