There is little doubt that social media is truly revolutionary, the 400 million users of Facebook, the glitterati-twitterati and the numerous bloggers who found celebrity by dint of their blogs, they will attest to that. Hence, as a small business, you will want to take advantage of this concept and try to get as much benefit out of it as possible, which in this case is marketing. While trying to do so, you would want to also ensure that you don’t come across as a desperate company that is bent upon hooking customers every possible way. The trick is to maintain a fine balance between marketing and creating brand awareness, without overwhelming them.

Here is a checklist that will help you work out a social media plan relevant to your business and also guide you in your efforts to execute it.

Know What You Want From Social Media: On social media, brand awareness can go in either direction. If your social media plans don’t pan out, you can end up with a lot of unwelcome negative publicity on your hand. So, be clear about what you want to use the platform for, and how you intent to achieve it. Do you want to use it as an instrument to gauge customer reaction, or would you rather use it as a forum your customers can use to air their views and grievances? Unless you are clear about your expectations, your social media plan in all likelihood will remain a haphazard exercise that will leave you with zero ROI.

Test The Waters: if you are one of those people, still mildly bewildered by the very idea of Social Media (really, there is no shame in admitting it), my advice to you will be to take things slow. Pushing too much promotional information into their followers’ signal stream is a mistake that most businesses new to the space end up doing. You can start by building a blog or creating profiles in the more prominent social sites to touch base with your customers, then slowly ease into your interaction model. The goal is to lure in potential customers and familiarize them with the product, try not to go trigger happy (or more specifically in some cases, tweet happy), and inundate your followers with messages they’ll be forced to label ‘junk’. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media had a smashing year in 2009. No one can dispute that. The web-wide popularity of social networks and social media sites reached a never-before high, and set the ball rolling for several revolutionary changes on the Internet. It is expected to do even greater things and touch greater heights in 2010. Let’s take a look at what social media experts think this year has in store for social media.

1. Social Media Will Get Real – The web is already beset by the real-time craziness, and I am so not overstating things. When real-time search debuted (on social media) last year, it was received so well that all the traditional search folks jumped to get a piece of all the real action. This year social media will take the real-time aspect on web one step further and work as a veritable web trend forecaster.

2. Social Media Marketing and Businesses – This year social media marketing will gather momentum as more and more businesses turn to this revolutionary method of internet marketing to promote their wares on the internet.

3. Social Media Vs. Email – The days when marketers almost exclusively depend on email marketing for all their promotional activities on the Internet will soon be over. This year will see online marketers choosing the very versatile social media with multimedia elements and nifty sharing options over emails.

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Over the past few months, some important changes have been underway at Facebook. Some are already noticeable when one visits the site, but there are others yet to become apparent. If you have no idea what I am talking about, come a little closer, I’ll tell you, “Facebook’s ditching its regional networks!” (I know, it’s no scoop, but did you really see that coming? If you subscribe to the Facebook blog, you probably did.)

My reaction to this revelation, though, is largely that of indifference, it doesn’t affect me one way or another. Probably because my activities on Facebook have never been network based, I have always taken care to set my privacy settings at ‘Only Friends’, which ensures that only the people on my friend list have access to my profile and the contents. And to be honest, except for the fact that it could possibly indicate the geographical location of a user, I’ve found the concept of regional network rather useless. In my defense, even Facebook admits (sort of) that these networks turned out to be pretty useless, apparently only 50 percent of the users ever joined regional networks.

Facebook first mentioned of a change in status quo in their 03 June post on their blog:

“…To make the site easier to understand, we’re taking the first step towards removing these regional networks…since they did not adequately reflect a world where people choose exactly the audience with whom they wish to share…made sense for those who wanted to be more open when Facebook was small, but they lost their utility as the site became global…”

In addition to frequently publishing posts regarding the matter on their blog, over the months, they have also maintained an active discussion thread for users to comment, air views and give suggestions.

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5th November ’08 was a historical day for the U.S & the world for more than one reason.

First, it was the election of the first ever African-American President, Barack Hussain Obama.

Second, and perhaps a bigger change over the long term was the crowning of the Internet as the king of all political media. It marked the end of an era of television that started with John F. Kennedy & the beginning of the Internet Presidency.

Obama & his team did a commendable job in coming up with an optimum mix of offline & online mode of election campaigns. The telling difference between him and the other was that he made his presence felt not only on television but also on the Internet.

Here are the 3 amazing tactics that Obama so effectively used to get himself to the White House:

1. Online Fund raising: With the great number of people online, there was a huge opportunity for funds to be raised on the net. The Obama team recognized this and realized that it would be easier for people to make donations online and with a sum of money they would be comfortable with. This strategy appealed to many and resulted in 94% of the funds coming in sums of $200 & less. A million little donors became the way forward.

This way, the Obama campaign was not dependent on a few rich people who would donate only to get some influence in the government. But instead, successfully reached out to the common man through the Internet, which helped them raise a little over a whopping $600 million in contributions, which poured in from over 3 million donors.

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