Social Media – Fundamental to Marketing in 2010

“It doesn’t matter if we’re insurance agents, plumbers, lawyers or interior designers. There are people who buy what we sell hanging out on social networking sites. If we don’t join in they’ll buy from somebody else, because they don’t know what we do, and how good we are at it.”

Where do we pick up the easy stuff, from customers who value our efforts and are happy to pay for them? Which jobs deliver the highest margins, with fewer service issues?

For most people the answer is the “network” – people we know, or people who know people we know. People at the golf club, tennis club, associations and churches. These are regular people we have social relationships with. Outside of work issues they help us with stuff they know, and we return the favors. They know what we’re good at and come to us when buying. We don’t “sell” at them, and they don’t make us compete, and we return the favors.

The Internet offers us new places, like the clubs, associations and churches we join, where we can meet new people, build relationships (just like we do socially), make friends, get help and help others. These places are the “Social Media” sites, and participating in them should be a component of every marketing strategy.

There are some differences though.

In these places we reach much wider networks, lay out our wares so passers by can see what we do, explain our expertise, in our own specialties.

Better still, they’re free to join, there are no “green fees”, and we can accomplish a lot more, with less time and effort.

And better yet. Whatever we lay out there is permanent and the search engines love it. For responding to search queries Google, Yahoo etc. prefer content over marketing sites. Publishing quality articles, sharing with others what we know, gets us better rankings than all the optimization we can put on landing pages.

Making our contribution in these places we can win new friends, influence people and create an Internet profile that helps people, we’ll never meet otherwise, find us.

Too good to be true? Not at all!

The Internet started out as a vehicle for big companies to reach a wider public, more cheaply, but it’s been taken over by the people. It’s become a social resource, and social is where we started in the first paragraph.

As with most things the kids showed us how to do it. They created Craig’s List, My Space, Facebook and a bunch of other sites just so they could hang out on-line with friends. And friends introduce other friends so eventually kids from all over the world are meeting, swapping pictures and stories, joining in, and having a ball. How many? Facebook now has more than 120 million members, and is growing around 600,00 new members every day.

Of course some smart people figured there was an angle for business here. They built similar “sites” but with a focus on connecting business people. Others built sites to support those connections, giving us the chance to publish our knowledge. Still more built services to help us move faster, taking our articles and connections with us.

How many? Linked In, the professionals network has more than 21 million members, all wanting to “network”. Xing has 8 million members, there are more Ning special interest sites than we can shake a stick at, and Collective X is enabling people to set up “city specific” sites. Wanna do business in Chicago? Go find the Collective X site.

It won’t be long before those same clubs, associations and churches we mentioned in the first paragraph are setting up their own sites, so we can network on-line with the people we meet off-line. (At this point we’re really back to the kids who spend their evenings hanging out on Bebo, with the friends they’ve been in school with all day.)

So back to business.

It doesn’t matter if we’re insurance agents, plumbers, lawyers or interior designers. There are people who buy what we sell hanging out on social networking sites.

If we don’t join in they’ll buy from somebody else, because they don’t know what we do, and how good we are at it.

Of course there’s the usual caveat.

Just like any other meeting place or market place there are good guys and bad guys. We’re going to come across people we don’t want to work with.

Just like other “clubs” we’ll find people who want to work with us, and those who don’t.

Just like other things we do promoting our businesses there are some things that work, and some that don’t.

BUT, if we’re not in the game we’ll lose out to those that are.

Social Media isn’t going away. It’s just going to get more important.