The only Americans who have not grown up with TV and mass marketing are now over 70 years old. Everyone else, including the newest crop of retirees, grew up with mass communications (radio, movies, TV, national magazines, etc.). It’s a part of everyone’s daily life, this electronic stew of images and sound mixed with commercials and ad-talk. Today, with the Internet connecting everyone, we are all part of the commercial, all part of the ad-talk. Every time we e-mail a friend about a new product or service that we like, we are part of what is now called a viral campaign. And you thought you were just chatting!

There is incredible depth, breadth and range to the ads and marketing messages that we are exposed to. No, not exposed to – make that, invited into. We are connecting not only with other people, but with a set of cultural components, group identities, niches and specializations. The technology we have developed is one that pulls us in and continues innovating with our assistance. We are all making the electronic stew richer, tastier and more tempting. The key to understanding social media marketing, one of the truly novel advances of our era, is seeing how people both cooperate and compete in the creation and distribution of what we might call marketing messages made personal.

The latest trends

The original social media line-up (MySpace, Facebook and other communities) has been joined by such services as Digg, StumbleUpon and other aggregators with the look-at-this appeal. Many people’s appetite for reading, hearing, viewing and sharing others’ opinions, rants and recipes is matched only by their desire to have the world read, hear, view and share theirs. On the Internet on a daily basis you can find literally tens of millions of people uploading words and images (still and moving) on every imaginable subject. And commercial considerations (the soda you drink, the shampoo you use, the car you drive, the music you like) are absolutely welcome in this growing milieu.

Notwithstanding the movies, news, books, friends, family, games and role-playing you can spend time with on your computer, there is almost as much you can do with your cell phone. Mobile devices (from iPhones to iPads, even from companies other than Apple, although it doesn’t seem like it sometimes) have immense power today and will be even more powerful tomorrow. High-definition video, CD audio and wide-bandwidth-everything will soon be streaming to whatever sort of device you care to drop in your pocket. If you want to reach people with your branding or marketing message, you need to reach them wherever they are, proactively. You can’t wait around for them.

Do not underthink things

There was once a tendency to overthink all computer-related things. Then the Macintosh (there’s Apple again!) pioneered the point-and-click interface, and people learned not to overthink. This may have led to something of a backlash to thinking at all among some, who started underthinking and began to believe that the systems themselves were the marketing, the displays did the selling, the medium was the message. Not so. If you start to think that adding a Web site, doing some e-mailing and joining Facebook is the answer, you are asking the wrong question. These are means to an end. You must still have a strategy and, then, the right tactics, or these tools will be poorly used.

The online tools and techniques, particularly those involving what we call social media, really are transforming our society, and thus the way we communicate among individuals and groups. And that is the key word, communicate. Marketing is nothing more or less than communicating effectively and helpfully with the consumer. On a basic level, you need to cover a few bases before you find a social media marketing firm to help you (unless you want to devote time to becoming an expert, and then you can help yourself). The basics include:

- defining your business needs and your business goals; – drawing dotted lines, so to speak, to the people, places, networks and niches that you hope to affect; – figuring out the behaviors, assumptions and opinions of those demographic target(s); and – experimenting, measuring, and then experimenting and measuring again.

Framework and teamwork

The framework for working the social media world, which is expanding into a solar system before our eyes, is already set. The players may change a bit over time, but you have the Twitters, MySpaces, Facebooks and other online communities that are ready to be leveraged. To this framework you need to bring a whole truckload of teamwork, because it takes a mix of talents, outlooks, sensitivities and skills to put together a plan that will work. And you only know it’s working if you know how to roll it out, measure it and then do some upgrades so it will roll better next time.

It is not easy, it is not simple, but it’s a challenge you don’t want to shy away from. It is probably safe to say, even today, that you cannot successfully do business without understanding social media marketing. Tomorrow may be too late, so if you need help with it, get some. This is one trend that won’t pass you by without burying you in its wake. If you do not get on top of the wave you just may be capsized by it.

INT Social Marketing is a full service social media intelligence firm providing Facebook, Twitter, video marketing and copywriting service solutions for all clients.

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