Author Archives: Jay_Dutton

Ingredients Necessary for Social Media Marketing

Posted by Jay_Dutton on January 11, 2009   |   No Comments

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Besides its benefit for higher search rankings, social media marketing has numerous other intangible benefits. Bottom line, Social Media Marketing must be incorporated into your online marketing strategy if you want to grow your presence online.

However, for social media to be effective, a few of the required ingredients are:

  1. Leadership
  2. Passion
  3. Content

Good leadership could mean expertise and/or credibility. Or it could mean mediocrity and pure foolishness. Whatever it is, if it actually generates a following or discussion, it could find a sweet spot within social media marketing.

You’ve also got to have passion. There are a million blogs out there, but its pretty easy to spot the ones that have passion. Passion, in whatever form it comes, is certainly an ingredient for social media marketing to be a success. Passion also generates a following.

Another ingredient for successful social media marketing is content. Do you have something worth talking about? Do people care about it? A good example is AT & T’s launch of its Facebook Fan Page. C’mon now! Is this company really suited for a ‘fan following?’ This Facebook Fan Page is an example of a social media marketing tactic the company has tried. If customers think AT & T’s customer service sucked before, is a fan base really going to help? Probably not.

These are just a few ingredients necessary for you to be successful in social media. Would anyone else care to divulge a few more?

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Do Corporate Giants Really Know About This Social Media Marketing Thing?

Posted by Jay_Dutton on January 10, 2009   |   No Comments

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Of course corporate giants like Coca-Cola and Comcast know about social media marketing and its potential benefits. If you’ve heard about it, surely they have right?

Another fellow blogger, Peter Kim, like Seth Godin, gave his personal list of most popular blog posts for 2008.  The most popular blog post of 2008 provided an extensive list of companies that are using social media marketing tactics and how.
I wanted to post on this because Peter Kim and his contributors do a great job of providing examples of social media marketing tactics being used by a long list of companies. 

But I think the real question is, how successful are these tactics? I think the question of whether social media will work for one company over another is best answered by asking and then answering two more questions:

  • 1. Does the company have a long-term strategy in place for online marketing and, if so, does social media fit into that strategy?
  • 2. Does the company have the proper ingredients required for social media marketing to be successful?

Going further on question number two. What are the ingredients required for social media marketing to be successful? One of these essential ingredients is having something that people think is worth talking about.

Let’s face it. Its probably going to be pretty hard for Clorox to pull off their social media tactic, Dr. Laundry! Why? Because how much do people really care about laundry? And this is precisely what social media is about. Getting people to care about something enough to talk about it.

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