Social Media Blog by Michael Brito
Insights into the social web & real
time community engagement
time community engagement
I recently discovered the below image from Deborah Schultz’s blog where she wrote about the importance of relationships and its impact on branding. I agree with her position that it’s not necessarily about marketing but how you relate to your customers.
To me, this is a clear representation of how social media differs from that of traditional media; direct marketing, advertising, public relations and its overall impact on branding.
As I mentioned many times before, consumers are tired of being marketed to. They are fed up with the millions and millions of marketing messages that are thrown in their faces and computer monitors everyday. And, even when these messages are coming from a third party (Cnet, Techrunch, NYTimes), there is still no guarantee as to the authenticity of the message.
If you have ever watched Law & Order, then you know who Fred Thompson is. He is also running for the GOP Presidential Nomination. Thompson and team are the first Republicans that have fully embraced the concept of social media. Let’s see, he has a Myspace and Facebook profile with about 2,500 friends each; and he’s on Twitter with 400 or so friends. He has a fairly new Youtube channel with 500 or so subscribers and 15,000 views; and his blog is completely optimized to ensure that his content travels; one characteristic of social media optimization. Lastly, he has an embeddable widget that allows for contributions to his campaign which is a great viral marketing strategy.
And, here is something really cool. It’s not his staff that is blogging, it’s actually Fred. And, it seems that his transparency (a characteristic of social media) on issues is helping him shoot up in [...]
I attended a session at the New Communications Forum a few weeks ago called “Viral Marketing – It’s the message, not the Media” facilitated by Susan Getgood and a few others. Susan’s message intrigued me the most as she discussed the 5 C’s of Viral Marketing: community, compelling, comedy, charity, and contest.
Of course, these 5 C’s make total sense to me not only as a marketer, but as a consumer as well. We all know that viral marketing in the social media space is all about communities. In fact, I would argue that communities play a larger role than most people think, both online and offline. They can build a brand, kill a brand, make a career, break a career, influence elections, etc. Think about it; from an offline perspective, life is community driven through PTA organizations, church groups, sports leagues, stay-at-home mommy groups, and various school organizations (sororities, fraternities) [...]
