Social Media has also made it easier for marketers to relate to a potential buyer. If the marketer already knows a bit about the prospect, his or her concerns, past experiences with products/services, etc., it is a lot easier to relate to that person and make the sale.  People thrive on that human connection.

Social media is not just used by Generation X.  It has been studied that even baby boomers, of all ages, are influenced by and interested in social media.

One doesn’t have to comb through sites to find out desired information.  There are text mining tools that will do that work for you.  Basically, text mining tools are able to scan for chosen information (words, phrases, etc.) from text.  For example, let’s say you are responsible for the marketing on a newly released movie and you want to find out what people are saying about it.  You can use text mining tools to grab everything related to that movie on popular blogs (or wherever you want to get your information from).  When you find out what real people are saying about the movie, why they liked it, it is then easier for you, the marketer, to advertise the movie according to why people really enjoyed it.  And as more people use social media, more sophisticated tools will be developed.

If you’re a smaller company and you don’t have the resources to invest in text mining tools, try Google Alerts.  Google alerts allow you to request an alert (which is in the form of an email) on the topic of your choice.  You can choose to be alerted when the topic comes up from your chosen source.  The online sources you can pick from are: news, web, blogs, video, group and comprehensive.  This can allow you to examine buying trends, identify your target market and spot your competition.

Another source of information for B2B companies is LinkedIn. Most professionals are signed up on sites like LinkedIn, which typically house all of their (potential prospects’) career information.  This is a great tool and provides some insight into who the person is and what their interests are.  This supplies you, the marketer with some speaking topics to help form the ever sought-after human connection, and make the sale.

Other companies with US employees on FaceBook:

—- 5,000+ Google’ers
—- 2,800+ IBM’ers
—- 1,000+ United Nations’ers
—- 5,000+ Apple’ers
—- 200 WSJ’ers
—- 500 FaceBook’ers
—- 280 CNN’ers
—- 260 FoxNews’ers

Want to advertise to these people, or other networks? Contact us.

This is important as individuals and companies alike pay more and more attention to the issue of reputation management. When someone Google’s you, what do they find?

Developing…

Here’s the link.

My take…

What are widgets?

In a sense, Widgets are Web 2.0 versions of the small software applications and shareware that we saw in the 90’s, only they are web based and they are much more useful. If you are an art enthusiast you could download a widget offered by one of our clients, for example, that shows you new masterpieces by famous artists every day.

There are widgets for everything. Frequent traveler? Get a widget that tracks fares for you in real-time. Looking to find local activity partners? Yep – a widget for that. If you’re a fan of celebrity gossip you can find a widget for that as well. Widgets are being created by everyone under the sun in order to address the very specific needs of niche audiences. Browse some for yourself here at Yahoo!.

What’s going on?

You may have heard FaceBook in the press recently. User activity and sign-ups have been going through the roof… primarily the result of one major event: FaceBook developed a platform that allows third-party developers to create widgets and share them with the FaceBook community. Google and Yahoo! both offer platforms for widgets, but what’s particularly interesting about FaceBook’s platform is that a good widget on FaceBook will quickly spread virally because of its tight integration with each user’s profile page and network of friends.

Why should you care?

Short answer: It’s a way to get more traffic, more visibility, and more links.

In the web world everyone talks about viral marketing. Want to get more traffic? Do viral marketing. Want to enhance SEO rankings? Do viral marketing. What’s unique about widgets specifically, and the platforms that are being developed to support them in particular (FaceBook, Yahoo!, Google) is that marketers will now have an easier time getting their cool new viral gimmicks into the hands of their customers.

Let the land-grab begin!