How do you take advantage of the growth of Social Media outlets for marketing purposes? Just what is Social Media, anyway? If you put the term into a Search Engine and go through some of the hits you'll find it's difficult to come up with an accepted definition. The essence of Social Media is a set of tools that allows users to share information and experiences with others, and to engage in interactive conversations over the information and experiences. So how can a company use the increasingly popular phenomenon of Social Media to market its products and services?

In the classic model of traditional marketing the message is the key. The company controls the message and seeks creative ways to disseminate that message to the public. The public is not involved in the conversation. But the essence of all Social Media is that it is a two way conversation controlled by the public, not by the mangers and operators of the particular Social Media site. The people who run Facebook and MySpace merely provide a sophisticated platform that allows interactive conversations to take place. But the content of those conversations is controlled by the users, not by the site operators. And that conversation is two way, with people listening to each other and then reacting to what they have heard. When many businesses attempt to listen to customers they end up defending their products and services instead of trying to understand what their customers are telling them. So what can a business that is interested in Social Media Marketing do?

Many companies with little experience with Social Media will try to go outside the company to find an "expert" to help them. But in reality, there's little expertise out there. Social Media is still in its infancy. FaceBook began on a college campus in 2004 and didn't begin to make a major impact until 2007. Twitter was born in 2006. The real experts at Social Media are the content providers -- the users of the site. Some companies have looked inside to get help from employees who are avid users of Social Media sites. But for the business world to really be able to join in the Social Media conversation, they have to rethink some of their most basic assumptions.

A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the way people think about things, in our case, marketing. To effectively engage the world of Social Media, companies have to listen more and talk less. That is the exact opposite of how businesses approach their world. They discover the answers and then tell us how we really need what they have and how it will benefit us. There are companies out there who are putting up profile pages on sites like FaceBook. Most of the sites have software tools to help create the profile. Then what? Put ads on the page? How about starting a conversation about something that relates to your business? Let's say one of the major Vodka manufacturers had a profile page up. An actual person from the company starts a thread about creative recipes for Vodka drinks -- here's one I use, what do you think of it? Or actually ask visitors to the site for their favorite Vodka recipes. That kind of conversation can begin to change the way people think about the company. In addition it can build brand identification. If you just change that model of thinking from "tell and defend" to "listen and interact" the marketing possibilities are endless. Good Luck with Social Media Marketing!!