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Social Media Wave helps companies use social media to engage with their customers, prospects, and partners in ways that have never before been possible.
It's called Social Media Marketing, and it's making a profound impact on marketing strategies for organizations of all sizes.
Social Media Marketing is augmenting, enhancing, and, in some companies, replacing "old" forms of marketing. It's radically different from traditional forms of marketing in a few fundamental and dramatic ways.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing has typically had two major forms:
- Direct marketing. This type of marketing focuses on directly generating leads and revenue: tradeshows, websites, seminars/webinars, email blasts, direct mail, pop up ads, etc.
- Brand marketing. This type of marketing is "softer" and seeks to create an image or reputation for the company in the mind of the customer: advertising, public relations, analyst relations, sponsorships, logos, tag lines, etc.
Both of these types of marketing are characterized by a few common attributes:
- They are one- way, push-oriented and interrupt-driven. These activities are from the company to the prospect. The prospect doesn't ask for them. They are "pushed" onto the buyer, interrupting them from whatever they're doing.
- They are brand-generated. The content comes entirely from the brand to the customer.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is defined by a new set of characteristics:
- It's a multi-way dialog. Brands talk to customers, customers talk to brands, and - perhaps most importantly - customers talk to each other. This is a new type of engagement that was never possible until the arrival of Web 2.0.
- It's participatory. Social media marketing depends on user participation - that's what makes it social. To truly be Social Media Marketing, your users must participate.
- It's user-generated. Most of the content and connections in an online community are created by the users - not by the brand. Sure, there will be content and conversations that are brand-generated, but they will be the minority. The goal is to get your users to talk.
Social Media Wave enables Social Media Marketing by building on-line communities that combine four key areas of capability:
- User-generated content (blogs, wikis, discussions, photos, videos, voting, etc.)
- Social networking (friend lists, user-created groups, status, presence, etc.)
- Member Profiles. Most of the content and connections in an online community are created by the users - not by the brand. Sure, there will be content and conversations that are brand-generated, but they will be the minority. The goal is to get your users to talk.
- Enterprise security and control. Depending on the scope of your SM project, Social Media Wave can offer a completely outsourced or "Cloud" computing model which provides you with a fully secure and private place to do business in. If your project needs to be integrated into existing IT frameworks for authentication, directories/profiles and security schema, we can accomodate an enterprise level hybrid solution.
Contact us to discover how we can create a solution for your social media wave! |
