What Does Social Media Marketing Really Mean?

2008-03-03T23:21:00.000-08:00

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a new and widely speculated form of internet marketing that uses social media networks as an outlet to advertise a brand and its goals. Social media marketing aims to make and keep close ties with social networks and their communities as they both grow with emerging technology.

Because of social media marketing’s young life to date, many experts and general internet users are confused over the meaning or argue as to what the term should mean. In its most basic form, SMM is any marketing campaign that uses any of the given websites below.

The Goal of SMM
The goal of SMM is generally to promote and build brand awareness by increasing its visibility and encouraging feedback/comments through dialogue in order to better position itself to sell a product or service. Of course every campaign that uses SMM will be different depending on the company behind the brand.

Some other goals that are generally aimed towards using SMM:

Create pages that provide links back to your site (for both traffic and link popularity)

Create pages that will rank well in the search engines
Build profiles on sites that can attract links, attention and contacts from other members
Contribute to the growth and value of social media sites

The one concept users of SMM seem to agree upon is the Five Pillars of SMM. It is said that most SMM tactics should fall under at least one of the following forms of action:

Declaration of Identity
Identity through Association
User-initiated Conversation
Provider-initiated Conversation
In-Person Interaction

Examples of SMM Websites

Social media networks such as:

MySpace

Facebook
Bebo

YouTube

Dailymotion

Gather.com

Social web applications such as:

Digg

Stumbleupon

Flickr

iLike

Wikipedia

Squidoo

Last.fm

Twitter

Eventful

ePinions

3D virtual worlds such as:

Second Life

ActiveWorlds

Moove

There.com

Measuring SMM

Because SMM is not a documented and clearly defined term, measurement can take many forms with more being created daily. Based on the terms use so far various authors have suggested to divide measurement into four sections: Audience Measurement, Content Tracking, Media Analysis, Market Research

Audience Measurement
(Web Analytics of brand website)

Page Views

Unique Visitors

Time Spent

Interaction levels

Comments

Content Tracking
(Track the content as it moves from planted server to third party websites)

Advertising Clicks

Third Party Site Click Through

Conversion Rates

Engagement

Media Analysis
(Analysing social media outlets for word of mouth)

News Collection

Trend Analysis

Message Volume

Market Research

Media analysis will lead full on market research focusing on online population and specific examples of success/failure.

Closing Remarks

SMM is somewhat confusing because it is new and not clearly defined. Without a definitive structure to agree upon, authors, marketers, and general internet users will continue to argue what SMM is and isn’t. Another reason SMM remains in a cloud of confusion is because of the amount of overlap between, viral marketing, Social Media Optimization (SMO), Online Identity Management (OIM) etc.... The overlapping terms are endless and will continue to be, until SMM becomes more clearly defined.

Further Reading
http://fthebigthree.com/what-is-social-media.htm
http://www.hitwise.com/downloads/reports/Hitwise_US_Measuring_Web_2.0_Consumer_Participation_June_2007.pdf

References
http://www.chiefingredient.com/blog/social-media-marketing-tips/
http://www.blogoxide.com/blog/category/internet-marketing/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_reputation_management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Media_Optimization
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/10/the-five-pillars-of-social-media-marketing.html
http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2006/08/5_rules_of_soci.html
http://pandemiclabs.com/pandemicblog/2008/01/viral-marketing-terminology-an-embarrassment-of-riches/