Social media is all well and good, but does it have any practical marketing application? Of course it’s immediately embraced by the woolly side of the marketing community, where ‘top of mind’ and ‘buzz’ are taken seriously. But what about the hard-nosed world of direct marketing?

In the direct marketing world things are measured properly, and any new idea is only taken on board if it can be tested and shown to work (i.e. impact directly on the bottom line).

Social media does indeed have a role to play in the hard-nosed world of measurable marketing. There are several ways to make use of it…

• Social media can be used to provide client service. And yes, I do consider client service to be an essential ingredient in the marketing mix. Take a look at this real-world example.
• Social media can be used as a source of leads in lead generation. Here’s an example.
• This guy uses Facebook to generate 80% of his business. His story is very interesting, and I plan to write about it someday (if he’ll let me).

There’s another way to use Social Media to generate traffic direct from the application itself. This involves cooperating with an organised group dedicated to helping each other out. Here’s how…

Let’s say you start the ball rolling by bookmarking a recent blog entry in your Delicious account. You then email everybody else in the group and ask them to do the same. If your group has 10 members, your bookmark will occur 10 times in Delicious. For some keywords, that’s enough to get it onto page one.

If your group has 100 members, your bookmark will occur 100 times in Delicious. That’s enough get to most content onto page one, and pick up visitors from Delicious. There may well be additional benefits associated with being on page one of a major category in Delicious.

And of course, Delicious is only one of several social bookmarking applications. This can be rolled out across all of them.

Are you interested in putting such a concept to use in your business? If so, here’s what you need…

1. A Delicious account
2. A willingness to cooperate with others on a quid-pro-quo basis
3. Some form of regular content creation (e.g. a blog, video series, podcast, slide show/presentation series)

Assuming you meet these minimum criteria, get in touch with me and let me know you’re interested.

social media, Social Media Marketing, Web Marketing