Social Marketing Hitting the Mainstream

Once again, long after savvy marketers discovered the power of social marketing by joining in the “conversation” going on in every niche, the traditional advertisers are just starting to catch on.

At least, they are trying to grasp how to get involved in the conversation.

Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, addressed a decidedly older “unhip” group of 250 advertising execs recently with a “revelation”:

“For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people,” he said, “but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation.” Using his firm’s new approach, he claimed, advertisers will be able to piggyback on the “social actions” of Facebook users, since “people influence people.” - The Economist

Hey, it really is a revelation to the old guard of advertising! Funny as it may seem to us.

These guys are reading books like “Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership” by Joseph Jaffe.

They are confused and slightly desperate to learn about something they are starting to feel like they are missing out on.

Here’s the problem, even in our relatively savvy community of in-the-know marketers:

People approach social marketing with traditional views of advertising. They are trying to continue the shouting match and the “Here’s my ad, now buy it!” approach that social media users despise.

Social marketing is a conversation.

And more importantly it is a conversation which requires valuable input from “outsiders” in order to be inducted into the conversation. Or rather, in order to avoid being buried and completely erased from said conversation, labeled as a spammer, troll, or astro turfer.

This is where most marketers fail to grasp the social marketing movement.

They just don’t know how to fit in. They create accounts at places like 9Rules, Mashable, Newsvine, and Digg and proceed to spam the hell out of them without even glancing at the rules or trying to understand the demographics and players involved in these communities.

Becoming a Social Engineer

There is so much to gain by slowing down and understanding how to be a player on the social networks.

Did you know that the top 100 Digg users are chased after by website owners and marketers trying to “buy” their way into a conversation under the wing of a respected user with the massive “street cred” to make tens of thousands of people take notice of whatever they are into?

What if a marketing team actively worked to be, collectively, among the top users in the top social sites. Not a “fake” top user, but someone who is actually respected and followed because of their contributions to the conversations they specialize in?

What could be done if a network of top social community movers and shakers formed across the social site network? Think about that for a moment. A group of top posters and respected community members across a network of social sites who can shape a conversation in front of literally tens of millions of readers every month.

You can’t fake it.

To become respected and “big” in a social community you have to bring the goods. Hard work, consistency, and a string of “hits” that garner respect and the kind of social currency that can only be earned.

That’s an extremely valuable thing. It’s actually the most prized thing to accomplish on these sites. To be in the top 100 of any of the majors means, as a marketer, you have serious pull.

There aren’t any marketers in the top 100 members in any major site because, again, it takes work that marketers are not yet interested in putting into a social marketing campaign.

But they are coming. I guess you can bet where they will come from too. I am consulting with scores of authority site builders and pushing them to become serious contributors to certain social networks. I’m not dumb for giving that kind of consulting for free.

I’d love to have some A-List leaders of social networks to reciprocate by mentioning me once in awhile on those networks! This would be worth millions in “social currency.” It would also translate into massive profits from the exposure.

And the beauty of it is that no one can become a respected A-Lister on a social network without being genuine. Which is precisely why big corporations will never dominate the conversation themselves. They can launch new cell phones, but it is us who decide if they get front-paged or not.

Lesson: Find your top social networks for your niche and become a full-fledged contributor. Don’t just spam your own stuff with your account. Be a member in exactly the way the community was designed. You will be surprised how much more traffic you can generate with respect for these communities as opposed to spamming them with lousy content and seeding them only with your own links.

Visit the Authority Site Center if you are interested in really getting into this kind of marketing. Organic traffic generation from social marketing is real big in ASC. Don’t get caught wondering how to get into this type of marketing a year after the fact like the ad execs above.

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Tagged as: Blog Marketing, conversation marketing, jeff jaffe, social marketing, web 2.0 marketing