So, all the chatter about social media and user-generated content is nothing new, right? What’s new: a lot more companies of all stripes are waking to the fact that customers hang out in online gathering places and very often talk and post content about them. It’s much like what happened with search a few years ago, and business executives said, “Hey, I think this is important and there’s opportunity here.”
A lot of agencies say they know social media. In reality, they’re only buying advertising and branded pages on social sites like MySpace and Facebook. Meanwhile, other firms perform social media optimization (SMO). However, both services miss the point of what social media and user-generated content is about.
Social media marketing isn’t about optimizing or advertising. It’s about socializing!
It’s about weaving your content and messages into the social Web, making friends and fans. It also means talking to and listening to friends and fans and measuring the impact the social Web has on your business. It’s not one campaign on MySpace or Facebook with a cool page that makes a few friends and is later abandoned when the campaign’s over.
