From a business perspective in many companies the new social media talked about here is considered a distraction and often curtailed. Probably with logical reasoning; you don’t go to Facebook to buy, you go to meet your friends. It’s just the forward thinkers out there in business that are beginning to utilise social media to its full potential.

For me, that’s the message we need to invite businesses and corporations to grasp. It’s the sub-currents facilitated by these sites that you’re asking companies and consumers to buy. ‘I’ve seen you on Facebook so now I am aware of you. Now, where do I go to find out more and how will I know whether you are a trustworthy source?’ (There’s a whole world of exploration to understand online behaviour/trust here). Anyway my point: that it’s amazing what will enter the mind subliminally and these sites provide a new, more subtle, advertising arena and a covert yet trusted way into building brand familiarity.

Web 2.0 doesn’t just signal changes to online technology either, it marks the emergence of new, more demanding, human behaviours which are revealing themselves in both the physical and online worlds. Consumers want a different interaction and are rewarding websites that allow collaborative opinions and knowledge sharing as a path to purchase. For some businesses I understand that this is dangerous territory (risk in loss of status and reputation can be costly), yet for others, moving with the changing terrain it’s a raison d’etre. We as E marketers need to persuade those businesses still in the dark, to step out of the pub into the light!

What I did not realise this that Squidoo is founded by one of my marketing Guru Hero’s. A guy called Seth Godin, who has written great marketing books like ‘Purple Cow’. Squidoo started from Seths blog subscribers, who wanted to be alerted when he posted up a new blog. His marketing message is quite simple. If you are not ‘remarkable’ you will not get noticed. A ‘purple cow’ is remarkable for a while, but an ordinary cow just does not get talked about. Hence Squidoo came to being to provide a social network expert site come blog come website tool.

An here I am talking about this ‘remarkable’ site!

I never grasped Twitter and now appreciate its function and am getting into better habits of using it.

The recent strategy I wrote incorporated how to take common threads through Twitter, blog posts and Linkedin effectively and when i reread my work realised it is all so simple to do and makes so much sense.

Everyone has an expertise and opinion and there is so much to learn, I speak with people within my company as well as people around the world, learning from them and about the work they do. what other medium could offer this opportunity.

With the current economic climate it makes learning easy without having the expense and time of travelling to conferences – a lesson to be learnt from this?

Whether your business is active online through social media or not, people are still going to comment on and have opinions about your company and activities. This dialogue takes place in a great number of venues and keeping track of them is not always easy.

Brian Solis and Jesse Tomas illustrate this very well in their online conversation chart called “The conversation prism”:

http://www.briansolis.com/2008/08/introducing-conversation-prism.html

Being a part of the dialogue requires a strategic decision and resources. An example of this is the Ford Motor Co. Scott Monty is responsible for social media at Ford. I connected to him through twitter.com:

http://twitter.com/ScottMonty

Initially I did not understand Twitter. What is the meaning of “texting” 140 characters into Cyberspace? However, after two days of use I got the message. Through Twitter I was able to interact with people, share ideas, build networks, have dialogues, make business connections etc.

Twitter led me on to sharing images through flickr.com, sharing interesting bookmarks through delicious.com, sharing documents on scribd.com and many other things.

Whether you have the full social media newsroom or you just have dialogues and interaction through a blog; you need to think about why you are there and what you wish to achieve. The more you do your homework and then form a strategy, the more succesful your effort stand to be.

The dialogue is out there. Care to join it?

http://www.twitter.com/pr_persson