Blogs and Social Networking-A Marketer’s Dream
{{stephanie}} Reaching the right audience is becoming easier for Marketers.
While listening to one of my favourite podcasts today, Marketing Edge, Albert Maruggi talked about social marketing and how it has completely changed the way that Marketers are identifying their target markets. Blogs and social networking groups are rapidly growing on the internet. Everything from Facebook to Ning, what we are seeing now is that people around the world are making an effort to discuss their interests, concerns, and opinions with others in this expansive online community.
A continuous goal for Marketers is to increase the amount of targeted advertising that they participate in. Maruggi went further to discuss that since blogs and social networking sites can be categorized by topics and places; Marketers have a huge opportunity in their hands. Just imagine a car company wanting to develop interest about a new model or event that may be coming up. What better way than to advertise or participate in a discussion where there are people passionately discussing cars?
Although it can be time consuming and almost addictive, try to participate in discussions about the industry that you work in or interests that you may have. What you will find is a community of people that you can provide information to and who can give you good feedback, tips, and advice as well. Don’t be afraid to offer your two cents; it’s not called a “community” for no reason.
November 1st, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Funny to now come across this post for 2 reasons:
1) I recently signed up for a Ning community at http://www.enlightenedbusiness.com, and thought I’d start my posting with an SEO experiment, which I’ve just published.
(From what I can tell, the folks at Ning are hard at work making updates to their software that allows for the customization of titles, URLS and other SEO factors. My stance currently is that if you’ve got relevant content to share, Ning shouldn’y be neglected. They’ll catch up!)
and 2) I found your blog by doing a search for “blogs without nofollow” :)
Great post. Will visit again.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I am just investigating Ning.com…I will keep you up to date on how it is going. Thanks for the information.
I look forward to reading more of your comments. Have a good one!
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:26 am
Stephanie, thanks for the mention. Megan, you are right on the mark, Ning is making a major overhaul to their site.
Just like Facebook groups, there are some with plenty of people and others with a handful. I am in Media2.0 and Ning developers networks. If you want to stay on top of Ning changes check out the Ning developers network. They are extremely helpful. You are also more than welcome to go to the Provident Partners sandbox and request an invite. I’ll show you how we are using the space.
The thing that I use Ning for is creating private networks that are used either for internal company communication platforms that either bypass IT or are with the approval of IT.
I believe the true winner in all this will be the company that can aggregate all of these social sites, because there just isn’t enough time in the day to get it all covered. I’m also playing with a site call http://www.netvibes.com which seems to have a start on this objective.
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Thank you for your feedback Albert!
November 3rd, 2007 at 9:04 pm
There is no doubt this social media can have huge power if you know how to tame it, but you really need to get some tips from experts who have a proven record because there is so much misinformation floating around.
November 4th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
I have just begun to explore social networking and have barely begun to understand it. I would love to see some tutorials on how to tap into the viral nature of these sites.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Good article I learned a lot of it. Thanks
March 8th, 2008 at 2:18 am
Yeh! Stephanie, you’re right. By discussing to our business related topics and places in blogs and social bookmarking sites, we can evangelize business faults and drawbacks and so we can improve it for our customers.