Social media marketing (SMM) gets a lot of press these days – and companies are feeling pressure to jump on the bandwagon.But if you’re like many marketers, you may be unclear about the benefits of SMM and how, exactly, you should use it to your best advantage. Without a clear strategy and specific goals and objectives, SMM can be a low-ROI time sink and it may undermine your other marketing efforts – even email. While email marketing and SMM can be a dynamic duo, you need to ensure these two powerhouse marketing tactics are working together in order to achieve results that are greater than the sum of their parts.

What Is Social Media?

There are a lot of new terms being thrown around about social media. But what is social media exactly? According to Wikipedia.org, social media is “online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies … It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one-to-many) into dialogues (many-to-many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.” Because the power of mass communication is being put into the hands of the individual (democratization), the adoption of SMM is skyrocketing – virally permeating our personal and professional interactions. Individuals and businesses are creating, sharing and receiving content in exponentially increasing amounts over highly interactive mediums. These mediums are fundamentally transforming the landscape of how consumers interact with each other and, ultimately, with your company. This interaction can be leveraged in very powerful, yet simple, ways to extend the visibility of your email campaigns. Here are some of the conversations we had during the Oxford Social Media conference on 18th September 2009 at the Said Business School.

Twitter Stream:  http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23oxsmc09

Some musings from the participants.

I got back last night from a conference on social media sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute. Why would anyone pay to hear me talk about blogging, Twitter and Facebook? They wouldn’t. The conference was free. I certainly tried to give people their money’s worth.

Conferences like this are hard to pull off. You can’t really be sure of your audience. Are they people who don’t know Twitter from Flickr fromFlicka? Or are they hardcore power-users who Tweet constantly? The answer was probably, “Yes,” which means you’re likely to disappoint people on both sides, occasionally by being too obvious, occasionally by being too obtuse.

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Guardian article: What we learned?

RESOURCES

The OxIS 2009 Report: The Internet in Britain (PDF, 1.9mb)