To succeed in this new social, your products and brands need to move from taking tried and true marketing tactics and retro-fitting them for the new environment. You as a business owner need to stop thinking about talk and buzz. Instead, there is an imperative that marketers engage publicly by collaborating with their audience towards a shared desired outcome. Follow that path. Be action-oriented toward a win-win outcome and transparent in the process and ethics won’t be an issue. Your Social Network Marketing Strategy The key components to any Social Network Marketing strategy are as follows: 1. Choosing the right Social Network(s) to participate on. 2. Creating specific accounts on the key social networks for your company and products – and actually using them. 3. Interact and communicate – people factor is the key. I’ve been asked on many occasions what Social Networks should one participate in to gain interest in their company and/or products. The answer lies in the networks which fit the space of the consumer or audience you are trying to reach. Not all Social Networks are created equal, and it’s tough to review them quickly. In this post, I’ve included 27 networks and their sales pitches to consider. Digg “Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best.” del.icio.us “del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too.” Reddit “Reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web — personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you’ll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you.” Technorati “Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs. We help people search for, surface, and organize bloggers and their daily posts… Technorati. Who’s saying what. Right now.” Squidoo “Squidoo’s goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo’s goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo’s goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.” Netscape “The Netscape portal has evolved from a portal that is programmed by us to a portal that is programmed by you–the audience! All of the stories on Netscape are submitted and voted on by users. With thousands of users submitting interesting stories daily, the news on Netscape.com moves much faster and more interesting stories can make it to the homepage.” LinkedIn “LinkedIn is an online network of more than 7 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.” Newsvine “At Newsvine, you can read stories from established media organizations like the Associated Press, ESPN, and New Scientist as well as individual contributors from all around the world. Placement of stories is determined by a multitude of factors including freshness, popularity, and reputation. Contribution is open to all, and editorial judgment is in the hands of the community.” Wikipedia “Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into the largest reference Web site on the Internet. The content of Wikipedia is free, and is written collaboratively by people from all around the world.” Ma.gnolia “At Ma.gnolia, members save websites as bookmarks, just like in their browser. Except with a twist: they also “tag” them, assigning labels that make them easy to find again. So when you search for something, you use words that people choose and look only at websites that people think are worth saving. Suddenly you have access to a human-organized bookmark collection that numbers in the millions, but is as easy to use as a search engine.” StumbleUpon “StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 1,284,477 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.” Shoutwire “Shoutwire is the latest community based internet news website. It allows the community rather than a news editor to submit and review news content on the site. Every story on the site that makes it to the front page is due to the users of the site promoting the stories. Shoutwire incorporates a system of self-moderation and management which allows the community to remove bar or broken content.” Facebook “Young adults are the primary trend drivers in our society. Marketing to young adults on their own terms is critical for success. Facebook offers relevant and integrated advertising opportunities to engage the tech-savvy youth audience We can help you develop the ideal Facebook advertising solution that reaches an active audience of youth trend-setters and influencers. To determine the most relevant opportunities for you, please click below, and a Facebook sales representative will be in contact with you within two business days We look forward to working with you and seeing your marketing initiatives come to life on Facebook” 43 Places “Travel changes people. Whether it is finding a great new coffee shop in your city or a life altering trip around the world, finding great places can make us happier people. 43 Places helps you make a list of the great places you want to visit and share stories and photos of the places you’ve been..” Your Elevator Pitch “An “elevator pitch” is a quick and concise way to communicate who you are, what you’re trying to do, and why you do it better. It’s nice to know that at any given time you can tell people, quickly and clearly, exactly what you do.” Flickr “Flickr – almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.” WikiHow “WikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest how-to manual.” Blue Dot “Co-founded in October 2004 by Mohit Srivastava, Blue Dot, Inc., is a Seattle-based company whose mission is to help people stay connected with their friends, wherever they are, whenever they want. Through a new type of communication described as Social Discovery®, Blue Dot’s free Web site allows users to find, save and share interesting Web content with friends and family. The company’s technology lets users quickly communicate and share information on a wide range of topics in a way that can be easily incorporated into their daily activities.” StyleHive “The Stylehive is a collaborative shopping community. It is a place where contributors can work together to share and discover the hottest stores, designers, trends, and must have products.The Stylehive is a collection of all the best products, brands, designers and stores discovered and tagged by the Hive community. ” JotSpot “JotSpot was founded in 2004 as the first company to provide an application wiki.” Wetpaint “Wetpaint powers websites that tap the power of collaborative thinking. The heart of the Wetpaint advantage is its ability to allow anyone — especially those without technical skill — to create and contribute to websites written for and by those who share a passion or interest. To do this, Wetpaint combines the best aspects of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks so anyone can click and type on the web.” Shadows “Shadows is the link-sharing website for people. By people. With Shadows, you have the power to discover the web’s most fascinating content – the most interesting pages saved, discussed, and rated by you, your friends, and the Shadows community. Express your individuality through your links, comments, and profile. Join or start a group discussion. Let your voice be heard! Invite friends. Grow your community. In Shadows, you can have fun surfing for the web’s best links or you can create an account, jump in, add your best links, and become part of our thriving community.” Yahoo! 360 “A place that’s all about you to share with friends and family.” Furl “Furl is a free service that saves the important items you find on the Web and enables you to quickly find them again. Furl archives a personal copy of every page you save. When you want to recall it, you can find it instantly by searching the full text your archived items. Each member has a personal archive of 5 gigabytes (GB), large enough to store tens of thousands of searchable items. Furl recommends new Web pages that may interest you, guided by the sites you’ve already “Furled,” or saved.” Ning “Ning is a free online service for cloning, customizing and sharing Social Web Apps.” Frappr “Frappr was created by Brian, Kun and James at Rising Concepts, who wanted to see where all their high school and college friends went after they graduated. Frappr (Friend Mapper) lets you see the zip code where your friends live or work, letting you find out who works in the office building next door and who lives in the apartment complex across the street.” The Best Stuff in the World “The Best Stuff in the World is an open, organic, polymorphous site which, depending on the user, could take on diverse forms and meanings. The site simply asks you to input your “best stuff” in the world: whether it be a song that inspires you, your favourite little Indian restaurant or the best explication of Kantian aesthetics … it’s up to you!” MySpace “MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends. Create a private community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends! See who knows who, or how you are connected. Find out if you really are six people away from Kevin Bacon.” Yahoo! Answers “A place where people ask each other questions on any topic, and get answers by sharing facts, opinions, and personal experiences.” Rdiculous “Poking fun at web 2.0 named websites. It was inevitable, all the good domain names are taken so companies have become increasingly more creative in choosing their domain names. We started this site on a whim after noticing the growing number of sites that are emerging with random letters missing (especially the “e” before the “r”). We figured someone should catalog all of these sites so we decided to step up to the plate. Follow along with us as we document this Rdiculous trend.”