Now that the internet has become a permanent fixture of modern life, companies can no longer market their products and services in the same way as they used to. The internet has changed how information is received and how people expect to communicate with other individuals and groups. It follows that the way that promotional messages are disseminated has to adapt accordingly.

To start with, information flow is no longer one way. We are no longer passive recipients of advertisements and other marketing materials. If we do not like a product or service, we can inform the whole world through the World Wide Web. Instead of telling people what to expect or prefer, companies now have to interact with potential customers and respond to them.

Therefore, new tactics have to be deployed to ensure your company is reaching out effectively to its target market.

Personal Communication
On the Internet, people want to talk to another person, not a company. Marriott CEO Bill Marriott has an entertaining blog in which he posts regular updates and stories from his travels to Marriott properties around the world.

IBM did not create just one blog. The company created an entire network of blogs by getting its employees to write about what interests them, what they are working on and any other random topic. In this way, IBM provided insight on what happens behind the scene by picking the brains of its employees. Consumers were not only able to feel more involved with the company, they were also given a direct connection with IBM employees. In turn, the employees were able to feel the importance and relevancy of their work and to understand what customers want and value.

Transparency
With direct and personal access to company personnel come expectations of transparency. If consumers are connecting to real people, they also want the real story, not some marketing speak manufactured for them.

Sun Microsoft CEO, Jonathan Schwartz has a blog that receives 400,000 hits a month. One of the reasons why it was successful was because it was open. Negative comments are allowed along with positive ones. Even the most inane ones were approved. The transparency shown by Schwartz built trust among visitors of his blog and they responded by becoming loyal followers.

Ford was able to leverage on transparency on social media to avert a potential public relations disaster. When the company’s legal department sent out letters to forum owners to request them to stop using Ford trademarks in the materials posted on their website, it caused misunderstandings and ill-feelings towards the company. Fortunately, Ford’s Community Manager Scott Monty was quick to detect these sentiments and manage the issues. He presented Ford’s side of the story and let everyone know what was happening every step of the way as agreements and compromises were ironed out.  Despite the internal gaffe, Monty was able to rally the online community around Ford rather than against it.

Showing You Care
Starbucks showed that its customers truly know best with its My Starbucks Idea website.

Suggestions can be submitted to this website for voting by Starbucks consumers. The most popular ones are reviewed by the staff. This is an idea that almost every company has. But Starbucks introduced a fresh spin to it by adding an “Ideas in Action” blog that provides updates on the status of the changes suggested. The blog showed that Starbucks recognized how savvy their consumers are. It exemplified the company’s commitment to continual innovation and to delivering what their customers want.

Comcast was able to show their customers how much they matter through their @comcastcares Twitter account. Run by the affable Bill Gerth instead of a nameless faceless customer service rep, the account provides help and advice to users in need. What Comcast does particularly well is the way it manages customer dissatisfaction through Twitter. Complain about the company and you can be sure you will hear from Gerth and his team immediately, and with warmth and empathy. The comcastcares team presents itself not as a company, but friends who exchange messages regularly with other Twitter users, sometimes with details of their personal life.

People not Products
With the shift from the impersonal to the personal, communications now have to be built around people rather than products. Companies are becoming increasingly sophisticated in engaging and adding value to customers through online communities.  On top of a variety of social media platforms, Dell has an island in Second Life. Through the HSBC Business Network, HSBC put entrepreneurs in touch with each other via blogs, videos and online forums.

Making It Fun and Interesting
Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” series on Youtube is legendary. In these videos, the CEO Tom Dickson attempts to blend all kinds of objects in the food processors the company sells. With the fresh and original idea behind the campaign, the low cost videos were a huge hit. They eventually led to a five-fold increase in sales.

At the end of the day, branding is all about creating and maintaining a consistent feeling of familiarity, trust, reliability and confidence with the targeted public. With the paradigm shift in how people use and interact with technology, the rules on how to nurture these feelings have also changed. Will your company be a winner or loser in the Social Media Age? It all depends on how well you continue to engage your customers in your branding.

One might think that building a presence on social media might make sense for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies, but why do Business-to-Business (B2B) companies and especially Small Medium Enterprises (SME) need to be on social media?

A common stigma among many B2B SME companies is that social media would only be relevant when businesses target young people, and for business set-ups such as theirs, social media is probably irrelevant to their business strategies, thus they would think that investing the additional time and resources to develop marketing strategies based on social media is unnecessary.

A simple logic that would appeal to B2B SMEs is that when social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook started becoming popular in 2003, it was mainly the young people varying from students to young working adults that were active in social networking.

Seven years on, many of these students have already graduated and started working and most of the young working adults have either climbed higher up the corporate ladder to become important decision-makers. Some have even started their own businesses.

The point is, most of them remained active in social networking despite advancements in their life, thus we can perceive that many of today’s professionals and major business decision holders are active users of social media. Thus what better ways are there to reach out to them other than through social media?

Below are some practical ways in which B2B SMEs can effectively utilize Social Media to enhance their business strategies.

Using of Facebook and LinkedIn Targeted ad options
Businesses could leverage on ad options available on Facebook and LinkedIn to target specific age groups, genders and industries. Options like this suit B2B companies as their target clients are usually more specific as compared to B2C businesses.

Using of LinkedIn to search and connect with prospective clients
Let’s say your company is offering a new service and you need to consolidate contacts from various industries to promote the service, what you need to do on LinkedIn is simply key the specific industry into the search term and you will have a list of professionals which you can connect with and eventually touch base.

Instead of making phone calls to prospects which at times might not be appropriate as they could be busy and also risk the chance of intimidating them, why not send a private message to their inbox on LinkedIn? By doing this, you allow your prospects to have time to think about your message and eventually if the need for your services arise, they could revisit that message and make the contact with you. Moreover, you could potentially reach out to much more prospects in a shorter amount of time using LinkedIn than other traditional methods such as cold calling.

Searching for prospects from your own friend list
On a more casual note, you can also explore your own friends on Facebook; generally most people would have an average of 200 – 300 friends on their Facebook friend list and a fraction of them are probably acquaintances which they rarely keep in touch with.

So here comes the opportunity; one of the best tools that Facebook has implemented is the live chat function which allows a real-time live chat experience. You could use it to engage with your acquaintances in casual and yet fruitful conversations when you see them online; you will be surprised that some of your acquaintance might require services that your business offers and vice-versa, some of them might even turn out to be viable candidates that your company is searching for to fill up a particular job position.

The right time to go on social media
Some B2B companies are still wondering when is the right time to jump on the social media bandwagon. The best time is now, considering the potential opportunities that it could bring to their businesses.

But the good news for businesses is that we’re living in the era of social media; more specifically social networking; which is fundamentally shifting the way the world communicates and how we look at information, with the advent of social networking sites, this new movement has paved the way for businesses to connect, engage and listen to real people on a global scale.

One name that is instantly associated with social networking is Facebook. Having only started in 2004 as an internal university network, it grew exponentially in the next couple of years. Presently, it offers more than 70 different translations and has recently hit 500 million registered users.

But before you start planning extravagant strategies using Facebook, it’s wiser to have an overview of the other social networks out there, especially the dominant social media networking sites in your target markets. Even though Facebook is generally the most popular social networking site in the world, a host of similar social networking sites still dominate the local social networking scenes in some of the most populous nations in the world.

Take China for instance, the most populous nation in the world. Its social networking scene is being dominated by QQ and Renren, with QQ boasting an astronomical number of 300 million users and counting.

Although Google’s Orkut never seemed to have hit off in most parts of the world, it is the number one social networking site in Brazil, which is listed in the fifth most populated nation in the world. Orkut was also previously the number one social networking site in India (2^nd most populous nation in the world), but according to statistics from comscore, Facebook had recently overtaken them as number one in India.

In the far eastern world, Mixi is the number one social networking tool in Japan and in South Korea, the crown belongs to Cyworld.

In Russia, the scene is dominated by a few local names with Vkontakte heading the pack with Mail and Fotostrana coming close behind.

Another competitor of Facebook, Hi-5; leads the charge in countries such as Mexico, Peru, Romania and Portugal.

Friendster who has lost its leadership position to Facebook, still holds a strong social presence in South East Asian countries like Indonesia and the Philippines.

According to statistics from socialnomics.com, 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and only 14% trust advertisements. Businesses can now look into leveraging on the prevalent usage of social networking sites as a tool for analyzing social and cultural trends of their target markets.

The revolution of these social networking sites has certainly helped to erase borders and allow people from around the world to be easily connected, making the world a much smaller place.

Such is its ease of use that anyone with basic or little computer knowledge can easily sign up for membership on any of the available social networking sites and place their profile online for the whole world to see.

In terms of cost, it is perhaps the most cost effective platform out there for businesses to utilize as the cost of joining any social networking site and creating a business profile is usually free or at a low cost

With the participants of social networking sites being expected to grow even more exponentially in the next few years, the potential of social networking looks promising; considering the significant opportunities and the extent of its reach, businesses can tap on social networking sites to help expand their global presence.

[Source: Cindy King, Brain Solis - Engage]