Social Media Social media marketing (SMM) and social media optimization (SMO) new forms of social interactive marketing that are increasingly taking control over brands, the marketing message and advertising away from the business owner and online marketer and putting it in the hands of the consumer. They have created a new marketing and advertising order where the goal is to partner with the consumers or customers so that they may interact with, or call attention to, products or services. Social Media Tools and Platforms This new trend in marketing and advertising is a result of the now dominant use of the Internet infrastructure and increasing adoption of social media tools and platforms, such as blogs, online forums, podcasts, wiki’s, online user review sites, RSS feeds and social networking web sites such MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn, which have allowed consumers with similar interests to find each other online, communicate better and share information. Other technologies have helped consumers to determine how they want this content to be delivered to their desktop or portable device. Consumers can now skip ads (Tivo), use software to block ads and pop-ups, filter email messages and delete cookies. On top of this, marketers have to deal with the fact that consumers have become more skeptical about traditional advertising and rely more and more on friends, colleagues and peers for product and service recommendations. To deal with this new reality, online marketers and business owners must adapt to this new social media environment and find creative ways to promote their brands, products and services. This has already begun as social media tools are used by many marketers to place and spread their marketing message, and to generate large amounts of web site traffic using social media tools.

The increasing prominence of the social web provides many ways to identify, target, and reach consumers. You're most likely already aware of the immense potential on the internet for your company and your brand, but it's likely that you aren't sure how to tap it. You hear buzzwords like viral marketing, social marketing, buzz marketing, viral videos, consumer engagement, and destination websites, but it's hard to climb the learning curve when the curve itself is always changing.

Social Media Marketing campaigns can vary from creating compelling text-based content that gets bookmarked at Del.icio.us or Furl, or achieves a listing on the home page at Digg to the creation of a video that spreads virally by placing it on YouTube and other video sharing and social networking web sites. The idea behind social media optimization is that by adding compelling, dynamic and fresh content on a regular basis, e.g. through Tip Sheets, How To listings, white papers, a podcast or blog, a web site gets more easily and frequently linked to and achieves top ranking and visibility in general and specialty search engines such as Technorati, BlogPulse and podcast directories. Other examples of SMO are the implementation of links to social media web sites to make tagging, sharing bookmarks (Del.icio.us), and voting for content (Digg, Propeller, Stumbleupon) by visitors easier.

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Involves establishing and nurturing online relationships that will help you improve your products and services, strengthen your reputation, and drive traffic to your site that you may otherwise have to concede to your competitors.