The Essence of Social Media Marketing
Posted by Kevin Gulley on Thu, Oct 07, 2010 @ 05:15 PM
Sometimes, FuelDog likes to go back and re-read things he wrote about in the past, and a blog post that he wrote back in June of 2007 has been sticking in his mind. Here it is:
Quote of the day. Came across this article while perusing MediaPost's Online Spin blog. It is about Facebook and how they are opening up their platform to any developer that thinks they have an idea to improve it and bring value to the 
community. It is important enough that FuelDog posted it on the conference room whiteboard. The post is summarized by this point, which is very insightful and should be a rule of thumb for all of us thinking about attempting to create or market into these networks.
"Providing value to social media communities will be the new cost to distribute marketing messages in the social media OS (environment)."
Simple, but vital. What value are you adding? Remember, you are not longer the judge of that, the community is and if they don't see the value in what you are providing, your messages will fall on deaf ears.
That quote, which was on the conference room white board for several years, is still very meaningful. However, the world has evolved, every business person has changed the way they do business since this quote was originally drafted, and FuelDog has refinements to that insight...they are subtle, but vital.
"Providing content that your target customer finds valuable is the price you must pay in order to generate leads for your sales pipeline."
If you deliver enough value to someone interested in your expertise that they raise their hand and tell you who they are, that person is now a lead and you need to work to turn them into a customer.