Getting Social with Your Customers.

Word-of-mouth is the oldest form of advertising known to man. Social media marketing takes the grassroots appeal of word-of-mouth onto the web. The explosion of MySpace, blogging, and other online social spaces in recent years has created a new outlet for getting your business talked about.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

Some well-known examples of social media sites are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), and Flickr (photo sharing). These sites typically use technologies such as weblogs ("blogs"), message boards, wikis, and tagging to allow users to interact and share opinions.

While many business people find social marketing to be intimidating, it is simply transferring the business communications skills you utilize in offline networking and relationship-development to the web. Social media marketing is about developing relationships, sharing knowledge and contributing to the global conversation about your industry or area of expertise.