About Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing

Meet local Internet Marketing Professionals to discuss the latest trends, tactics, and techniques for Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing.

Our social networking Web site is at:
http://chicago-social...

We will discuss Social Media Sites, Blogs, Podcasts and Online Video. Social media sites allow people to share their content, opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives. These sites offer users tools such as message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, communities, wikis, weblogs etc. to share text, images, audio, and video.

Facebook - A Social Networking Site to connect with people, upload photos, share links and videos.

MySpace – A social networking website offering personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. There are over 100 million MySpace accounts and according to a CNN report there are about 230,000 new registrations per day.

NING - This is an online platform for users to create their own social websites and social networks

Twitter - A free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

YouTube – Users can upload, tag and share their videos. Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. A December 2007 study by Burst Media found that 76 percent of men and 67 percent of women watch online videos.

Wikipedia – An open content encyclopedia operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and has about 300 million page views a day. Almost every article in Wikipedia may be edited anonymously or with a user account, while only registered users may create a new article. Although some contributors are authorities in their field, Wikipedia requires that even their contributions be supported by published and verifiable sources. To ensure its quality, the project relies on its community members, called Wikipedians, to remove vandalism or identify problems such as violation of neutrality or material that cannot be referenced to an external source.

Other sites:

• Hubpages
  
• Squidoo
  
• Yelp
  

Why Do It

Brand Management – Companies need to be diligent about how their brand is discussed on the Web and respond quickly and appropriately.

Speed to Market – Typically content can be posted on social media sites quickly. Company news, special events, press releases, etc. can be added to social media sites.

Low cost advertising – Social media sites rely on user generated content and typically there are no charges to place information on these sites.

Promote Company - Counter act negative publicity. Companies need to be consistent with their efforts and have established channels of communication ready to receive our message.

Repurpose Content – Information that companies already have can also be posted on Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc.

Search Engines – Search engines are indexing content on social media sites and could give companies top placement and push down in the search results the competition some of the negative publicity companies get.