What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing is a sub-category of online marketing whose goal it is to achieve branding and marketing communication targets through the participation in various social media networks. Social Media Marketing is relatively new form of relationship based marketing targeting social networks such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Wikipedia, ActiveWorlds, Second Life and others. Goals of each Social Media Marketing are mostly connected to brand awareness, as opposed to another sub-category of online marketing which is more performance based (Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-Acquisition) business models. Attention Interactive focus is performance based marketing, but since we are already in the same internet medium and well familiar with brands we represent, we pitch Social Media Marketing services to our clients usually as 2nd tier offering.
Should we use performance based marketing business model in Social Media Networks?
No, we don't recommend you mix the two because most online communities do not welcome traditional sales techniques regardless how you disguise them. These audiences are usually smarter than marketers marketing to them and once they figure you out, you campaign will be blogged and laughed to death. Social Media Marketing campaigns require a lot more planning and style to be successful. Those campaigns must be targeted to particular community you want to reach with a tone and structure of message that appeals to them and invites their contribution. Best ways to achieve this is authoritative information, humoristic approach, fun and entertainment or some kidn of controversy generation.
What is Internet Hard Sell?
In marketing and advertising, a
hard sell is an advertisement or campaign that uses a more direct and forceful sales message. Marketing minds smarter than us, have done historical trend analysis and compared success of the value of repetition for hard sell vs soft sell advertisements and found that soft sell campaigns that have inferred conclusion are more persuasive. While hard sell is likely to me more irritating to consumers in traditional world, we find that both hard and soft sell equally "bomb" your campaign when it comes to connecting with social media users who are only one click away from checking out competing product or service. To overcome this problem, we have developed intimate knowledge of workings of all major Social Media Networks (fortunately there are not that many) and we start our Social Media Marketing campaigns from perspective of Social Media User.
