We have been doing Social Media Marketing for Sutter Home Wineries, Wells Fargo, Plantronics, Shogakukan, Ebates, Pleo and many more for about 10 years. Social Media Marketing is the new term for what was called Word of Mouth Marketing. Before WOM, we called this type of marketing Guerilla marketing, and before that, newsgroups marketing (I am dating myself!) We still have a large number of clients (companies in entertainment, wine, travel and many B2B) and prospects who don’t know where to start. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, RSS, Mashable, Kaboodle, etc…

…ARGH! It’s no wonder they are confused!

Here are some recommended baby/first steps that many corporations/organizations can follow to get involved:

Phase I:

• Review, evaluate and select a buzz audit tool/social media metric tool such as Radian6, BuzzLogic, BuzzMetrics, Kavaa, Umbria, Cymphony
• Ask the account manager for the tool company to run queries (and grouped them by themes/categories) on your company’s name, product names, services, key executives, competitors, competitors brands, products, services
• Analyze for the last 3-6 months who are the influencers, what are the top social media channels for your company (forums, blogs, photo sites, video sites, news sites, social networks, mobile networks, etc.), high level topics, negative and positive word of mouth

Phase II:

If you analyze the information from Phase I, next you should be able to identify the following information:

• Trends: what consumers or B2B professionals are talking about
• News: what consumers or B2B professionals have noticed and is newsworthy to them
• Negative sentiments about a brand, a product, a service, your company, your competitors
• Positive sentiments about a brand, a product, a service, your company, your competitors
• Top influential bloggers, forum leaders, Flickr groups/person, YouTube Partner Pages, Facebook groups, MySpace

Phase III:

Once you have identified the information and started to analyze it, you have the following choices:

Observe and Report:

• Continue to observe trends and report them to marketing, product development, corporate management and PR
• Continue to provide brand, product, service reports on negative and positive word of mouth and comments on forums, blogs, Flickr, Amazon reviews, etc.

Observe and Ask Questions:

If you have observed and analyzed information, there is naturally going to be a lot questions you as a corporation/organization you are going to ask yourself. This is one of the powers of communities, social networks, blogs, etc – you can initiate contact with prospects and customers. Here are some of the things to think about before you do though:

• If you ask questions, you will get feedback, good and bad
• If the feedback is good, be ready to say thank you
• If the feedback is bad, be ready to say thank you, and answer honestly. Marketing, PR speak is always seen as dodging the real issues and many bloggers, consumers will call you on it. If you answer honest about what you can and cannot do as an organization, consumers/B2B professionals will respect you. As a matter of fact, we have had many occasions where your worst enemy becomes your best advocate – why? Because you were not afraid to be honest and you engaged in a two way dialogue with them – not a “push marketing” dialogue.
• Keep in mind this statistic – reducing negative word of mouth by 2% has the same effect as increasing positive word of mouth by 7% according to a London School of Economics study. Reducing negative word of mouth is 3 times more effective than trying to increase positive word of mouth – which one should you invest in first?

Proactively Participate in the Conversations

Once you have started to engage in two way conversations, you could start initiate conversations, you could start engaging with folks proactively. Here are some examples of ways to do so:

• For a B2B company, if there are many forums that speak about your product, service, brand, you can dedicate some of the support, marketing personnel to proactively answer questions on them. Take a look at xdadevelopers.com – this extremely active forum with consumers and developers about every cell phone on the planet is peppered with experts from AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Singapore Telecom who are genuinely answering questions.
• For a B2C company, if there are many forums, blogs, flickr, YouTube comments about your company, brand, product, service – go ahead, answer their questions, thank them for their comments and correct misinformation by backing every statement you make. Just remember, you are engaging in a two way conversation

Proactively participate and engage them into your company

You can take the next level and participate but more importantly, engage influential bloggers, forum leaders, group leaders etc into your company. How? Simply have multiple conversations with them, and overtime you can evaluate who are the bloggers, forum participants, etc who know about the industry you serve or don’t. From there, you can invite them to participate into your company’s growth; here are some ways it can help:

• Product Requirements
• Product Development
• Support
• Internal Knowledge
• Market & Customer Feedback

In conclusion, if organizations follow Phase I, II and 1) & 2) of Phase III, they can dive into Social media marketing or at least intelligence by using the power of social media networks, sites and Web 2.0 communities to gather real information about their prospects, customers. These recommended steps are not very resources intensive, and can help organizations be much more aware of their customers needs.