Jennifer Mattern just wrote a great post answering some of your questions regarding the important question, Should You Jump Into Social Networks to Promote Your Business? over at RedFly Marketing via Chris Abraham:

There’s a lot of buzz in the online PR world about social networking, whether that be traditional social networks like MySpace and Facebook or social networking through microblogging services such as Twitter.

Should you jump into social networking to promote your business? And if so, with so many options available, how do you choose which social networks to participate in?

Read more…

I just discovered another very interesting article written by Jennifer Mattern over at RedFly Marketing, Online PR vs. Internet Marketing — here’s an excerpt:

Internet Marketing Tactics:

  • Paid advertising (banner ads, text link ads, etc.)
  • Link exchanges, free Web directory submissions, blog comments (link-building activities)
  • Affiliates
  • Sales letters (and other sales copy)
  • Article marketing (to drive affiliate sales, traffic, or backlinks)
  • Search engine marketing (paid search placements)
  • Blogs
  • Social bookmarking sites
  • Social networks
  • Podcasts / Internet radio shows
  • Sales, coupons, or other discounts
  • E-books
  • Reports / white papers
  • Direct mail campaigns via email (for promotional purposes)

Online PR Tactics:

  • Press releases / news releases
  • Op-eds / letters to the editor (for online publications)
  • Online newsrooms and media kits
  • SEO (to build awareness through organic search engine placements)
  • Interviews
  • Blogs
  • Articles (used to build exposure and expert status more than directly pushing sales or traffic)
  • Podcasts / Internet radio shows (if not purely or mostly promotional)
  • Reports / white papers
  • Email newsletters
  • Social networks

Via Chris Abraham.

While very many media outlets support del.icio.us in their bookmarking and social media strategies, there has been very little innovation in the del.icio.us social bookmarking platform — this has been a major problem with properties that have been acquired by big firms such as AOL, Google, and Yahoo!, in the case of del.icio.us. Allen Stern wrote a very insightful post, Did Delicious Lose Its Chance To Be FriendFeed?, about how FriendFeed has started to take del.icio.us’ lunch based on innovation and creativity:

[…]

Had Delicious (and Yahoo) moved faster on the release could they have become what’s hot with FriendFeed today? I get that FriendFeed allows you to share your delicious bookmarks. But what I am talking about here is something much bigger strategically. By “sitting” on the release, the team lost their chance to move the strategy forward.

[…]

Had Yahoo wanted to actually take their Delicious investment and do something with it, how hard would it have been to add the same functionality? If we look back a year, Delicious had a much larger “buzz share” than they do today. When I look at the CN logs, we rarely see any traffic from Delicious and haven’t had a frontpage link in probably nine months. Yet in the last week, I’ve seen way more traffic from FriendFeed. Yahoo’s Delicious service has a “close to mainstream” userbase and sure missed a golden opportunity to move forward - a fail whale if you will.

[…]

If you look at the topic I’ve discussed here, it’s basically what Fred Wilson discussed when he wrote about stagnation when companies acquire startups. Who will come up next and displace Upcoming and/or Flickr as the techies choice?

Oh, and be sure to join me on FriendFeed as well as del.icio.us! Via Chris Abraham.

From Drew B’s Take on Tech PR via Nixon McInnes & Chris Abraham:

“Only 18% of TV ad campaigns generate positive ROI”

“The average person is exposed to 3000 advertising messages a day”

“36% of people think more positively of companies who have blogs”

I quickly realized that StumbleUpon is the coolest and hottest social bookmarking service nobody has heard of.  I love it but I don’t nearly use it enough: either as a stumbler or as a marketer. I found this on Blog Marketing Journal and thought I would open it up to you:

In case you are not familiar with the concept, StumbleUpon allows you to pay for visitors to your pages, five cents per visitor or click. The question is, do you consider this to be a simple form of paid advertising, or paid social bookmarking.

I have done some experiments with paid Stumbling and what BMJ says is true:

If you set a limit of $20 per day, you will get 400 visitors. They may stay on your page or they may spend five seconds and disappear. Where the situations changes is when they thumbs up your page. That’s a stumble and can lead to more than just the 400 visitors.

So, in this case, content is key, and good content will result in conversions and interest.  If you just throw money at it without thinking your content or strategy through, you will be disappointed with the results, especially since there’s nobody on the planet more savvy than the gang from StumbleUpon — these are earl-adopters and are just the people you want to love you but these are the worse people to piss off. Just because you’re paying to have your content promoted doesn’t mean that people are prevented from digging the content down (thumbs-down) or writing scathing comments.

Read more…