Love this!
When I attend marketing/networking functions now people are starting to give their email addresses for people to find them on Facebook or give their names to follow them on Twitter.
Marketing, media and the way we communicate (and want friends/fans/ followers - for our brands and businesses) means that we have an opportunity to reach more and more people.
But we still have to communicate with people, answer them, inspire them, and communicate with them rather than having thousands of fans/friends/followers and nothing else, no real conversations or communication.
Madam and Eve is an incredible site which has been going for years, poking fun of the news and South Africa. They're on Facebook of course, and receive a lot of feedback and comments on their daily cartoon.
Doing social media is about learning.
It is called new media or new marketing (at the moment) but really in the next 8/10 years social media will be just as traditional marketing is now. The two will go hand in hand.
And media will be about advertising, blogging, TV ads, print ads, updates, sharing links, uploading photos, posting competitions etc.
Each company will do what is comfortable and within their budget. And each company will find out which social site suites their needs better. Some may use blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.
This will take learning, being part of each social site and then seeing which one works the best.
Social Media takes time and patience. It takes a lot of effort uploading photos, writing regular updates (Twitter at least 6 - 8 times a day) Facebook, several times a week, LinkedIn, a few times a week (for a different market), YouTube, subscribers like regular videos.
When you think about it; the more updates you submit, pictures you add, photos you upload, blog posts you write ... the more your business brand and profile gets recognised by others. If you are an educational company, educate, if your business is funky and modern, add quirky links and submit quirky updates. And so on. There is room for everybody online.
Everyone wants to communicate. The more you respond to your fans/followers, the more you answer questions, the more time you spend on the sites and the more interesting content you use (written, photos, videos, quotes, comments, links) the more you will be found on search engines and the more interest an individual will take in whatever your business is representing.
It takes effort, updates, links, replies, response, interest in others, good customer service, regular content, updates and a lot of time to build social media well.
Learn by what your competitors are doing and saying and how they are responding (or not) to fans or followers, Get ideas by seeing what others in your industry are doing online.
And then do your social media, often, extremely often.
Then it will be as normal as any other form of marketing.
And no, don't stop writing e-newsletters, advertising, marketing or sending updates or invites via email .
Both social media marketing and traditional marketing will work well for you, hand in hand.
