Participation is the key to social media marketing success

[mandy]

1. Don't promote. Participate!
All too often, brands look greedily to social networks as an immediate way to reach significant audiences. Beware the fickle and cynical general public, however. You need to get involved and give something back to the community if you want to get something out of it. Think about building interactive elements into your profile pages, Starbucks has done a nice job of this on MySpace with features such as custom invites you can put together inviting people to meet for coffee. And if you've got great features or cool content, don't keep it walled in; allow it to be easily embedded. Done successfully this "hypersyndication" makes it easy for people to do your marketing work for you. Also, it's these interactive features that can help drive traffic from the social networking sites back to your corporate site, if that's the objective of your campaign.

2. Know your audience and let them get to know you, the person, not the company...

full article: http://imediaconnection.com/content/16287.asp

[BellisimaJ.]

5. Extending your reach
An if-we-build-it-they-will-come mentality to SMM just isn't going to cut it. You've got to be out in the community and interacting on an ongoing basis to be accepted. Think about features you can develop above and beyond your main profile page. Widgets are undoubtedly the hottest property in this area. iLike, which lets people share their favorite musicians and songs amongst friends, launched a Facebook widget earlier in the year and within a week had more than a million new users as a result. It took the company six months to build the same user base via its own site. As the gold rush for widget-share gathers pace, the key will be to come up with something entertaining and/or useful that people will actually want to use, add to their profiles and send on.

What if you can't actually build a widget yourself, but you have an idea for a widget that you think could be hot. How do you find someone to build it for you?

[amy]

What if you can't actually build a widget yourself, but you have an idea for a widget that you think could be hot. How do you find someone to build it for you?

http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...l#msg64087

[BellisimaJ.]

[quote author=amy link=topic=16029.msg64096#msg64096 date=1187724210]

What if you can't actually build a widget yourself, but you have an idea for a widget that you think could be hot. How do you find someone to build it for you?

http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...l#msg64087
[/quote]

Thanks, Amy. Actually, I believe that they had their in-house tech people do the programming. So this tells me that I need to hire a java programmer. Now I just need to find one........

[bargainbloodhound]

So this tells me that I need to hire a java programmer. Now I just need to find one

Go to one of the freelancer sites.  Search here for freelancer and I think there's a couple of lists of sites.

[BellisimaJ.]

Go to one of the freelancer sites.  Search here for freelancer and I think there's a couple of lists of sites.

Okay. Thanks, bbh.