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Abstract
 In recent year’s social media, likely more than anything else has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook and Twitter might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade. But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Even it has an impact on the way we started spending our free time, there is a big influence of technique on our daily life. Social media topic is not for today its for everyday and it is most forward-looking media and surely “the” medium of the future e. With the fact that we are seeing a trend where more and more people are moving away from traditional media, and its creating vital challenge for companies and making them to think twice before dumping the usual amount of cash into traditional media marketing and advertising.

 
The goal in advertising and marketing is to get your message and/or brand in front of as many people that you can, and to engage your audience accordingly. Common sense would tell you to take your message where the majority of the people are gathering and paying attention, which just happens to be Web 2.0(Shift in consumer habits: From expert driven content to User driven content) social mediums. Does it make sense to spend entire advertising dollars in a declining media market? Of course not. That’s why social media marketing is making more sense by the day.
 

Introduction
 The data is growing every single day. The number of connection points to the DATA is becoming increasingly available. Realizing what information is available about the business relationships becomes more critical as dollar value increases. Every dollar and every minute spend on marketing tactics is for one purpose: Business Growth!  Let me share this interesting quote from Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO – “People relate to people, not companies”, Social media provides us an opportunity to humanize the brand and engage the companies with consumers at personal level, which can provide substantial results in long-term like decreased customer support costs, customer feedback management, good PR and marketing channel to engage with target market.  Social Media is for every company that genuinely wants to engage with their customers, it doesn’t matter whether you are fortune brand or Local restaurant. As Sandy Carter, Marketing Head at IBM quoted, “I think the primary difference here is not in big or small company. But the difference is in how close you are to your customers”. I personally find that it is very interesting and exciting “Net Space” to be in and also rewarding if used in the right manner.
 
Social Media is Evolving           
According to “Michael A. Stelzner” –”Social media marketing is an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. It seems that many marketers see the social media frontier as the next marketing gold rush. Given the low cost of entry, many marketing pros are doing more than just dipping their creative toes into this gold-laden water.”
According to me –”Conversation between various people in net space using different internet tools and platforms.” 

Social media contains:    
Is this medium required?-Yes! Why because, this is the place where we can meet real people in real time across the globe. And people are not just demographic anymore to connect with them you need to understand relationships are more powerful than Marketing. Now-a-days If people wants to read news or information then they straight hit internet and they have internet access at home, office, car and even in their pocket. No wonder why Google has 200,000,000 look ups everyday. People are searching product and company information online so if you are not pushing your quality content online then you are missing the great opportunity.  There are sites that can help you to post your content on the internet.  
 
 You cannot make money with Social media for sure but you can make money from people who can trust you. Social media will help you to develop “Trust” and “Build strong relationship” with people. To experience that you need to join the social network website to connect yourself with right people.  Once you find the right people then you need to provide content NOT Commercials. How will you do that? Simple approach would be using content management tools and search engines. For example you can utilize the second most used search engine YouTube –to create video with related content and upload, Or you can post articles for online magazines, Or create your mini website Or Blogs and reviews. You can do things that deliver high quality contents. You can as well provide high ethical information of your email ids and contact info on the pages that you are delivering content and you can as well send newsletters to stay in touch with them.

Right Way to Do Social Media Marketing
Social Media market is just another way of marketing but the difference is that the traditional way of marketing is “Shouting” and Social Media marketing is “Sharing”. It is not a kid game anymore. If you look at the Big Brands and proven track records, “Consumer Brands” have taken the lead in executing “Social Media Strategy”. Many large “B2B companies” have started to explore Social Media opportunities but the question raise in my mind – Are they doing it in Right way?
 
Before defining the right and wrong way of doing Social Media marketing, let’s identify and understand the Social media ROI [Return on Investment] in terms of Qualitative Vs Quantitative advantages. Identifying ROI will allow you understand the opportunities of cost reduction. Quantitative cost measurement, for example you can give trainings /induction programs to your employees by implementing video integration into recruitment process. And also Quantitative would mean the number of activities carried out in various social platforms. When we talk about Qualitative you need to be more innovative to build relationships and grow your market with established industry standards. It also includes the kind of content generated for brand, the quality of response and comments so generated, outreach program carried out for influencers, reviews received from experts etc.

 I will say “Content is Super hero in Social Media”
One life! & One Time! Do things in right way. The fundamental rule is that “people need to understand” that “This is business” and the game is changing everyday. The content is shared everywhere and its reaching people wherever they are.  We all see that the change in the way of consumption of content. You can do market without having a PR or sale person in your team if only your “Quality Content” can talk to people. Content should be more informative and interesting. Your content need to have relevance of your customer need. If your customer find more relevant in your content then you will get business out of it. You can place your content in many interesting format. The most common format is blogging and video streams but I vote for video and moblog to post your content. Creating content and giving format would never end this story of course you need to decide the channel to deliver your content.

There are thousand and above social web sites are available so you need to pick the right channel to deliver your content. You need to get onto the social sites and be a part of the conversations and build followers in social web 2.0 network sites.
Two important things that you need to keep in mind before you connect yourself with Web 2.0 social sites–You should have a strong “Business plan & model” and another one is “Brand acuity”. Brand acuity should start from yourself and once built that, later anything can happen in your business/life. Most of the companies are in cloud of confusion to choose the right Web 2.0 tool – Try to use all kind of User Based tools [anyway you can; everywhere you can;] to connect to people and definitely you will find massive opportunity. In earlier days you need to go under lot of tensions with media streams to create your brand strategy and create sustainable market to see profit but now social media networks, blogs are available for you to carry your ideas, company brands and helps to get good ROI.

Brand Leverage with Social Media:
Branding is nothing but “Name Recognition” of a company along with product & services it sells. It is critical success in ecommerce space; company should develop a branding strategy which allows their name to be associated with quality. Quality and safety of the products and services is an important attribute of branding for a company today because of the global implications of the internet. In present scenario companies are trying to maintain and promote their brand in internet through the following Web 2.0 Tools and Mediums:
:: SEM [Search Engine Marketing tools]:  Blogs, Content development tools, RSS tools, Community building tools, Link development tools. 
:: SEO [Search Engine Optimization]: Social bookmarking tools [such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook], blogger tools [integrating blogs into marketing campaigns], Website analytical tools [Google analytical tool] 
:: Viral Marketing: Every satisfied customer will tell at least three others about the product or service. This particular marketing relies heavily on social networks and social bookmarks, such as: [YouTube – social network MySpace – social network Facebook – social network Digg – social bookmark Stumbleupon – social bookmark Del.icio.us – social bookmark]

Brand Strategy for Social Media:
A brand has a direct or indirect relationship with  people, and if a company is successful in creating relevant and motivating interactions, “brand love” improves. The game today in social media is about density and leverage. Some people are less involved in brand therefore less likely to jump into conversation so what happen to those who are in discuss, join or lead. For example popular bloggers they have huge followers and as a leader shapes and influence the online conversations. A group of people follow a Leader that makes decisions or taps into the motivation of a purchase in ways that no one else can match. The Leader now has leverage over the brand.  People follow, taking advice or information, and their perception of a brand changes based upon the impressions gleaned from the Leader. Understanding the impact a Leader has on the purchase habits of his or her following places immense value on that Leader. The greater the influence a Leader has over his or her followers, the more valuable that person becomes to a brand.
 
The Super Cool – Mega- Awesome- Dos and Don’ts of Social Media marketing
Social Media is creating such an incredible revolution, in the sense, “Anyone can participate”. In 90’s you need to be a tech guru in order to participate in web space but now anyone can do anything without having tech background. More over its completely free and you can look at internet as your own advertising agency. You can create free video and content for people so that they are seeing your content and Commercials. These contents and commercial suppose to be Value-Driven and it should NOT be a replicated one. When you are doing online marketing then you are branding all about yourself and you are positioning yourself in front of people who you are and attracting people to you. Two key things to keep in mind when you do this 1. Content should be value driven and 2. Brand that should add value. Another main key focus area would be how to generate Traffic to your blogs or videos or to your mini websites.

You should know how to drive people to your site. Say for example you are one of the customer related industry and you find interesting a book on “Creating customer value in Internet Era by Peter Keen” and want to share the same with people who are interested in reading books about customer value. When you share this content you are not pitching your product or services you are providing information, within the content you can include links to your landing page, you can link to your blog, you can link to your marketing page, whatever information, you want to direct people but key here is to actually you want them to read your content and information. Only the way you can do this is providing valuable and relevant information to them.

What NOT to do with Social Media? 
:: Directly selling your product and service your followers/audience: it will create negative effect
:: Self promotion is not good so better learn from your competitors
:: Do not ignore criticism, respond to it and try to tackle it the best way possible and it will  
   turn positive results
:: Do not have too many names and email ids that spoil your reputation and you cannot
   brand yourself.
:: Do not bombard the facts and figures to show that you are savvy. Make sure to discuss,
  comment and ask for options.
:: Do not be fake in any way
:: Do not use irrelevant channels and try to connect with irrelevant audience
:: Do not use only one social network

What To Do with Social Media
:: Listen to your prospects.
:: Listen to your customers.
:: Listen to your competitors.
:: Listen to your critics.
:: Listen to your followers and fans.
:: Listen to your industry leaders.
:: Be responsible and honest what you are writing.
:: Be authenticating.
:: Be friendly with your fans/follower when you are in Social media channels because
   you never know when they will turn to be your prospective customers.
:: Double check before you send or pass information/comments/review.
:: Respect copyrights
:: Need to have clear policy that protects the confidential information
:: Need to bring customer value
:: Need to have mechanism to assess ROI

Data Points that helps us to understand the growth of Social Media
Social media marketing budgets were on the rise. Forrester Research is out with their Interactive Marketing Forecast for the next five years, and estimates social media marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums. Forrester estimates that $716 million will be spent on the medium this year, growing to $3.1. Billion in 2014. At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).
:: Facebook has garnered over 350,000,000 active users worldwide,
:: Twitter has attained roughly 45,000,000 users, and
:: 130,000,000 blogs indexed by Technocratic since the year 2002.
:: In 24 hours alone, over 900,000 blog posts are created.
But even with these staggering statistics, there are still those who believe that the social media explosion is a fad, not a paradigm shift. 

  Let’s Landscape the Indian Social Media:
Social media and viral marketing is growing slowly and steadily in India. It is fast becoming the replacement of traditional outbound marketing techniques such as TV adverts and direct mail. This inbound marketing is much cheaper or free and the possible ‘reach’ is huge. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and Bharathstudent are exploded.  Facebook in May and June 2009, doubling from 1.6 million to 3.2 million monthly active users in the country in the last 60 days. Facebook is now available in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. This localization approach could explain the growth of Facebook users in India. Orkut beat Facebook in December 2008 with more than 12.8 million visitors, an increase of 81 percent from the previous year. Local social networking site Bharatstudent.com with 3.3 million visitors (up 88 percent) and hi5.com with 2 million visitors (up 182 percent).Apart from this, Facebook has actively partnered with Indian companies, particularly mobile operators.
The recent milestones include:
:: Feb 2009 -– Partnership with Zoom TV and World TV for the Oscars in India.
:: April 2009-– Facebook goes mobile in India for SMS Alerts with Tata Indicom
::  Facebook promoted in a Zoozoo’s commercial by Vodafone.
::  May 2009: -– Launches Indian language interface
::  Partners with Nautanki.tv for coverage of the Indian Elections
:: Lot of Micro blogging platforms were introduced in past 6 months in [SMSGupShup, Snockles, Vakow, and Kwippy]

Conclusion: 
Social media marketing is a big idea meant to change attitudes or behaviors, such as getting kids to stop smoking, protecting the environment or encouraging condom use.  I see every other year “changes” widening the landscape of digital media.  In 2005 blogs were in thousands and slowly a year late broadened the way to upload video into YouTube, a site that did not exist in 2005. In 2007 all the traditional media had fully embraced these social media channels. Its become more and more dynamic in 2008 to engage and quantify the digital landscape. The future of communications is in the mixing of “Open & Controlled conversation” and “Open & Controlled Collaborations” and understanding how they work together to influence the public.  Welcome to Revolution!

Want To Make Money Online? Some Easy Ways To Do So

The Internet is allowing ordinary people to create incomes working from home. I am going to reveal some easy ways to make money online that are proven and successful. Putting a little effort into these techniques will help you start to build your own business online.

Have or create your own product giving information to people on the subject they are searching for. People use the Internet to search for information. Find a market that has a lot of people searching for information and create a product around that. Having your own product will give you a much higher chance of making money online as every sale gives you huge profit margins. Try to make at least one product and that will help you on your way to riches online.

Selling other people’s products is another great way to make money online, and the only downside is that you do not get 100% of the profits for each sale. However, this does save you the time of creating your own product and can help generate an income quickly which in turn gives you more time to work on producing your own products. Affiliate Marketing will allow you to do this and with thousands of products available finding one to suit your marketplace should not be hard.

Writing reviews of the product is best as this helps people to make a purchasing decision and if they see someone else has benefited from the product, they are more likely to buy it themselves.

Creating a website and sell advertising space on it is another great way to make money. The most popular way for this is to use Google Adsense. These small ads appear on your site and are always relevant to the content you have published there. Whenever someone clicks on a Google Adsense Ad, you will earn a small commission from that ad on your site. Of course, you will need a lot of traffic to make big money using Google Adsense so do some research first before going down this route.

If you have your own product, or are selling products from an Affiliate program, then using other people’s mailing lists will help you to make money. Some call it Join Ventures while I prefer to call it “UOPML”. “Using Other People’s Making Lists”.

There are two ways to do this. One is to write and ask if you can pay for an advertisement to their list, or the other is to write and offer them a commission for promoting your product to their list. You will need to have an affiliate program in place to do the latter of course, but in time as your business grows, you will begin to understand how this works a lot more.

Until you have an Affiliate program in place for your product, contact people and pay for advertising to their list. Do some research first on the people and maybe even subscribe to their list to see how they market. If you like the content and form trust for this person, it is likely others are doing the same.

If you find the right people to advertise your products for you, you can generate a lot of traffic to your website very quickly and this in turn can lead to huge profits fast.

Any of the techniques above will help you to make money online, but unless you put effort into this you will not make any money. Take the time to research and then take action.

Do you know what social media marketing is and to go about making money with social media?

First of all before you can make money at something you need to know what it is. Once you are educated on the subject then you can start to make money.

So what is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is promoting and trying to sell your product on social networking sites. For example a couple of different social networking sites would be Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube, just to name a few.

Some other forms of social media are blogging and forums. With blogging you can write about your products and reach thousands of people. I would suggest this blogging blueprint for making money if you want to get serious about it.

On forums you can have links to your website abd tell others about your products. You can also talk to people and create relationships with them by answering their questions on your products. You can find forums relating to the theme of your business at Big-Boards which is the largest message board and forum site on the web today.

So how do you use social media to make money?

By having links to your website on many different kinds of social media websites then you can potentially increase traffic to your website resulting in many more customers which will result in many more sales.

If you are doing this for internet business reasons it can lead to you making money.

With so many different forms of marketing on the Internet, making money with social media is an easy and fast way to get in front of potential customers. There is no reason you could not start a new blog and be getting 500 visitors a day in less than 2 months if you work at it.

To find out more about making money with social media you need to further your research and decide which social media sites are best for you and the customers that you are trying to reach.

You can find many websites online that offer excellent training on social media including ebooks, and blogs specificially about it.

To make money with social media you have to work hard at it all of the time, just like any other form of internet marketing. If you are willing to do this you can start and run any business you want online and use socail media to promote it.